Hella Haasse, who had grown up in the Dutch East Indies, and at this time was working in the cabaret and theater business in Amsterdam, submitted the manuscript for Oeroeg[a] under the Indonesian pseudonym "Soeka toelis" (modern spelling: Suka tulis, "Like to write"); her name wasn't announced to the general public until after the novel was published,[1] selected by a panel of 19 anonymous judges.

The narrator grows up as the child of a white Dutch family on Java, with Oeroeg, a native young man; as high-school students, they live together in a boarding house.

[8] Initially, the novel was not wholly uncontroversial; according to Maier, its publication was a painful experience for a number of Dutch readers, especially those wedded to the idea of the Netherlands as a colonial power and those who had lost friends, family, and possessions during World War II and the period of unrest and "rebellion" which followed, one which prompted military intervention from the Dutch army and eventually led to the independence of Indonesia.

[10] Haasse went on to write another book focused on the Indonesian archipelago, Krassen op een rots (Scratches on a Rock; 1969), which detailed a trip to an independent Indonesia—particularly Java.

Directed by Hans Hylkema and with a screenplay by Jean Van de Velde, the film starred Rik Launspach, Jeroen Krabbe, Martin Schwab, Ivon Pelasula, and Jose Rizal Manua.

The movie, on the contrary, portrays the colonizer as tortured by guilt, and contains imagery of burned-down native villages reminiscent of the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War.

[13] On the other hand, Ario Sasongko from the Jakarta Arts Institute argues that Pattynama's analysis of the film can be doubted through the editing and cinematography, which "portrayed the burning villages merely as Johan's nightmare" and the characterization of Depoh, an Indonesian character, as having "servant attitudes".