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‘I didn’t so much “experience? the war: I am the Second World War,’ Mulisch wrote in the autobiographical Mijn getijdenboek (My Book of Hours, 1975). Het stenen bruidsbed (The Stone Bridal Bed, 1959) is regarded as the best work from his early period. In addition to novels, Mulisch has written plays, poetry, political pieces and philosophical studies. He is one of the most illustrious authors in the Netherlands today. His work is held in high regard, as witness the numerous awards he has received, including the P.C. Hooft Prize (1977), the Constantijn Huygens Prize (1977) and the Dutch Literature Prize (Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, 1995). Mulisch gained international fame with De ontdekking van de hemel (The Discovery of Heaven, 1992). The American press compared him with Homer, Dante and Goethe.

Harry Mulisch

The Second World War has strongly informed Mulisch’s thinking, and his writing. We need only think of the Eichmann trial in De zaak 40/61 (Criminal Case 40/61, 1962), the German occupation in The Assault (1985) and, more recently, the figure of Hitler’s son in Siegfried (2003). The War is ever-present.The Stone Bridal Bed is no exception. In this impressive novel, the war takes the form of a classic tragedy, complete with Homeric songs chronicling the epic struggle.Thirteen years after the war Norman Corinth, a dentist from Baltimore, revisits the German city of Dresden, destroyed by a firestorm triggered by Allied bombing. Corinth had taken part in that bombing as an aerial gunner and didn’t come through unscathed; his face bears traces of the burns he suffered when his plane was shot down, injuries which Russian doctors lacked the resources to treat properly.

A curious, wry and thoughtful novel. (…) Mulisch is a fine writer. A beautifully done book, evidence that the future for the novel of ideas is both considerable and unlike its past.

Mulisch ingeniously links the taking of the city with the taking of a woman – Hella – with whom Corinth has a brief affair. She is the embodiment of the Helen whose abduction led to the Trojan War and who, like Troy, is destroyed and abandoned. Lust and the desire for conquest lead Corinth to the bridal bed, which – once the fire of passion has cooled – turns into a stone-cold tomb.

The Press on Siegfried:
Few if any other living novelists could make such potentially intractable material so thrillingly dynamic and provocative. One of the world’s great writers continues his steady march toward a Nobel Prize.

Book

Asset

Assets

Het stenen bruidsbed

Harry Mulisch is a philosophical author who does not shun the great issues of life. This is evident in his magnum opus 'De ontdekking van de hemel' (The Discovery of Heaven, 1992), which centres on the ungodliness of the world due to progressive technology, and the disastrous consequences for humanity. Although his basic premise is pessimistic, Mulisch offers a way out: for those who perceive the world as essentially in harmony, and who prefer the freedom of art to the yoke of technology, there is still hope.

The Stone Bridal Bed

Mulisch modestly calls his book a report, but it is much more than that: a personal and most disturbing essay on the Nazi mass murder of European Jewry as brought out in the Eichmann trial. Mulisch’s stake is high. He does not confine himself to the case alone, but takes a leap into speculating on the destructive drive in contemporary art, which found its unintended culmination in ‘Auschwitz’. Not that Mulisch blames the artists; he believes there is a deep and fundamental gulf between art and reality.The artist’s destructive imagination was more a form of resistance to the ‘new element whose approach they viewed with alarm’. That new element was embodied in Eichmann, whom Mulisch considers ‘the symbol of Progress’. Unlike the ‘mythical hero Hitler’ and his faithful disciple Himmler, Eichmann may not even have been a convinced anti-Semite. He simply carried out orders, regardless of the moral consequences; he was an anonymous technocrat, ‘not so much a criminal as a man who stopped at nothing.’Mulisch typifies him as ‘the smallest of men’, behind whom modern technology loomed; this is an idea that also plays a crucial role in Mulisch’s novels. The dangers of modern technology, which at their most banal were made manifest in the person of Eichmann, force us to examine and reflect upon ourselves. For Mulisch, Eichmann is not some inhuman devil, but the person we all see in our mirrors. The question of morality that this raises is what Mulisch tries to answer with imagination and sensitivity in De zaak 40/61. The essay has lost none of its topicality.

Non-Fiction

De zaak 40-61: een reportage

In her preface to 'Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil' (1963), Hannah Arendt tells us that the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch is one of the few to have shared her views of the character of Adolf Eichmann, the organiser of the Holocaust. In 1961, Mulisch went to Jerusalem to report on the Eichmann trial for a Dutch weekly. His articles were collected a year later and published as 'De zaak 40/61'.

Criminal Case 40/61

After her childless marriage comes to an end, art historian Laura falls in love with a young woman called Sylvia. She has a volatile personality. After a while she disappears but is discovered having an affair with Laura’s ex-husband. She pretends to be in love with him, but when she becomes pregnant she returns to Laura. The man, furious at being manipulated, kills Sylvia and her unborn child, and Laura loses her beloved a second time.Why does the novel have such an impact? In the years prior to its publication, Mulisch wrote mainly non-fiction and experimental work. Readers were surprised by this classic tale of love, jealousy, and murder. Since the novel is written from Laura’s perspective, the reader identifies with her sense of abandonment, her happiness when Sylvia returns and her ultimate anguish.Mulisch explores themes that would return in his later work. For him, lesbian love is problematic because it is infertile; when the laws of nature are violated, destiny takes charge. To what extent can humans intervene? With modern technology, we have almost become capable of creating life. We can artificially postpone death, clone living beings and manipulate the reproductive process. Along with Mulisch’s successful novels of the 1980s and 1990s, this remains a compelling book. In 2008 it was distributed by libraries as part of a national reading campaign. More than a million copies were printed and the book became the subject of widespread debate, bringing it back more to attention.More by Mulisch<ul><li>De diamant (The Diamond, 1954). The main character is the largest diamond in the world, which brings death and destruction to all who possess it, east and west, even after it is broken in two. The story ends with the destruction of the diamond itself.</li><li>Het zwarte licht (The Black Light, 1956). A day in the life of lonely carillonneur Maurits Akelei, who decides to celebrate his birthday by treating the world to heavenly music. By the end of his party, an ecstatic mob marched through the flooded streets toward its doom.</li><li>Hoogste tijd (Last Call, 1985). An ageing actor from a renowned theatrical family makes his comeback. His return to the big city and his infatuation with a young actress slowly but surely lead to his downfall.</li></ul>

A moving love story, but at the same time a literary page-turner – a term more commonly applied to thrillers. No reader will remain unmoved by the chilling conclusion.

Fiction

Classic

Twee vrouwen

In 1975 Harry Mulisch published a novel that stunned the critics with the simplicity of its storyline and the unexpected theme of lesbian love, which until then had been almost exclusively the domain of female writers. But 'Twee vrouwen' is above all a psychological novel.

Two Women

The ‘Hunger Winter’ of January 1945. Twelve-year-old Anton Steenwijk is playing a board game with his brother Peter in the darkened back room of their house in Haarlem one evening. Suddenly they hear six shots. When they look out of the window, they see a policeman lying in the street, next to his bicycle. It turns out to be a man who was collaborating with the Nazis, and he has not survived the attack. That same night, the Germans set the family’s house on fire. Anton is locked up in a dark cell at a police station. When he is released, he discovers that his brother and parents have been executed.In the decades after the war, Anton Steenwijk gradually finds out what happened that night. At political riots in 1956, he meets the son of the murdered policeman, who presents him with the following argument: Was it the fascists’ fault that the family’s house went up in flames and Anton’s parents died? Or was it the fault of the resistance fighters, who knew the Germans would be sure to take revenge?

A detective mystery crafted like a Greek tragedy, of a clarity and a profundity that make it exhilarating to the intellect.

Exactly ten years later, Anton talks to the embittered resistance man who killed the collaborator. But the truth of the situation only becomes clear to Anton when he meets the daughter of his former neighbours. She tells him that the policeman was shot dead in front of her family’s house but that her father wanted to save his lizards, which represented ‘eternity’ to him. They therefore moved the body so that it was found in front of the Steenwijks’ house and not in front of the house of the neighbours on the other side – as there were Jews in hiding there.This finally resolves the mystery, a quest that has lasted for decades, but Mulisch allows the moral ambiguity of the war to remain. At the same time, this is also a book about loss and mourning: after all those years, Anton remains numb with grief – and so it is significant that he chooses the profession of anaesthetist. Nothing can change the course of events, not even coming to understand them: ‘Was everyone both guilty and not guilty? Was guilt innocent, and innocence guilty?’

Mr. Mulisch brings exceptional skill and imagination to his task […] You can hardly help being reminded of the clarity of Dutch paintings; characters are established with deft economy.

We may read 'The Assault' in part as a thriller. But it is a political thriller that removes the post-war scar tissue protecting society. And it is a psychological thriller probing the moral devastation between neighbors, fellow students, husbands and wives that is still a fading factor, 40 years after the event, in Dutch life.’

De aanslag

As the only child of a Jewish mother and an Austrian banker who worked with the Nazis, Harry Mulisch brought together two moral extremes in his biography. It is no coincidence that the war features in his work time and again. De Aanslag (The Assault), published in 1982, is his most successful war novel. This book is a thriller and a moral-philosophical novel in one.

The Assault

More Harry Mulisch

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