FROM COLONIZER TO VICTIM: THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC (1942 – 1945) AND ITS AFTERMATH FRAMED THROUGH A DUTCH NATIONAL SECOND WORLD
WAR NARRATIVE
From Colonizer to Victim: the War in the Pacific (1942 – 1945) and Its Aftermath Framed Through a Dutch National Second World War Narrative
Tamara Breugelmans
Research Master Cultural Analysis Thesis Student-number: 10174648
Supervisor: dr. I.A.M. Saloul Second Supervisor: dr. D.A. Duindam
Date: 13 – 6 - 2018 Wordcount: 23 021
Cover: “Women in a camp bowing for the Japanese emperor” Spaarnestad Photo
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Dutch Resistance Museum: The Emotional Conditioning of the Visitor 7
1.1 The Experiental Museum 8
1.2 Constructing a Narrative and its Leading Roles Through “Authentic”
Objects 11
1.3 From Cultural Memory to Prosthetic Memory 14
1.4 The Double Layer of Oppression 17
1.5 Conclusion 21
Chapter 2 TV-Documentary Series De Oorlog (‘The War’):
The Effects of Temporality 23
2.1 Bringing the Past in to the Present and the Present into the Past 24
2.2 De Oorlog as Palimpsest 27
2.3 The Aftermath of War and Postmemory 33
2.4 The Same Time Frame 36
2.5 Conclusion 38
Chapter 3 The National Monument on Dam Square and Memorial Day:
Lieu de Mémoire and the Performance of Dutch Cultural Memory 40
3.1 Foundation Myth of the post-war Dutch Society and the
National Monument 42
3.2 The National Monument as a Lieu de Mémoire and the
‘Depoliticization’ of the War in the Pacific 44
3.3 Multidirectional Memory and the Progression of the
National Commemoration on Memorial Day 47
3.4 Performing Dutch National Cultural Memory 51
3.5 Conclusion 55
Conclusion 57
Introduction
“We allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what imperialism has done?” - Edward Said (2003: xvii)
This thesis deals with the effects of framing the War in the Pacific and its aftermath through a national Second World War narrative in the Netherlands. By framing I mean showing and telling one narrative; that of the War in the Pacific and its aftermath, through another, namely the narrative of the Second World War. A frame, described by Frank van Vree as a cognitive structure that guides our perception and representation of reality, is used to create meaning (2013: 7). Because the national Second World War narrative has played an important role in the formation of the post-war Dutch identity, it is therefore the most dominant narrative in war representations in the Netherlands. As a result, the making of meaning through framing also happens in relation to an ideological hierarchy. My approach in this thesis is therefore to analyse how the dominant Dutch narrative of the Second World War influences the way in which the War in the Pacific and its aftermath are represented through cultural objects.
According to David Duindam, cultural objects mediate the past in an effort to bring the past closer, however, this past “is appropriated and invested with desires from the present and for the future” (2016: 25). The representations that deal with the War in the Pacific and its aftermath together with the Second World War in the Netherlands are thus created from a present-day perspective, and are illustrative of the desirable way in which to remember these historical events. Besides from being the only few contemporary representations that deal with both the War in the Pacific and its aftermath together with the Second World War in the Netherlands, I have chosen the Dutch Resistance Museum, the TV-documentary series De Oorlog (‘The War’) and the National Monument in combination with the national commemoration on Memorial Day, because these three all deal differently with the notions of hero, victim and perpetrator. My analysis therefore focusses on the way in which these notions are framed, may complicate the relationship between the Dutch as victims of the War in the Pacific and that as colonial perpetrators. In addition to that, the three objects that are the subject of my thesis also cater to different audiences. The Dutch Resistance Museum uses a fairly simple language and way of presenting its narrative, which could be argued, is used to reach people - such as (high)schoolchildren and tourists – who probably are only familiar with
the general outline of the Second World War in the Netherlands and may have heard about the War in the Pacific. Because of their trivial knowledge about these events the museum has the potential to shape their knowledge according to the narrative that the museum presents. De Oorlog on the other hand, as a documentary series, is aimed towards a more adult and Dutch audience, who are presumed to be somewhat more familiar with this historical period. The National Monument and the national commemoration attempt to reach all ages, but have more of a commemorative function. This in turn may influence the way in which the narrative of the War in the Pacific is framed through a Dutch national Second World War narrative.
I find it important to note upfront my shortcoming of not properly representing the narrative of the Indonesians in this thesis. The reason for this, is that I am looking for representations of the War in the Pacific and its aftermath as they are represented in the Netherlands, and also through the Dutch national narrative of the Second World War. However, it is precisely the underrepresentation of the Indonesians in these representations that sparked my interest in the subject. As a Dutch citizen myself, I feel responsible for the history of the nation that I belong to, and which Indonesia as a colony was once part of. I therefore consider myself an implicated subject. This term is coined by Michael Rothberg who used “the deliberately open-ended term ‘implication’ in order to gather various modes of historical relation that do not necessarily fall under the more direct forms of participation associated with traumatic events, such as victimization and perpetration” (2013: 40). Rather, he argues implicated subjects are related to events they did not directly experience, and in that way these subject positions move us away from questions of guilt and innocence, into a more complex ethical terrain (ibid). As I have not been a part of the colonial history of the Netherlands, I am not guilty of the crimes committed in the former Dutch colonies. This does not mean, however, that I do not bear responsibility towards that history. My responsibility towards the Dutch colonial history should be to attempt to reach a better and more inclusive understanding of that past.
Because the events that happened in Indonesia in the 1940s are not well known compared to the Second World War in the Netherlands, I will give a brief, but therefore incomplete, historical contextualization. At the end of the 1930s, Japan had already conquered a lot of territory in East-Asia in order to establish a great Asian empire, free from any Western interference. In 1942, this resulted in the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies (Leeuwen, 2008: 35). Lizzy van Leeuwen argues that in this period of occupation, the role of the Dutch had changed from being the colonizer, to victims of war. In Japan’s quest to destroy the European upper layer of the Dutch East Indian society, everyone who was considered
European had been put into camps (ibid). The Japanese considered many of the Indo-Europeans as Asian, and therefore most of them remained outside the camps. Except for those who fought for the Royal Dutch Indies Army (KNIL)1; they were taken as prisoners of war, together with the Dutch men (Captain & Jones: 42). However, as most Indo-Europeans resisted the Japanese occupation, the Japanese largely distrusted them. Consequently they were far from safe outside the camps either (ibid: 43). Gert Oostindie describes that the conditions inside the camps were brutal and that almost one out of ten did not survive (2010: 75). He goes on to argue that comparisons with the German occupation are drawn frequently and in the most extreme form “whether the Japanese camps fall into the same category as the Nazi death camps” (ibid: 77). Not all of the survivors compare their camp experiences with that of the Nazi camps, but the Japanese occupation creates a type of shared trauma with the German occupation. According to Oostindie, however, outside the camps conditions were even worse, as hundreds of thousands so-called romushas2 died while providing compulsory work for the Japanese (ibid: 76).
During the occupation the Japanese showed sympathy towards the Indonesian nationalists, as long as they did not interfere with the Japanese interests. Because of this, the Indonesian nationalist movement continued to grow. After the Allied forces defeated the Japanese, Indonesia proclaimed its independence on August 15th, 1945 (Captain & Jones, 2010: 43). In the power vacuum that occurred right after, groups of permudas3 attacked everything and everyone that they associated with Dutch rule. In this period, known as the Bersiap, between 1945 and 1946, many Dutch people and Indo-Europeans lost their lives (Oostindie, 2010: 76). When the negotiations about self-government between the Indonesian Republic and the Dutch government failed, the KNIL started the so-called ‘police-actions’. These were needed to ‘orderly’ come to a situation in which, according to the Dutch government, not only the Dutch interest would be served, but also the Indonesian. The Indonesians have a more apt term for this: agresi militer Belanda4 and the Indonesians saw this as a way for the Dutch to re-establish their colonial rule and to deny Indonesia’s independence (Captain & Jones: 44). For a long time, the Dutch refused to acknowledge 1945 as the year of Indonesia’s independence, and instead maintained 1949 when the Dutch government formally transferred sovereignty (website newspaper Trouw). As Captain argues,
1 Translation of Koninklijk Nederlands-Indisch Leger, which existed from 1830 until 1950. Also important to
know is that the KNIL existed out of Dutch soldiers, but also had some Indo-European soldiers.
2 Indonesian forced labourers. 3 Young nationalist freedom fighters. 4 Dutch military aggression.
for most Indonesians, the Japanese occupation, known as the War in the Pacific – by the Dutch and other Western countries regarded as part of the Second World War – and the Decolonization War after are not two separate events. Rather they see this period as a struggle that would eventually bring them independence from their Dutch colonizer (2010: 33).
My theoretical approach belongs mostly to memory studies. Within memory studies there is a strong focus on the idea that remembering always foregrounds a sense of forgetting (Bijl, 2012: 443). When it comes to uncomfortable collective memories, such as memories of the Dutch colonial past, this thus entails that remembering one memory actively, in turn hides another uncomfortable memory, which as a consequence ends up being forgotten. Van Vree calls this “the dominant paradigms of social silence and forgetfulness” (2013: 1). Recently, post-colonial scholars have argued for a more subtle approach towards the idea of forgetting within memory studies. Paul Bijl argues that the traces of the Dutch colonial past have not been hidden, but rather that they have not gained meaning through the frames in which they have been represented. He therefore argues against the equation of forgetting with absence (2012: 441). Instead, he proposes the notion of memorability: “the degree to which the past is made easy to remember” (ibid). He builds onto Judith Butler’s idea of recognisability, which highlights the importance of frames through which a subject is made recognisable (ibid: 444). Thus rather than forgetting, Bijl argues that the victims of Dutch colonialism are not memorable, because the dominant discourses frame them as not belonging to Dutch national history (ibid: 441). I argue that the national Second World War narrative is one of those dominant discourses, and will therefore analyse if the act of framing the War in the Pacific and its aftermath through that narrative, disallows the Indonesian victims of that period of violence to also be considered as part of Dutch national history.
Ann Laura Stoler, writing about the situation from a French perspective, proposes the idea of colonial aphasia, in which the occlusion of knowledge is the issue and not ignorance or absence (2011: 125). Stoler draws on Michel Foucault’s work on aphasia, in which Foucault thinks about how categories are formed and dispersed. To him, aphasia draws connections that do not seem to make sense. Stoler uses the way in which Foucault has used the idea of aphasia - to disentangle the epistemic ordering of things – in her analysis of the colonial disordering of the present world (ibid: 154). According to her, in colonial aphasia there is a difficulty in generating a vocabulary that is apt to associate words and concepts to appropriate things (ibid: 125). In this thesis I will focus on how the national Second World War narrative is used as a language – similar to the idea of a frame - through which to talk about the War in the Pacific, and whether this language occludes certain uncomfortable
knowledge that does not fit into that dominant narrative. I will analyse whether the language produced by the national Second World narrative, which determines who is a victim and who a perpetrator, is apt enough to conflate the two when it comes to representing the War in the Pacific.
The first chapter in this thesis focuses on how the Dutch Resistance Museum in Amsterdam as an experience museum emotionally conditions the visitor to the narrative that the museum presents. I will be using the concept of cultural memory – that which is remembered collectively and is shaped by different cultural processes (Rigney, 2005: 14) – to discern the dominant narrative concerning the main exhibition about the Second World War in the Netherlands. In turn, the concept of prosthetic memory will help to demonstrate how the immersion into this dominant narrative allows the visitor to experience the memories that are on display almost as if they were their own (Landsberg, 2004: 34). This will help me to analyse the effects of the emotional conditioning that happens in the museum’s main exhibition “The Netherlands in the Second World War”, when the visitor afterwards gets to see the museum’s sub-exhibition “Dutch Colonial Empire”. In turn, I will examine how this affects the notions of hero, victim and perpetrator.
The second chapter is centred on the TV-documentary series De Oorlog (‘The War’). The medium of this documentary series allows for a temporal representation of how the Second World War in the Netherlands and the War in the Pacific and its aftermath evolved. By showing the relation with time, the series offers a more nuanced understanding of this historical period and seems to question the dominant Dutch cultural memory. I will be using the concept of the palimpsest – something that is altered, but still bears visible traces of its earlier form (English Oxford Dictionary) - to show how De Oorlog not only uncovers the different layers of meaning that are underneath the Dutch cultural memory, but also in relation to the notion of perpetrator. The concept of postmemory – how memories of traumatic experiences continue to live on onto the next generation through a familial relation (Hirsch, 2008: 109) – will help me to explain how memories of the Second World War and the War in the Pacific and its aftermath are passed on onto future generations. In turn, I will question how these postmemories affect the relation between the Dutch as victims of the War in the Pacifc and that as colonial perpetrators.
The third and final chapter deals with the performative nature of the annual national commemoration – which both describes a condition and recreates (Winter, 2010b: 11) - on Memorial Day held at the National Monument in Amsterdam. The performance of the ritual during the national commemoration will help me to explain how the idealized identity of the
Dutch post-war society is constructed and maintained. Using the concept of the lieu de mémoire, which entails an (im)material place of memory which has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of a community (Nora, 1996: xvi), will help to explain how the National Monument represents a sense of national unity and national cultural memory of the Dutch as heroes and victims of the Second World War. As I will argue, however, the inclusion of the War in the Pacific in the material of the National Monument, and later the inclusion of the Decolonization War in the national commemoration, show that who are being remembered remains contested. A multidirectional memory approach may explain how the advocates who vouched for the inclusion of the memories of the Decolonization War in the national commemoration borrowed and cross-referenced from the memories of the Second World War (Van Ooijen and Raaijmakers, 2012: 465). I will question, however, whether multidirectional memory is the right term to describe this process. Furthermore, as both the National Monument and the national commemoration are focussed on the notions of heroization and victimization, I will in turn analyse how the notion of perpetration is dealt with.
My analysis of these three objects is an attempt at showing the effects of framing the War in the Pacific and its aftermath through a national Second World War narrative. My investigation in the subject is also to see how this framing may complicate the relationship between the Dutch as victims of the War in the Pacific and as colonial perpetrators.
Chapter 1
The Dutch Resistance Museum: The Emotional Conditioning of the Visitor
The Dutch Resistance Museum in Amsterdam is housed in a neighbourhood known as the Jewish Quarter, where before the Second World War a lot of Jewish people lived. It is the same neighbourhood where deportations to the concentration camps were held. Many sites in this neighbourhood are related to the horrible events that happened to its Jewish population, such as the National Holocaust Memorial, the Hollandsche Schouwburg - from which most of the deportations actually took place - the Jewish Historical Museum, and the National Holocaust Museum. Unlike the Hollandsche Schouwburg, the museum itself does not have an indexical character, which Patricia Violi describes as a specific semiotic trait that maintains a real spatial proximity to the trauma that took place at that particular place (2012: 37). The building in which the Dutch Resistance Museum is located may not have been an actual site where traumatic events happened, its content does refer to the events that unfolded in the neighbourhood where the museum is located, which adds a sense of site specificity. In turn, the location’s significance may help to emotionally condition the visitor to the narrative that the museum presents.
The main and also permanent exhibition in this museum is “The Netherlands in the Second World War”, with a smaller sub-exhibition “Dutch Colonial Empire” about the War in the Pacific and its aftermath in Indonesia. Drawing on Foucault, Tony Bennett outlines the relation between power and the production of knowledge in the origin of museums, coining it the ‘exhibitionary complex’ (1988: 74). As Bennett argues, the manifestation of power in the ‘exhibitionary complex’ lies in its “ability to organize and co-ordinate an order of things and to produce a place for the people in relation to that order” (ibid: 80). According to him, in the context of imperialism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the construction of this order of things and people on display in their interaction through time in national museums, meant to demonstrate the process of evolution. In this process the imperialist powers were on top, as opposed to the people of the colonized countries, who were represented as the ‘other’, thereby teaching the public about their assumed imperial superiority (ibid: 92). Museums have been criticized for the way in which they produce knowledge, in particular for the kind of colonial knowledge aforementioned. However, as any kind of museum display is an active agent in constructing knowledge, Stephanie Moser remarks that there still remains “a general lack of awareness (…) about the extent that
exhibitions create knowledge about the subjects that they seek to represent” (2010: 22). In spite of the critique that any kind of museum display constructs a particular type of knowledge about what it presents, this is still not commonly known.
The Dutch Resistance Museum, like any other museum, also has a certain ordering of things, or rather of events and of the people related to those particular events. Following Bennett, this in turn produces a place that allows the visitors to relate to that order. In the case of the Dutch Resistance Museum this is particularly done through more traditional means of providing the visitor chronological and factual information by wall texts, alternated with the display of personal memories and a more or less interactive journey through the exhibition space itself. Silke Arnold-de Simine describes a transformation over the last thirty years of traditional history museums and heritage sites into ‘spaces of memory’. She argues that “the museum has undoubtedly become one of the vital institutions for transforming living memory into institutionally constructed and sustained commemorative practices which enact and give substance to group identities and foster memory communities” (2013: 1 - 2). I would argue that the Dutch Resistance Museum functions in a similar way - by keeping the memories of the Second World War in the Netherlands and the War in the Pacific alive – the museum offers an opportunity for the visitors to relate to these memories and consequently creates a space for commemoration. Paul Williams explains that “identity lies at the heart of memorial museums” (2007: 132). In this chapter I will focus on how the Dutch Resistance Museum constructs a sense of Dutch identity in relation to the Second World War. In order to do so, it is necessary to outline what the dominant narrative of the main exhibition is. In turn, I will analyse how the museum emotionally conditions the viewer in the main exhibition, and how this affects the way in which the notions of hero, victim and perpetrator are perceived when viewing the sub-exhibition “Dutch Colonial Empire” after.
The Experiential Museum
The exhibition “Dutch Colonial Empire” is situated a little off the grid on the left side of the main exhibition space, right after the loop of “The Netherlands in the Second World War” exhibition ends. As the sub-exhibition does not have the same dominant spot upon entrance, the logical start for the visitor would be the main exhibition. This exhibition starts off with an introduction video, which opens with the question “adapt, cooperate or resist?” This question seems to ask what the visitor would personally do when he or she would have been in the
Figure 1: Tamara Breugelmans, Dutch Resistance Museum, February 7th, 2018
same situation. The interactive re-created scenes of how the Netherlands must have looked during the Nazi occupation - this includes an imitation of a prison cell and several facades (figure 1) - works on the visitor’s imagination of what it must have looked and felt like during that time.
The exhibition starts off chronologically in the 1930s, when there was an economic crisis, a religious divide, as well as opposing political points of view. When, chronologically, Nazi Germany invades the Netherlands, the passage narrows and the colours become darker, thereby heightening the gloomy feeling that war brings about. After the invasion, the architecture of the exhibition forms a maze-like structure. A maze is constructed to confuse and disorient the person who enters it, and normally has one point of entry and only one possible exit point. In the exhibition it is not clear which direction to follow. Most paths that the visitor can take either have a dead end - where one is confronted with personal memories of either victims or heroes - or are shaped like a semi-circle which causes the visitor to return to the middle of the maze again. This confusing structure intensifies the feeling of chaos and despair that corresponds to this particular historical period of Nazi occupation. When the visitor has finally managed to find the exit of the maze, the chronology is resumed. The exhibition finishes with a brightly lit passage, complete with flags and images of cheerful-looking people, giving the visitor the idea that victory is achieved. Alison Landsberg argues that what she calls ‘experiential museums’, give the visitors the “opportunity of having an experiential relationship to a collective or cultural past they did not experience” (2004: 33).
The experience that the museum has created not only allows the visitor to be able to relate more to the collective past that the museum seeks to represent, the experientality is also a way to make meaning. What kind of meaning about the Second World War is offered to the visitor when he, or she, has walked through the exhibition?
Projected on the ground near the introduction video is the quote: “Asking yourself a question, that’s how resistance begins.” This is the same quote with which the exhibition ends, where it is printed in large letters on the wall.5 The return of this particular quote seems to answer the question of what one was morally ought to do when faced with the dilemma of “adapt, cooperate or resist?” which the introduction video confronts us with. The first information panel upon entering the exhibition also claims that this dilemma is the focus of the exhibition. According to this same panel, however, the subject of the exhibition is the Dutch resistance to the Nazi occupation, something which the name of the museum – Dutch Resistance Museum – already gives away. What the museum claims is the focus of the museum, thus seems to conflict with what they claim is the subject of the exhibition. As the museum’s subject is resistance, there is no longer a dilemma to be figured out by visitor when walking through the exhibition. Furthermore, the introduction panel claims that the main route shows the experience of the ‘average Dutch man’, while the side rooms show specific groups or themes. However, the amount of times that this ‘average Dutch man’ - consisting out of the majority of the Dutch population at that time - appears in the exhibition, can be counted on one hand. Nor is there any attention given to the reasons why ‘the average Dutch man’ was ostensibly less heroic than the people who actively resisted the occupation.
Arnold-de Simine warns us that “discourses of remembrances can be ideologically instrumentalized and exploited to ignore the complexities of a historical event, they can be dehistoricized and mythologized to view the world in simple terms of good and evil, victims and perpetrators” (2013: 18). It seems as though the same is happening in the Dutch Resistance Museum, where the complexities of how the Second World War evolved in the Netherlands appear to be neglected. Daniel Sherman equally cautions that memory is the material that these particular museums attempt to turn into history (1995: 52). By not focussing on the memory of those who chose to adapt, the museum obfuscates this from the history that it represents. Even though these people were also victims of Nazi oppression, they do not fit into an absolute image of what constitutes victimhood, for they do not allow to represent the Second World War in simple terms of good and evil. In the sections below I will
5 This quote comes from a poem about resistance, written by Remco Campert, a famous Dutch writer whose
explain how the museum constructs the role of the victim, hero and perpetrator and will delve deeper into how the combination of the experientality of the museum with the objects that are on display are used to construct meaning.
Constructing a Narrative and its Leading Roles Through “Authentic” Objects
According to Williams, “the enumerative nature of group victimhood means that suffering in a historic event is calibrated not through some objective standard, but through its visibility and recognition in public consciousness” (2007, 18). This means that the way to collectively acknowledge a subject’s suffering is by granting the victim a voice and face that allows it to be perceived as such. As Amy Sodaro argues, memory museums “are very much victim-oriented institutions that seek to put the individual at the centre of memory of the negative past” (2018: 25). Both roles of victim and hero in the main exhibition are established through personal stories of their heroic deeds or hardship, almost all accompanied by their portraits. This resembles Sodaro’s argument of having the individual at the centre of memory of the negative past of the Second World War. These testimonies are mediated through quotes, presumably acquired through interviews after the war, accounts from friends and family, or represented by farewell letters and diary entries.6 The notion of victimhood is further highlighted by the farewell letters that are presented with images of deportation trains and camps on the background, or by diary entries in little blood red coloured niches. According to Sodaro, these techniques make the heroes and victims more real, thereby “making the [museum] experience more visceral and immediate” (2018: 25). The objects through which these testimonies are represented add to the experientality of the museum, by making the people from whom these testimonies come from more substantive and thus more relatable.
However, the authenticity of these letters and diary entries is questionable in some cases, and the first wall text of the museum confirms in small letters at the bottom of the panel that “the most fragile documents in the exhibition have been substituted by replicas”. Although the letters may not be authentic, Sian Jones argues that it is “undoubtedly the case that replicas can acquire authentic qualities” (2010: 183). She explains that visitors to museums can experience a sense of authenticity in front of reproductions to the same degree as original authentic objects, just as long as the visitors do not know that they are
reproductions (ibid). What these letters thus rather do is evoke authenticity: due to their assumed connection to the events that these letters describe, they elicit a similar emotional reaction if they were to be the actual letters sent. Even more so, if these were the actual original letters, then their authentic degree would still be problematic as David Lowenthal argues: “Authenticity today usually attaches to one of three conflicting goals: faithfulness to original objects and material, to original contexts, or to original aims. All are ultimately unattainable” (1992: 186). If the letters on display would be faithful to the original material, then the museum display places them out of their original context, and take away their original aim of being a correspondence between the person who wrote them and to whom they were addressed.
Something similar can be argued for the objects on display; personal items used as props to further heighten a feeling of empathy and closeness to the subjects or events that they are presumed to be related to. Regardless of their authentic status, Williams argues: “Any item exhibited in a museum is never allowed to remain the thing itself, but instead invokes meanings greater than the world of objects from which it has been picked out” (2007: 30). The objects that have been put on display in the museum are never just an object. They have been carefully chosen to be on display, because they play a role in constructing the narrative of victims and heroes of the Second World War that the museum seeks to represent. Joan Branham adds to this by arguing that the deception of an object in a museum does not only come from its decontextualization; of having been extracted from its original use or purpose. The deception also comes from its recontextualization by the newly created context that the museum environment provides through the relation with the other objects that are on display (1994/1995: 35). The juxtaposition of these different objects together, combined with explanatory wall-texts, creates a compelling and convincing visual narrative, especially because of the evoked authentic relationship with the people or events that these objects appear to have.
Williams warns us that even if the personal objects on display are the original authentic objects, they may still give a false sense of significance. For when these objects were being used by the owner, they did not have the historic significance that was later assigned to them (2007: 28). To give an example of this: about halfway through the exhibition, there is a glass display that contains a suitcase and behind it a photograph of a group of people who are waiting on a train platform with suitcases next to them, waiting for deportation (figure 2). The display does not say whether the suitcase that the visitor sees is the actual suitcase that we see in the photograph. However, it does evoke a sense of authenticity,
Figure 2: Tamara Breugelmans, Dutch Resistance Museum, February 7th, 2018
because it looks old and a bit damaged, and also resembles the one in the photograph. If the suitcase on display is indeed the authentic object from the picture, at the time of use it did not have the historic significance attached to it, as it was simply a functional object. In hindsight it acquired its meaningful status - especially by being on view in a museum - of being part of the deportation. Williams therefore goes on to argue that a memorial museum’s aim of representing a compelling narrative of the history that it seeks to represent, is often found more important than whether the objects that support this history are actually directly related to the event, person or place that it resembles (ibid: 33). For the Dutch Resistance Museum it appears that it is thus not important whether the objects on display have an authentic relationship to the past; it is more important that they help to construct the narrative that the museum seeks to represent.
In comparison to the victims and heroes, the perpetrator is not only underrepresented in this exhibition, but is also constructed differently. The introduction video gives some information about Nazism with a short footage of Hitler, and some images of anonymous Nazi German soldiers while they are taking over the Netherlands. In the exhibition space there is a short
section devoted to the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging (NSB),7 who were supporters of the Nazis, in which we mostly see images of its leader Anton Mussert. There is one advertising pillar with NSB and Nazi propaganda posters, a destroyed bust of Hitler at the end of the exhibition, and some swastikas throughout the exhibition space. There are no personal accounts of the perpetrators, with the exception of one single testimony. Arnold-de Simine argues about the underrepresentation of the perpetrator: “The question of whose memories are able to find a forum is rarely explicitly discussed. The assumption is that those whose suffering, moral worthiness and potential to invite empathy is unquestioned, are granted a voice. The decision is usually based on a clear-cut binary of victims and perpetrators” (2013: 28). That it feels morally unjust to give the perpetrators a voice is evident in this exhibition due to their underrepresentation. However, by doing so, the museum again steers away from showing the complexities of the history of the Second World War in the Netherlands.
Sibylle Schmidt argues that the memories of perpetrators are also valid forms of testimony and do not differ from victim accounts in likewise being frail sources of historical knowledge (2017: 89). Nonetheless, she also argues that in the context in which the testimony is equipped with normative value – The Dutch Resistance museum is such a context given its nature as a memorial museum – “the emphatic notion of testimony is, explicitly or implicitly, reserved for the victims” (ibid: 87). Furthermore, it seems as though the perpetrator’s role is already a given; it does not need much more construction from the museum than the few images we do see of them that are well known from the general cultural memory of the Second World War: Hitler and swastikas. In contrast to what Williams described about how victimhood is not represented through an objective standard, it seems as though the perpetrator is constructed in exactly this manner. In the paragraph below I will explain how the museum makes use of the cultural memory of the Second World War, but also how it simultaneously reproduces and thus maintains it.
From Cultural Memory to Prosthetic Memory
The concept of cultural memory helps to discern the dominant narrative in this exhibition and the identities it produces. Cultural memory is often interchangeably used with the concept of collective memory, and while the two are closely related, there is an important distinction. According to Maurice Halbwachs - who coined the concept collective memory in the 1920s -
when studying how people acquire memories, we should not see people as isolated beings, completely detached from society (1992: 38). Rather, he argues, “it is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize and localize their memories” (ibid). The latter is what he calls ‘social frameworks for memory’ and is “the instrument used by collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society” (ibid: 40). The concept collective memory thus shows that the act of remembering is a social practice; the way in which we remember is resolved through ‘social frameworks for memory’, which are determined by the prevailing beliefs in society.
Near the end of the twentieth century, the concept of cultural memory emerged, which puts more emphasis on the cultural processes that shape these collective memories and subsequently the way in which they are the product of mediation (Rigney, 2005: 14). Just like the two other objects in this thesis, the Dutch Resistance Museum is a cultural entity that mediates the memories that shape the cultural memory that exists about the Second World War in the Netherlands, which in turn is also formed by other cultural mediations. In the last two decades there has been a more critical discussion among historians about the moral dichotomy of good and evil in the historiography about the Second World War (Captain, 1992: 38). In spite of this more critical approach, the popularity of for instance the Anne Frank House and the diary written by her, as well as the musical ‘Soldier of Orange’, show that the dominant belief in Dutch society regarding this period, is still that the Dutch were either the victims or the heroes, with the few exceptions of those who collaborated with the enemy.
Jan Assmann, who is one of the definers of cultural memory, stresses the importance of what he calls ‘the concretion of identity’:
Cultural memory preserves the store of knowledge from which a group derives an awareness of unity and peculiarity. The objective manifestations of cultural memory are defined through a kind of identificatory determination in a positive (‘we are this’)
or a negative (‘that’s our opposite’) sense. (1995: 130)
This is visible in the museum in that the emphasis is placed on what Assmann would call a positive sense of identification, namely that of victims and heroes, and to a lesser extent on a negative sense of identification, ‘that which we are not’: the perpetrator. Another important element according to Assmann is cultural memory’s capacity to reconstruct (1995: 130). He
argues that no memory can preserve the past, but rather that “cultural memory works by reconstructing, that is, it always relates its knowledge to an actual and contemporary situation” (ibid). The different identities of the victim, hero and perpetrator that are represented in the museum, and the way in which the Second World War evolved in the Netherlands, are thus reconstructed from the present day perception of that particular past. The present day perception of that past is still dominated by the aforementioned dichotomy of good and evil, although there is some space for a more critical approach as I will demonstrate in the second chapter. However, as I have written earlier, the Dutch Resistance Museum gives very little attention to the people who were neither absolute victims nor heroes.
Ann Rigney makes an important contribution to the concept in arguing that cultural memory is not only the result of memories circulating in a mediated form and through public circulation (2005: 16). These memories also “circulate, moreover, among individuals and groups who have no connection in any biological sense with the events in question but who may learn to identify with certain vicarious recollection – thanks to various media” (ibid). Cultural memory is thus not only memory shared within a collective, it is also memory maintained when the members of that collective no longer exist. As people who have consciously experienced the Second World War in the Netherlands are starting to pass away, the cultural memory about this historical event is what will remain of these memories. Only as long as it keeps on being circulated and mediatized by cultural entities, of which the Dutch Resistance Museum is one.
This process of identification with memories by individuals who have no connection to the events of which the memories are about, is even further intensified in the museum through, what Landsberg’s calls, prosthetic memory. As discussed earlier in this chapter, the experientality of the museum’s exhibition, as well as the objects that evoke a sense of authenticity provide a compelling framework which tells what it must have been like during the Nazi German occupation. This allows the visitor to immerse into the narrative and have a resembling experience. Landsberg imagines the experiential as an act of prosthesis, or rather as prosthetically appropriating memories of that particular past (2004: 34). While these experiences are not an actual experience of the event that is being remembered, she claims that they are nevertheless felt (ibid: 33). Arguably, it is impossible to take on the memories that are represented in the Dutch Resistance Museum as if they were your own. I rather interpret the notion of prosthetic memory as taking on the same emotions that the owner of those memories must have felt. Or, that the memories which do not belong to us elicit certain emotions in us. In that sense, a term such as ‘transferred emotional memory’ for example may
have been more apt, but the word prosthetic remains important, for it implies that the emotions that are being felt are not evoked by our own memories, but someone else’s emtions. Furthermore, just like a prosthetic, we can also easily undo ourselves of the memories that caused the emotional reaction. In short, prosthetic memory thus allows the visitor to emotionally relate to and identify with the memories that are represented in the museum. Landsberg continues to argue that prosthetic memory has the ability to produce a form of empathy (ibid: 48). The concept of prosthetic memory and the way in which it evokes emotions of sympathy in the visitor is important, for I argue that it conditions the visitor emotionally about what constitutes a perpetrator, hero and victim. In the section below I will argue that this emotional conditioning disallows the visitor to see the “Dutch Colonial Empire” exhibition without having already determined who is the victim, and who is the perpetrator.
The Double Layer of Oppression
At the end of “The Netherlands in the Second World War” exhibition, there is a wall text that tries to connect the sub-exhibition with the main one. It does this by informing the visitor that after the Netherlands was liberated, thousands of Dutch men went to Indonesia to fight there against the Japanese, and that the Second World War was only over when the Japanese capitulated in August. Even though another information panel in the sub-exhibition explains that Japan wanted to establish a great Asian empire, the different origin of the War in the Pacific is not explained further. I argue that the absence of this information makes the contextual link that the Dutch Resistance Museum makes with the Second World War in the Netherlands too much of a simplification of historical events. In addition to that, there is also a lack of information about why the Dutch colonized Indonesia, which makes it seem as though it was an unquestioned given that the Netherlands was a colonial power. This is illustrated by the introduction video that we see before entering the exhibition space. This video shows a map of the world with a dotted line going to the Western colonies of the Antilles and Suriname, and one going to Indonesia – skipping all the other places in which the Netherlands also had colonies. Immediately after that we see footage from the 1930s about the daily life in the Dutch East Indies. This is the same chronological starting point as the main exhibition, already indicating that the same format of the main exhibition will be used here as well. What is more, there is no information given about the period before the 1930s, for
instance about the violent Aceh War, which ended only sixteen years before the chronological start of this exhibition.
The first information panel upon entering the exhibition space does provide some information on how the Dutch East Indies was a highly hierarchical society with the white Dutch on top who “ruled a large group of ‘inlanders’”.8 The panel goes on to inform that the majority of them were dissatisfied with colonial rule, that a group of Indonesian nationalists wanted independence, but also that some of the Indonesians – the Moluccans for instance – remained loyal to the Dutch. There is, however, no further explanation of the reason why the majority of the Indonesians were frustrated by Dutch colonial rule. As will become clear, the double layer of oppression remains unexposed, giving little space to the role of the Dutch as colonial perpetrator. The same exhibition panel explains that between the white Dutch and the Indonesians were the Indo-Europeans of mixed blood, who were officially considered to have Dutch nationality, but were often not regarded as equal to their white counterparts. The final group that this wall text mentions are the Chinese. This type of ordering echoes what Edward Said has called orientalism, in which the Orient resembles Europe’s colonies, and its people are imagined as the ‘other’ (2003: 1). He describes the historical origin of orientalism in the eighteenth century as a way of dealing with the Orient “by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient” (ibid: 3). It is obvious to state that the effects of orientalism are still visible today, not only in the former colonies, but also in the Netherlands, as the Dutch Resistance Museum demonstrates. This orientalist way of ordering people with the Dutch white colonizer on top of the hierarchy, thereby demonstrating its dominance, and the local Indonesians as the ‘other’ on the bottom, remains present throughout the exhibition. A clear-cut example is the video-panel that returns twice more in the exhibition, in which we see personal testimonies of the situation before, during and after the war (figure 3). On top we see a white Dutch woman, followed by an Indo-European man, a man of Chinese descent, a Moluccan man and at the very bottom we see an Indonesian man. The Dutch Resistance museum with its exhibition “Dutch Colonial Empire” thus seems not far removed from the imperialist national museums that Bennett used as the example for his term ‘exhibitionary complex’.
Figure 3: Tamara Breugelmans, Dutch Resistance Museum, February 7th, 2018
The same dominant narrative of heroes and victims from the “Netherlands in the Second World War” exhibition is applied in the sub-exhibition as well. Ivanova uses the notion of ‘schematic narrative templates’, introduced by the anthropologist James Wertsch, to demonstrate how the notion of victimhood is shaped in cultural memory, which can be applied to different historic events (2003: 18). She argues: “Different narratives constructed on the same schematic narrative template can describe different events or characters, but still have a common role and function” (ibid). I argue that the narrative of “Dutch Colonial Empire” is constructed on the same schematic narrative template as the narrative from the main exhibition. Different events are described – the Second World War in the Netherlands versus the War in the Pacific – but the characters have a common role. In “Dutch Colonial Empire” we are also presented with countless sorrowful and some heroic accounts from white Dutch people and Indo-Europeans through diary entries, letters and testimonies from relatives and friends, often accompanied by portraits of them. In contrast, there is only one general mention of the fate of the Indonesians under Japanese oppression and the loss of thousands of so-called romushas.
The notion of victimhood is further constructed through presenting the aforementioned personal stories from behind what appear to be prison bars, barbed wires, pictures and drawings of the camps, all presented with dark colours in the background. No physical scenes are recreated that would allow the visitor to have an experience of what it must have looked
like at that time, but the denseness of the exhibition makes it feel a little claustrophobic, adding a heightened sense of unease. In the section before, I argued that prosthetic memory allowed the visitor to identify with the victims and heroes of “The Netherlands in the Second World War” exhibition. The experience of unease that is repeated in the sub-exhibition, along with the display of personal memories, continues to let the visitor emotionally identify itself with the victims and heroes in this exhibition as well. The narrative produced by the main exhibition thus conditions the visitor in deciding who fits into the role of victim, hero and perpetrator. This process of decision-making is made easy by the museum in that it has copied the same schematic narrative template from the main exhibition.
The same method of representing the perpetrator as omnipresent, but in a more or less abstract form, fed by a few familiar images, is applied here as well. The exhibition continuously refers to ‘the Japanese’ and shows the well-known image of the Japanese flag and some propaganda posters, without offering a face or voice to them. The role of the hero, defined in “The Netherlands in the Second World War” exhibition as offering resistance against oppression, appears to be a little different in this context. Only those resisting the Dutch enemy are granted this honour. The Indonesian nationalists, offering resistance against Dutch colonial rule, are not only depicted as collaborators, but at the at the end of the exhibition are turned into the enemy. The information panel about the period right after when Soekarno proclaimed independence from the Netherlands informs that thousands of Dutch and Indo-European people lost their lives to Indonesian nationalists. The few Indonesians that are given a voice in this exhibition are either those who supported the Japanese, or actively fought against the Dutch when the Japanese were defeated in order to gain independence.9 There are no victim accounts from the Indonesians about either Japanese or Dutch violence directed against the them. The same panel describes the Decolonization War that followed as ‘police-actions’, which were meant “to restore calm and order”, even though the panel also states that thousands of Dutch and ten-thousands of Indonesians have perished in this period. As the Dutch are continuously being represented as the victims, and the role of hero is only assigned to those who fought against the Dutch enemy, the “Dutch Colonial Empire” exhibition leaves very little room to see the Dutch as colonial perpetrator. Nor is there space for that the Indonesians might see the War in the Pacific not as part of the Second World War, but as a war that would bring them independence from their colonizers. As Captain explains, when Indonesia refers to ‘the war’, they do not mean the Second World War, but the
9 The Japanese were sympathetic towards the Indonesian nationalists, as long as they did not interfere with the
Indonesian revolution or the struggle for freedom, which includes the violent period after 1945 (2010: 33).
Conclusion
Sodaro argues that memorial museums are political projects at heart, which continue to support and sustain the dominant narratives of the past (2018: 183). According to my analysis of the Dutch Resistance Museum through the concept of cultural memory, the dominant narrative about both the Second World War in the Netherlands and the War in the Pacific and its aftermath which the museum represents, is that the Dutch were for the majority either the victims or the heroes. By giving almost no attention to the people who chose to adapt to the Nazi occupation, or by not openly addressing the role of the Dutch as colonial perpetrators, the museum leaves little room for the grey area in between absolute victim and perpetrator. This dichotomy of good versus evil is further illustrated by how the role of the hero is presented in the “Dutch Colonial Empire” exhibition, which can only be represented as heroic when it is against the Dutch enemy. There is thus no room for a multi-layered and possibly contradictory character in both narratives.
The identities that are produced by this cultural memory correspond to Assmann’s explanation that cultural memory constructs identities by a negative identification with the past; ‘that which we are not’, which in this case would be the perpetrator. But cultural memory also constructs identities through a positive identification with the past: ‘we are this’, which is either victim or hero. The museum’s experiental nature, established through the use of space, light, personal testimonies and objects – authentic or not – as well as the museum’s site specificity, combined with the notion of prosthetic memory, allows the visitor to experience the memories, and thus the identities that they create, almost as if they were their own. As I have argued in this chapter, this emotional conditioning of the visitor will make the visitor perceive and experience the “Dutch Colonial Empire” exhibition in a similar way as the main exhibition “The Netherlands in the Second World War’. This is further accomplished by that the same schematic narrative template is copied from the main exhibition onto the sub-exhibition. The role of the victims, heroes and perpetrator are thus constructed in the same manner for both exhibitions. As the viewer is already emotionally influenced to determine who constitute these different roles, I have argued that this disallows the visitor to see the Dutch as something other than either victim or hero.
However, not all cultural objects deal so one-dimensionally with the role of the Dutch in the two wars discussed above. In the next chapter I will analyse how the documentary series De Oorlog (“The War”) – which has a more critical perspective on both wars – deals with the roles of victim, hero and in particular perpetrator, and how the medium of film affects this representation. The focus will be in particular on the play on temporality, by bringing the past into the present, and the present back into the past.
Chapter 2
TV-Documentary Series De Oorlog (‘The War’): The Effects of Temporality
The TV-documentary series De Oorlog – shown on national television in 2009 and still available online - offers a nuanced version of how the Second World War evolved in the Netherlands as well as the War in the Pacific and its aftermath in Indonesia. De Oorlog consists out of nine episodes, which all have a different theme, but are weaved together more or less chronologically. The series does not start with the beginning of the Second World War, and also does not stop right after the war is over (table 1).10 By doing so the series makes an attempt at explaining the origins of the war and what the effects have been of this traumatic event in history, up until the present (at least up until 2009). According to the press release that the makers of the series released, the aim of the series was to tell the story about the war in a “modern way”, for which they have used relatively new studies that shed a different light on the history of the Second World War. Most of these studies, the makers claim, have not reached a large audience yet, but adjust the existing perception of the war considerably (Webpage NPS De Oorlog, 2009).
De Oorlog is not the first TV-series to question the dominant Dutch moral narrative
about the Second World War in the Netherlands of good versus absolute evil. However, as the previous chapter has shown, it remains crucial that there are representations of the Second World War that have the ability to reach a large audience, in order to function as a counter-narrative for the prevailing dominant perception of this dramatic period in history. Nonetheless, Paula Rabonowitz warns us that the persuasive rhetoric of documentary film in historical documentaries is used to convince the audience of its truth (1993: 119). These strategies are used to “enlist the audience in the process of historical reconstruction” in order to “provoke its audience to new understandings about social, economic, political, and cultural differences and struggles” (ibid). As De Oorlog also offers new understandings about the Second World War in the Netherlands and the War in the Pacific and its aftermath, we have to be aware of that this narrative is also yet another claim to the truth, compellingly presented through the medium’s rhetorical strategies such as interviews and archival footage. This should come as no surprise, as Brian Winston explains that our current understanding of the word “document” still has the connotation of evidence, as a sort of indexical relation to
reality. He goes on to explain that the photograph was initially received as a document, and therefore as evidence. This evidential status was passed on to the film camera, in which Winston traces the source of the ideological power that documentary film has (1995: 11). However, as John Grierson, founder of documentary theory, already claimed in the 1920s: documentary is “the creative treatment of actuality” (quoted in Winston, 1995: 11). Documentary film is therefore inherently always an adaptation of reality, in which the use of creativity affects its truth-bearing status even further.
Because documentary’s claim to truth will always be the subject of debate, I will not focus on what is true and what is not in De Oorlog. I am more interested in how this ambivalent representation translates itself into the two episodes that deal with the War in the Pacific and its aftermath. In this chapter, rather than focussing on how the perpetrators, victims and heroes are constructed – which was the focus of the first chapter – I will analyse how these different roles are represented in this series, particularly the role of the perpetrator. The previous chapter illustrated that in the case of the Dutch Resistance Museum, framing one historical event through another caused the same narrative of victims, heroes and perpetrators, to be applied onto the other. As the different identities are not that clear-cut in De Oorlog, does this also allow for victims to simultaneously be represented as perpetrators? Furthermore, the series alternates between archival footage, diary entries and more recent interviews with people who have experienced the events that are the subject of the series. As the series in addition to that has a final episode about how the war lives through to today, I will also analyse how temporality; the relation with time, has an effect on the aforementioned different identities.
Bringing the Past into the Present, and the Present into the Past
Andreas Huyssen claims that “as fundamental contingent categories of historical rooted perception, time and space are always bound up with each other in complex ways” (2003: 12). The way we perceive and understand history is thus always influenced by the time that has passed and by the time and space that we live in today. De Oorlog uses time in relation to particular historical events as a moral rhetorical tool. It does so by bringing uncomfortable knowledge from the past – which has purposefully been forgotten – back into our present-day understanding. Throughout the series, the presenter often times asks the viewer probing questions about how particular events related to both wars are remembered, in order to provoke a sense of ambivalence. By addressing the viewer directly through a
“voice-of-authority commentary (the speaker is heard and also seen)”, the series resembles Bill Nichol’s category of the ‘expository mode of documentary’. This style of documentary assembles historical fragments into a rhetorical or argumentative frame (2001: 105). This frame is carried by commentary in which images serve a supporting role, has the impression of objectivity, and the “capacity to judge actions in the historical world without getting caught up in them” (ibid: 107). By having the presenter question the present-day understanding of the past adds to this sense of objectivity and reinforces the series’ argument that this particular period in history evolved in a more nuanced manner than how it is remembered today. However, as we will later see, the presenter’s capacity to judge actions in the historical world is sometimes disrupted by his own subjectivity.
The questioning of the cultural memory of the Dutch as heroes and victims of the Second World War in the Netherlands is further achieved by the use of present-day interviews. A lot of attention is given to how the average person dealt with them and why they made certain choices. People who committed acts of resistance and those who became the victims of Nazi atrocities are given a voice, but those who chose to adapt are given equal consideration, if not more. The use of these personal accounts adds a sense of embodied knowledge to De Oorlog. Bill Nichols’ category of the ‘performative documentary’ helps to think about how the series situates this embodied knowledge. Performative documentary “sets out to demonstrate how embodied knowledge provides entry into an understanding of the more general processes at work in a society” (2001: 131). Nichols goes on to describe that the performative documentary underlines that our understanding of the world is complex and is influenced by subjectivity and affect. This type of documentary focuses on how memory, experience, personal beliefs and emotional involvement all have effect on how we personally perceive the world (ibid).11 We see how emotional involvement shows that the understanding of the world is more complex than the dichotomy of good and evil in episode two, “Continue under Foreign Power”. The presenter explains how the capitulation of the Netherlands had actually been rather quick and easy – despite the bombing of Rotterdam - and how after the capitulation Nazi Germany soon felt at home in the country of their Germanic neighbours. This is illustrated by diary entries of Nazi German soldiers, accompanied by archival footage of them enjoying life in Amsterdam without any resistance. At the same time we also hear a present-day interview with a Dutch man from a small village who explains that he and his friends did not really resent the Germans - except for the bombing of Rotterdam – as life in
11 For more information on the six modes of documentary that Nichols distinguishes, see chapter ‘What Types of
his village simply seemed to continue. What this type of embodied knowledge does, is not only to demonstrate that the world is not black and white, but in doing so it also brings past experiences back into the present.
By bringing the past into the present, De Oorlog tries to counter the current perception of history. In episode four, “Prosperity, Robbery and Hunger”, the series informs us that contrary to the now common perception about the Dutch economy during the war, during the first few years of the war the economy was actually doing better than before, as a lot of companies and factories were producing for Nazi Germany – something which a lot of entrepreneurs were prosecuted for after the war. The presenter reminds the viewer that according to international military law, one is not allowed to produce military goods for the occupier. But as most Dutch authorities were convinced that Nazi German would remain in the Netherlands for a long time – which counters the general idea of uniformed resistance - they actually allowed for the production, leading the presenter to ask the viewer: “Were the Germans still the occupier, or the new government?”
A similar question about the difference between occupation and becoming the new government is, however, not asked in the series about the role of the Dutch in Indonesia before the War in the Pacific. What the series does do, is show how today the events that unfolded after the War in the Pacific had ended and the Decolonization War erupted, are interpreted differently. By doing this, the series thus brings the present into the past. In episode eight, “Tough Years”, we see the presenter standing on the same beach in present-day Indonesia (Figure 4), explaining that it is the same beach where the Dutch landed in 1947. After that, we see archival footage of the landing whilst an unknown voice-over explains that “it was necessary for a police intervention”12. We are taken back to the presenter who explains that the Dutch government at that time orders everyone to talk about “police-actions”, because it is about an internal matter. He goes on to tell that the international community had already acknowledged the Republic of Indonesia, which the Dutch government still refused to do. In the scene after that, we see a present-day interview with an Indonesian nationalist, who explains that they have a different name for these actions, namely “the Dutch aggression”13. That the Decolonization War is interpreted differently in hindsight is even further emphasized by the present-day interview that follows, in which a Dutch veteran also admits that “police-actions” is just a political term, as he describes it as an ordinary war. In addition to that, the presenter later on in the episode literally states that the
12 Own translation of: “De noodzakelijkheid werd ingezien politioneel in te grijpen”. 13 Own translation of: “de Hollandse aggressie”.
