First published in 1982, this book about the choices of ordinary people in war sold more than 200,000 copies and inspired an Oscar-winning film. Now it has been republished with a new introduction
May 2, 2025 15:23
Harry Mulisch (1927-2010) was perhaps the most acclaimed modern Dutch writer. Born in Amsterdam, the son of an Austrian father and a Jewish mother, he was enormously prolific. The Assault was first published in 1982 and sold more than 200,000 copies when it first appeared in the Netherlands; it inspired a successful Oscar-winning film of the same name. It has now been republished by Serpent’s Tail with a new introduction by the acclaimed author Thomas Harding.
The Assault is the latest of a group of astonishing newly published novels set in occupied Europe: Belgium (33 Place Brugmann), the Netherlands (The Safekeep) and Germany (Once the Deed is Done), all about ordinary people during wartime and the choices they make or can’t make.
Mulisch was just 13 when the Germans occupied the Netherlands in 1940, almost the same age as Anton, the main character, at the start of the novel. Anton and his family live on the outskirts of Haarlem. His father is a clerk of the district court. They and their neighbours live quiet, ordinary lives until, one evening in January 1945, there is a “catastrophe”. Nothing in Anton’s life will ever be the same again.
This is how the novel unfolds. On the one hand, Anton and the people around him live uneventful lives. On the other hand, they live with the memories of what happened that night. How do people cope with such trauma and yet continue to live quiet, family lives, getting on with their jobs? And then every now and again they meet someone from the past and talk about what happened that night and try to make sense of it. Or they commit suicide.
Not everyone, of course, lives such peaceful lives. There is one Dutch family who collaborate with the Nazis and then there are those who serve in the Resistance, like the young woman Anton meets in a cell in a nearby police station on that extraordinary night.
The Assault is also a novel about time, moving forwards and backwards as Anton finds out a little more about what happened that night and why. It also twists and turns in interesting ways. Of course, Anton becomes an anaestheseologist.
What else could someone trying to cope with such lifelong pain ending up doing? Mulisch keeps playing these kinds of jokes with the reader. At one point he writes, “He [Anton] almost never thought” about the past. Except when he does. Constantly. More and more as the past recedes. Except that it doesn’t.
Late in the novel Anton, now middle-aged, sees someone from the Resistance being interviewed on television. “The whole thing was one big mess,” he says. “I really don’t want to hear any more about it.” Why does this hero say such a thing? Why does the novel become more and more bleak and melancholic?
Finally, there is one surprising absence. Where are the Jews? Where are the discussions about the Holocaust and the camps? And when there is a reference to Jews in the novel, just one of two, it completely changes everything we (and Anton) thought we knew about the story. No wonder writers like JM Coetzee and John Updike were such admirers of The Assault.
‘The Assault’ by Harry Mulisch
Serpent’s Tail