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Post-war writer is Holland’s conscience
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BY: Ben Naparstek Freelance Writer
Son of a Jewish mother and gentile father writes about moral ambiguities
Harry Mulisch, Holland’s leading post-war writer, turned 80 last month. The event was cause for nationwide celebration in Holland, where Mulisch is looked to as a national conscience for a society troubled by its history of Nazi occupation.
But Mulisch says he does not feel Dutch. “I was born in Holland, but in a way Holland was never born in me,” he muses, pointing out that his Austrian father and Jewish mother were foreigners.
Interviewed in his canal-side Amsterdam apartment, Mulisch looks a decade younger than his eight decades. Wearing a pink-and-white-striped shirt and white loafers, he sports an elegant set of black-and-silver bracelets. Although supremely at ease with his importance, he surprises with flashes of boyish ebullience. “I have a theory that everybody has an absolute age which he will always have. My absolute age is 17.”
Mulisch is uniquely placed to probe the moral ambiguities imposed by history, which he writes about in his own work. His mother’s entire family was exterminated by Hitler, while his father was a gentile who saved his wife and son (Harry) by working for the Nazis. The elder Mulisch was a director of the bank where Holland’s Jews were forced to deposit their assets before facing deportation. His mother was incarcerated in 1943, but her husband’s access to power assured her release three days later. Mulisch’s unusual parentage has elsewhere led him to declare: “I didn’t so much experience the war; I am the Second World War.”
Mulisch recalls how once during the war, at the cinema, the lights came on to reveal Nazis surrounding the auditorium. All men whose identity cards showed them to have three or more Jewish grandparents were arrested, while those with one Jewish grandparent were sent to work in German munitions factories.
But Mulisch, as a half-Jew, was free. “Two Jewish grandparents meant that you were not Jewish enough to be murdered, but you were too Jewish to be allowed to work in the German factories.”
The author’s formal education was aborted in 1944 when he decided not to risk attending school any longer. Although originally set on a career in science, he turned to writing at age 18, a few months after the war’s end, when his first effort at penning a short story was published in a newspaper. With his father serving three years in prison for his service to fascism, Mulisch continued writing to earn enough money to pay for two meals a day.
At age 23, his first novel, Archibald Strohalm, won the Rein Geerlings Prize for young writers and was published to high praise. Money was scarce in his twenties, but he found himself a patron: “A girlfriend, who had a job, thought that I was a genius n very clever girl! n and I lived on her more or less. I was very poor, but after the war everybody was poor.”
Mulisch is best known for two books: The Assault (1982), a compact, intense thriller that probes the decades-long reverberations of a political assassination in Nazi-occupied Holland, and The Discovery of Heaven (1992), a 700-page saga of divine intervention, in which Mulisch incorporates characteristically exhaustive displays of his encyclopedic learning, on topics ranging from astronomy, philology and theology to architecture.
Sometimes misreported as believing that the The Discovery of Heaven is his best work, Mulisch likens asking an author to choose among his or her books to the malicious question of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice: “You may not ask a mother which of her children they love most,” he says.
The Assault tracks 35 years in the life of Anton, an anesthetist, whose innocent family was gunned down by the SS in reprisal for the murder of a collaborationist police officer in 1945.
The novel was made into a film that won the 1987 Oscar in the foreign language category. Mulisch admires the film but comments that no one has described it as an improvement on the book, calling that “the worst thing that could happen to me.”
The novel’s tension reaches an apogee when Anton confronts the ex-underground member who indirectly caused his family’s slaughter. What interested him, he says, “was the difference between guilt and responsibility.”
Dutch writing is far less internationally famous than Dutch painting; even Mulisch has seen only one-third of his work translated into English.
A sculptor rather than a reader, Mulisch hasn’t read a novel for two decades. While enthusing about his close friend of five decades, fellow Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, he admits unabashedly that he isn’t familiar with Nooteboom’s books.
Mulisch reads only nonfiction that forms research for his novels. He gestures toward the walls of his capacious, book-lined study n here, books about theology used for The Discovery of Heaven; there, tomes about Nazism that he drew on for his 1962 essay on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, “Criminal Case 4061.”
His report on the trial advanced a theory of Eichmann’s ordinariness similar to Hannah Arendt’s study of “the banality of evil” in Eichmann in Jerusalem.
“My book was first,” says Mulisch, noting that Arendt cites his work approvingly. He revisits the question of evil in his most recent novel, Siegfried (2001), centering on Rudolf Herter, an aged and self-important Dutch novelist, famous for his 1,000-page opus The Invention of Love.
During a publicity jaunt, Herter is inspired to tackle Hitler, when he tells an interviewer: “He’s been examined from all sides. All those so-called explanations have simply made him more invisible. Perhaps fiction is the net that he can be caught in.”
Siegfried imagines that Hitler had a son, and then considers his reaction to discovering that the child is 1/34 part Jewish.
After attempting to draw the interview to a premature close, Mulisch is reengaged when asked about his collection of pipes. There are over 80 displayed around his desk. Photographs often show Mulisch with a pipe, but he quit five years ago.
He speaks proudly of his nomination for this year’s Man Booker International Award for an author’s body of work, speculating about the envy of other Dutch writers. “It’s a small country, but this smallness is also in the Dutchmen themselves. If there’s suddenly somebody who is a really big man n let’s say, Spinoza n he’s thrown out.”
To flag his birthday, Mulisch’s Dutch publisher commissioned six novellas from noted Dutch authors, taking Mulisch’s novels as their departure points. It’s an unlikely homage to a writer whose exuberantly inventive, philosophical works depart from the understated realism of most Dutch literary fiction. “Dutch writers and painters are naturalists, describing normal life. That tradition is not mine,” he insists.
As he looks forward to a 1,000-strong birthday reception and the array of media profiles, public literary forums, and book publications welcoming him into his ninth decade, Mulisch surely knows that he’s exaggerating.
Harry Mulisch, Holland’s leading post-war writer, turned 80 last month. The event was cause for nationwide celebration in Holland, where Mulisch is looked to as a national conscience for a society troubled by its history of Nazi occupation.
But Mulisch says he does not feel Dutch. “I was born in Holland, but in a way Holland was never born in me,” he muses, pointing out that his Austrian father and Jewish mother were foreigners.
Interviewed in his canal-side Amsterdam apartment, Mulisch looks a decade younger than his eight decades. Wearing a pink-and-white-striped shirt and white loafers, he sports an elegant set of black-and-silver bracelets. Although supremely at ease with his importance, he surprises with flashes of boyish ebullience. “I have a theory that everybody has an absolute age which he will always have. My absolute age is 17.”
Mulisch is uniquely placed to probe the moral ambiguities imposed by history, which he writes about in his own work. His mother’s entire family was exterminated by Hitler, while his father was a gentile who saved his wife and son (Harry) by working for the Nazis. The elder Mulisch was a director of the bank where Holland’s Jews were forced to deposit their assets before facing deportation. His mother was incarcerated in 1943, but her husband’s access to power assured her release three days later. Mulisch’s unusual parentage has elsewhere led him to declare: “I didn’t so much experience the war; I am the Second World War.”
Mulisch recalls how once during the war, at the cinema, the lights came on to reveal Nazis surrounding the auditorium. All men whose identity cards showed them to have three or more Jewish grandparents were arrested, while those with one Jewish grandparent were sent to work in German munitions factories.
But Mulisch, as a half-Jew, was free. “Two Jewish grandparents meant that you were not Jewish enough to be murdered, but you were too Jewish to be allowed to work in the German factories.”
The author’s formal education was aborted in 1944 when he decided not to risk attending school any longer. Although originally set on a career in science, he turned to writing at age 18, a few months after the war’s end, when his first effort at penning a short story was published in a newspaper. With his father serving three years in prison for his service to fascism, Mulisch continued writing to earn enough money to pay for two meals a day.
At age 23, his first novel, Archibald Strohalm, won the Rein Geerlings Prize for young writers and was published to high praise. Money was scarce in his twenties, but he found himself a patron: “A girlfriend, who had a job, thought that I was a genius n very clever girl! n and I lived on her more or less. I was very poor, but after the war everybody was poor.”
Mulisch is best known for two books: The Assault (1982), a compact, intense thriller that probes the decades-long reverberations of a political assassination in Nazi-occupied Holland, and The Discovery of Heaven (1992), a 700-page saga of divine intervention, in which Mulisch incorporates characteristically exhaustive displays of his encyclopedic learning, on topics ranging from astronomy, philology and theology to architecture.
Sometimes misreported as believing that the The Discovery of Heaven is his best work, Mulisch likens asking an author to choose among his or her books to the malicious question of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice: “You may not ask a mother which of her children they love most,” he says.
The Assault tracks 35 years in the life of Anton, an anesthetist, whose innocent family was gunned down by the SS in reprisal for the murder of a collaborationist police officer in 1945.
The novel was made into a film that won the 1987 Oscar in the foreign language category. Mulisch admires the film but comments that no one has described it as an improvement on the book, calling that “the worst thing that could happen to me.”
The novel’s tension reaches an apogee when Anton confronts the ex-underground member who indirectly caused his family’s slaughter. What interested him, he says, “was the difference between guilt and responsibility.”
Dutch writing is far less internationally famous than Dutch painting; even Mulisch has seen only one-third of his work translated into English.
A sculptor rather than a reader, Mulisch hasn’t read a novel for two decades. While enthusing about his close friend of five decades, fellow Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, he admits unabashedly that he isn’t familiar with Nooteboom’s books.
Mulisch reads only nonfiction that forms research for his novels. He gestures toward the walls of his capacious, book-lined study n here, books about theology used for The Discovery of Heaven; there, tomes about Nazism that he drew on for his 1962 essay on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, “Criminal Case 4061.”
His report on the trial advanced a theory of Eichmann’s ordinariness similar to Hannah Arendt’s study of “the banality of evil” in Eichmann in Jerusalem.
“My book was first,” says Mulisch, noting that Arendt cites his work approvingly. He revisits the question of evil in his most recent novel, Siegfried (2001), centering on Rudolf Herter, an aged and self-important Dutch novelist, famous for his 1,000-page opus The Invention of Love.
During a publicity jaunt, Herter is inspired to tackle Hitler, when he tells an interviewer: “He’s been examined from all sides. All those so-called explanations have simply made him more invisible. Perhaps fiction is the net that he can be caught in.”
Siegfried imagines that Hitler had a son, and then considers his reaction to discovering that the child is 1/34 part Jewish.
After attempting to draw the interview to a premature close, Mulisch is reengaged when asked about his collection of pipes. There are over 80 displayed around his desk. Photographs often show Mulisch with a pipe, but he quit five years ago.
He speaks proudly of his nomination for this year’s Man Booker International Award for an author’s body of work, speculating about the envy of other Dutch writers. “It’s a small country, but this smallness is also in the Dutchmen themselves. If there’s suddenly somebody who is a really big man n let’s say, Spinoza n he’s thrown out.”
To flag his birthday, Mulisch’s Dutch publisher commissioned six novellas from noted Dutch authors, taking Mulisch’s novels as their departure points. It’s an unlikely homage to a writer whose exuberantly inventive, philosophical works depart from the understated realism of most Dutch literary fiction. “Dutch writers and painters are naturalists, describing normal life. That tradition is not mine,” he insists.
As he looks forward to a 1,000-strong birthday reception and the array of media profiles, public literary forums, and book publications welcoming him into his ninth decade, Mulisch surely knows that he’s exaggerating.
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