In 2016, I joined a historical society titled the Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945 and their annual reenactment of the 1949 General Offensive of 1 March in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.1

On the day of the performance, we had gathered in front of the Benteng Vredeburg, a colonial fortress in the city’s center. Just like the other participants, I nervously pointed a “weapon,” in my case a camera, at the scene.

While in 1949, the Indonesian troops reclaimed control over the city from the Dutch colonizers for six hours, the performance itself took less than twenty minutes. Prior to the event, I had spent almost three months with the reenactment group, joining their preparations, meetings, workshops, and dis­cussions in order to understand what attracted the members of this historical society in the bodily performance of the past, and particularly this historical episode in the current post-Suharto era.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429445668-12

Figure 9.1 Reenactor performing Royal Netherlands East Indies Army shouting “Prepare to be shot!.” Video still documentary The Feel of History (2017) by Lise Zurne.

event had been presented as a vital episode in the history of Indonesian independence: it has been claimed that after this successful attack, interna­tional pressure on the Dutch government increased, leading eventually to the high-level meetings between representatives of the Dutch government and the Republic of Indonesia, and eventually the official recognition of independence. The attack became one of the most systemically organized commemorations of Indonesian history during President Suharto’s New Order regime. The Reformasi in 1998, a period of reform directed toward a more liberal political and social climate, ended Suharto’s rule and opened up space to renegotiate Indonesian history (McGregor, 2007; Strassler, 2010; Vickers, 2005; Zurbuchen, 2005). As alternate voices had been suppressed, there was a strong interest in what was called meluruskan sejarah, meaning “straightening” the history that had been “bent” by the New Order regime. This “ushered in floods of commentaries, newspaper accounts, and confer­ence or seminar papers indicating the spirited efforts to remember, interro­gate, and re-write the past” (Curaming, 2006). The Serangan Umum 1 Maret became one of the main controversies in these publications as an increasing number of intellectuals criticized Suharto’s self-staging as the initiator of the attack. Indonesian historian Heddy Ahimsa-Putra (2012) argued that because of this controversy, the annual commemoration lost its popularity from 1999 onward.

However, in 2013, a newly founded historical society called the Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945² took the initiative to “reinvent” the annual reenactment of the attack.

This chapter analyzes the construction of the reenactment of the Serangan Umum 1 Maret and explores the motivations and practices of its main organizers, the reenactors of the Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945. As often described, reenactment’s popularity seems to lie in its promise to provide a glimpse of “what it was really like back then,” something beyond the history found in books, schools, or museums (Agnew, 2004, 2007; de Groot, 2009; Gapps, 2009; Schneider, 2011). The body becomes the main tool for historic research. In contrast to “fixed” and “elitist” versions of the past, reenact­ment is, because of its performative character, always bound to change. As “unfinished business,” it provides participants with agency to appropriate and reshape the past from the hindsight of the present (Daugbjerg et al., 2014, p. 682; Gapps, 2009, p. 400). Taking into account the controversies sur­rounding this episode in Indonesian history, I seek to answer the question of how this performance relates to attempts to “rewrite” history in post-New Order Indonesia. This case study demonstrates how reenactors continually aim to achieve “authentic” experiences, yet this experience focuses primar­ily on the embodied relationship with tangible material culture rather than historic narratives.

This chapter seeks to contribute to reenactment studies by providing an analysis of reenactment practices in a context in which the representation of history has long been bound to state control. In such contexts, we often observe that memories that are considered unfitting for national identity become subject to collective amnesia (Anderson, 2006, p. 204). In the case of Indonesia, the famous documentary The Act of Killing (2012) shed a crit­ical light on this issue when director Joshua Oppenheimer asked his pro­tagonists to reenact their past crimes as key figures in the mass genocide of alleged communists in 1965. These purges are pivotal in understanding the transition to Suharto’s authoritarian New Order administration. The regime presented the massacre as the result of “decomposed people” who lacked morality (Siegel, 2006, p. 135). Such discourse emphasizing the unpredictable “masses” justified a powerful military-dominated govern­ment. Excluding “the people” from political participation meant exclud­ing them from dominant historical narratives too, resulting in a political history where civilian contribution was just a backdrop to military efforts. The reenactment can therefore be understood as an attempt to redefine the notions of “revolution” and “the people” in contemporary Indonesia.

The chapter will start by providing some context for the historical event of the Serangan Umum 1 Maret to demonstrate how it has been described in Indonesian historiography, specifically during Suharto’s New Order regime. Then, I will provide a description of the Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945 and analyze the reenactment and historicizing practices of this com­munity. Lastly, I will come back to my main question and analyze how the participants of this study have dealt with the controversy surrounding the historic attack.