“Are we heroes too?”: Reenacting the 1949 offensive against the occupation by the Dutch troops in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Every year on 1 March, a historical society called the Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945 performs a large-scale reenactment of the 1949 General Offensive against the Dutch reoccupation in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Under former president Suharto's authoritarian rule, the historic event was represented as pivotal in recognition of Indonesian independence. However, after Suharto's presidency, the historic attack became one of the biggest controversies in Indonesian historiography as intellectuals claimed Suharto had manipulated historical facts for self-glorification. This chapter analyzes why and how this historical society reconstructed this sensitive past in Indonesian historiography. Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate how the reenactors continually aim to experience the authentic past, yet this experience focuses primarily on the embodied relationship with tangible material culture rather than social and political historical narratives. In the imagined past, there is no space for political discussions of controversies. The reenactment is rather a performance of horizontal comradeship in which victory is the result of the self-sacrificing Indonesian people who stood united in opposition to Dutch occupation. It, therefore, rejects Indonesian historiography that was long characterized as a channel for military ideology, attempting instead to revivify public history in Indonesia.