ABSTRACT
While the German occupation of Holland came to dominate post-war Dutch collective memory, the memories of those repatriated from Indonesia suffered from a loss of place. This caused a traumatic rupture in remembering. During the 1950s and early 1960s, nostalgic remembering in the works of the likes of Dermoût and Nieuwenhuys, as well as feelings of existential angst and victimhood, contributed to unremembering the reality of decolonization. However, memories of military brutality were present in the stories of Beb Vuyk and in the memoirs and novels of some veterans. Unlike American and Australian historians, few Dutch historians showed much interest in decolonization. Despite some promising historical work in the early 1950s, historians and memoirists ignored the reality of warfare.
