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4. Divided Memories of World War II in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies: Sukarno and Anne Frank as Icons of Dutch Historical Imagination
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105 Chapter 4 Divided Memories of World War II in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies Sukarno and Anne Frank as Icons of Dutch Historical Imagination Frances Gouda With a bit of hyperbole, one could argue that during the past fifty years, the memory of Anne Frank has served not only as an icon in World War II memories in the Netherlands but also as a foil for lingering questions about the varying degrees of Nazi collaboration among a sizable proportion of the Dutch population during the German occupation in 1940–45.1 It is equally plausible to assert that memorial practices in the Netherlands with regard to World War II in Southeast Asia have singled out Sukarno as symbol of Indonesian Nationalists’ collaboration with the Japanese enemy in the Dutch East Indies during 1942–45. As a result, the sometimes obsessive concern in the post-1945 era with Sukarno’s supporting role in the Japanese occupation has served as a lightning rod among the Dutch public in general and among former European administrators and settlers of the Dutch East Indies in particular. It is as if the Dutch focus on Sukarno’s aiding and abetting the enemy during World War II in the Indonesian archipelago has stifled an honest postcolonial assessment of Dutch complicity in the technologies of oppression—a veritable “state of violence”—which the Japanese easily took over in 1942 and further perfected in the course of World War II.2 Sukarno’s collusion with Japan’s military occupiers not only influences Dutch historical memory of World War II in Southeast Asia; it has also encumbered postwar appraisals of the Indonesian nationalist movement and the legitimacy of its demands for independence after more than three centuries of Dutch colonial rule. Frances Gouda 106 By stating the case in this manner, several issues must be interrogated. In the first instance, it requires an exploration of the intellectual maneuvers and moral judgments that have framed Anne Frank (a young girl and innocent victim of the Nazi Holocaust) and Sukarno (an adult anticolonial politician who willingly collaborated with Japanese military authorities in 1942–45) as icons of memory.3 This concept of “icon of memory” is introduced here to highlight something historians have increasingly been concerned with, namely, the ways in which people remember, forget, and distort parts of their history.4 Icons of memory arise due to what has been called the “scarcity principle” in cultural memory, meaning that most recollections of minor and even major historical events tend to fade, even if some are recycled in a recurrent process of “producing meaning in an ongoing way through selection, representation and interpretation.”5 Both Anne Frank and Sukarno have emerged as icons of memory in the Netherlands through paradoxical patterns of repetition and omission, making them not only sufficiently stable but also flexible enough to function in changing historical contexts.6 Second, thinking comparatively about Anne Frank and Sukarno as icons of World War II remembrances requires an examination of the intellectual formation of “memory work”—as some postmodern or postcolonial commentators prefer to call it—in the Netherlands since 1945 and how it might be related to postwar political developments. Iconic memory is part of an individual inclination and a communal practice grounded in fluctuating currents of affection and disaffection, of remembering and forgetting, and of cohesion versus “othering.” This organic process makes it necessary to consider the ways in which national historical memory is stipulated at different historical junctures, not only to mitigate a lingering sense of national disquiet about World War II but also to boost a reconfigured postwar national character, that is, a new identity grounded in a less prominent place in the postwar international order because of the dismantling of the lucrative Dutch empire in Southeast Asia. Crucial, in this context , is cultural memory’s selective nature and its intrinsic connection with what might seem its opposite but is, in fact, a necessary counterpart: forgetting . How did the icons of memory that came to be called “Anne Frank” and “Sukarno” emerge and evolve in the postwar Netherlands, and what were the urgent needs that these icons fulfilled, both in terms of memory and either amnesia or aphasia?7 Above all, it is necessary to examine the tendency in the Netherlands to frame World War II in Europe and Asia [3.141.8.247] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 23:09 GMT) Sukarno and Anne Frank as Icons 107 in moral terms in an...