ABSTRACT
The second generation of those repatriated from the former colony during decolonization inherited a memory of traumatic loss that they themselves had not experienced. The violent actions of Moluccan youths during the 1970s were not anti-colonial attempts to promote liberation but can be best understood as attempts at contesting Dutch colonial unremembering. During the 1980s, postmemory authors, like Jill Stolk, Marion Bloem and Adriaan van Dis, problematized unremembering, drawing attention to their postcolonial condition and complicating the narrative of us (the Dutch) versus them (the Indonesians). Radio and television during the 1980s increasingly offered platforms where the brutality of the war of decolonization and perpetration of widespread Dutch atrocities were highlighted. The testimony of veterans, not historians, dominated these narratives.
