Remembering and Forgetting Indonesia’s Madiun Affair: Personal Narratives, Political Transitions, and Historiography, 1948–2008

Abstract

The new intellectual climate in post–New Order Indonesia has shed light on the role of personal memory in uncovering forgotten aspects of Indonesia’s national past. One individual who has been placed under the spotlight is Sumarsono (b. 1921), one of the few surviving eyewitnesses of the Madiun Affair, an armed conflict between the Indonesian Communist Party and the Republican government in 1948. This article examines and evaluates Sumarsono’s narratives of Madiun between 1949 and 2008, and in doing so, offers a fresh analysis of the historiography of this critical turning point in the last years of the Indonesian Revolution (1945–49).