Imagine what Indonesian historical research could look like if there were no language barriers, no travel costs and no visa issues, and instead just a strong Wi-Fi signal, dedicated Dutch-Indonesia
The letters sent by the Rempt-Schepers couple from the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia to the Netherlands between 1937 and 1946 were recently donated to the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD). For this blog, the couple’s daughters selected a few of the letters from the period September 1945 to February 1946 and wrote an introduction.
Of course the Corona-crisis did also throw a spanner in the Dutch-Indonesian project Regional Studies. In this blog the Indonesian research coordinators Yulianti and Abdul Wahid reflect on the impact of the Corona-crisis on their work. Next, their Dutch counterparts Ireen Hoogenboom and Martijn Eickhoff share some of their experiences.
How is the corona crisis affecting the researchers, now the archives are closed, and the planned conferences and seminars in the Netherlands and abroad have been cancelled for the time being? In the blog below, Azarja Harmanny describes the impact of these historic times on his own research.
How is the coronavirus crisis affecting researchers now that the archives have closed and conferences and seminars in the Netherlands and abroad have been cancelled for the time being? In the following blog, research assistant Maarten van der Bent describes the impact of these historical times on his research.
This autumn, Anne-Marie Visser decided to share her photo album and a few memories of her mother with Getuigen & Tijdgenoten (Witnesses & Contemporaries). In this blog post, she describes what it is like to receive certain information and not know some of the answers.
Anne Janse-Veen described her experiences as a 14-year-old girl in the Bersiap period for Getuigen & Tijdgenoten (Witnesses & Contemporaries). You can read more about them in the blog post below.
Koos-Jan de Jager has been a doctoral candidate at the Free University of Amsterdam, where he examines the role of religion in the Indonesian war, since September 2018. His work centres on the question what impact the war had on the religious beliefs of members of the Netherlands armed forces and their actions in the war. He wrote the following blog for Witnesses & Contemporaries
‘As if someone is knocking on that door...’
Between October 1945 and October 1946, the Sumobito sugar factory, close to the town of Sumobito between Jombang and Mojokerto in East Java, served as a refugee camp.
The project Witnesses & contemporaries has been running for two years now. This prompted Eveline Buchheim, one of the coordinators of this project, to write a personal reflection on the value of memories.
![Geïllustreerde atlas van de Bersiapkampen in Nederlands-Indië, 1945-1947 / Henk Beekhuis ... [et al. ; bew. kampplgr.: MaxZ, M.P.B. Ziellemans ; red.: Henk Beekhuis]](/sites/default/files/styles/teaserbeeld/public/2019-04/Afbeelding%20Blog%20Soemobito.jpg?h=5dcfa06e&itok=Vb9U4xb_)
