Page - 74 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

74 | Freek L. Bakker www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 63–77 provincial elections in Central Java and East Java in 1957. They had taken a sig- nificantly larger proportion of the vote, which led President Sukarno to suggest they be included in the national government.14 After these electoral advances communists repeatedly organised demonstrations and campaigns in which oth- er Indonesians were intimidated. Many non-communists believed it was only a matter of time before the communists would win a national election and as- sume power. The national election was repeatedly postponed. It was to have been held in 1960 and again in 1965, but it was not until 1971, so after the killings, that another national election took place in Indonesia. A SUBSTANTIAL DIFFERENCE Noting these parallels we now return to the significant divergence noted above. Anwar Congo spoke about the spirits of the dead who would return and give him nightmares, depriving him of a carefree life in a purified world. The Germans did not speak of the souls of the dead. I assume that this distinction has to do with the distinct German and Indonesian cultural and religious environments. But before I scrutinise this perception more thoroughly, we can note another difference. Das radikal Böse was based on letters the German soldiers wrote to their families and friends back home after they had carried out the murders, sometimes immediately after, but sometimes days or weeks later. The temporal distance between the killings and their reports and reflections on those killings was much smaller than in Indonesia. Joshua Oppenheimer held his interviews with Anwar Congo, Herman Koto and others involved in the Indonesian massa- cres in 2012, so 47 years after the coup d’état and 46 years after the end of the killings, which continued into 1966. How people look back differs according to whether the event on which they are reflecting took place recently or far longer ago. In both instances we learn that perpetrators are haunted, but the Germans speak about what they saw, the act of killing, the sense of pleasure experienced by some of them, but also a disgust that they murdered defenceless people. Nobody speaks about being haunted by the spirits of the dead, with the idea of a spirit living on after death evidently absent. As a convenient shorthand, let us call this the Western perspective. For Anwar Congo, and also for other Indone- sians, the souls of the dead are a bitter reality; they want revenge, haunt them and give them nightmares. The Western perspective is also known in Indonesia, with one of his friends advising Anwar Congo to visit a psychiatrist. Congo re- fuses. We face the difference between an Eastern (Indonesian) understanding of the cosmos and a Western (German) view of the universe. The Indonesian in- 14 Ricklefs 1981, 248.