ABSTRACT
Works by veterans during the late 1980s and 1990s illustrated the liminality of veterans’ experiences. Their unremembered narratives, ignored by historians, had failed to be integrated into the national collective memory. Oeroeg (1983), the anti-colonial film directed by Hans Hylkema, loosely based on Hella Haasse's novel, provided a restaging on screen similar to Hollywood's Vietnam films. A number of controversies, including the Boomsma affair, the Poncke Princen affair and the queen's 1995 visit to Indonesia, kept the contested nature of collective memory prominently in the news throughout the mid-1990s. Television documentaries highlighted Dutch war crimes, including the massacre of Rawagede, while historians provided solidly researched accounts of the diplomatic side of the conflict as well as the business of running a war.
