ESSAIS

The Assault by Harry Mulisch

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One of the most common themes in modern storytelling is that as we get older, a certain episode from our youth will gather around itself, like a pearl growing in its shell, greater and greater significance, until one day we realize that this episode has determined our life’s course, that all along it contained the seeds of our fate. The episode itself is usually something that during its passing seemed inconsequential. For Proust’s narrator in In Search of Lost Time, it is the peal of the bell on a garden gate outside his summer home in Combray. For Charles Foster Kane, it is a romp in the snow on a sled named Rosebud.

But what if the episode was this: One night, out of the blue, a Nazi collaborator is shot dead on the street outside your home, and your innocent family is wiped out by his cohorts in retribution. This is the literal assault of Harry Mulisch’s book, which begins at the tail end of World War II, in the town of Haarlem in occupied Holland. The only survivor is twelve-year-old Anton Steenwijk, who, as he grows older, attempts to put the episode behind him for good, to live a normal life, with job, wife, and children. Unlike Proust’s narrator, who finds knowledge and purpose in the fog of the past, Anton finds only incomprehensible pain, and so keeps his face forward, consciously determined to transcend the moment. But the past is the most persistent kind of visitor and the episode barges into the present over and again during Anton’s life, forcing him to examine it, to question it, and to finally solve the mystery of what happened that night.

In the aftermath of traumatic events fiction can only offer up the palest of lights to guide us, illuminating small patches of dust and ash but piercing nothing. The horrors of reality supercede the horrors we can imagine, and it is no coincidence then that we resist fictional accounts of recent traumatic events like 9/11, not only because those works seemed too audacious, too eager to stake a personal claim on that universal experience, but because our own memories from that day, and the images of a plane striking a building, are far more powerful and moving. It is why some of the most memorable works of literature rising from the Nazi era are not fictive, but actual artifacts of history, testimonies from a mad age, like the Diary of Anne Frank or Elie Wiesel’s Night.

Of course, with the passage of time, a new relationship emerges between the individual and the event, and thus sixty years after World War II, when the minutiae of Nazi activity has been collected and displayed in textbooks and museums, a new type of literature also emerges, one that no longer dumbly displays open wounds, but looks underneath the scabs and seeks to explain some persistent, interior damage. As W.G. Sebald, perhaps the best example of modern Holocaust literature, writes in Austerlitz, “Our concern with history…is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.” The images he refers to are the ones we are familiar with, and are no longer shocked by; the emaciated prisoners at Auschwitz for one. For Sebald, the Holocaust, and the lives that passed through it, are episodes that have been obscured, their significance hidden, not only as an effect of time’s passing, but because we have placed too strenuous an emphasis on history, and used it, perhaps unconsciously, as a barrier to protect us from its horrors. It is in this gap between history and reality, this canvas of darkness, where fiction smears its brush.

But if we are to fictionalize history’s horrors, what form or style should it take? Shall the Nazi officer be a Hollywood caricature, as Ian Buruma writes in Wages of Guilt, “the thin, sinister type, the torturer with a monocle, the one who always said: ‘Ve have vays of making you talk.’”? Should we divide the oppressors and victims into cats and mice as Art Spiegelman does in the graphic novel Maus? Or should we simply bludgeon the audience with historically based atrocity after atrocity, as Spielberg does in Schindler’s List? The following passage is from the beginning of The Assault, when the Nazis storm the Steenwijks’ house:

“But already the door was being broken down and slammed against the wall. Anton heard the mirror shatter, the one with the two carved elephants over the little side table with the twisted legs. Suddenly the hall and rooms were filled with armed men in helmets, wrapped in ice-cold air, all much too large for his mother and father’s house. Already it was no longer theirs. Blinded by a lantern, Anton lifted one arm to his eyes. From beneath it he could see the shiny badge of the Field Police, and hanging from a belt, the elongated container of a gas mask, and boots caked with snow.”

What is most significant in this passage is its cramped perspective. The hall and rooms are instantaneously filled to the brim. From Anton’s view, that is, a child’s view, we see only helmets, a shiny badge, the container, and the boots. Everything else is eliminated by the light from the lantern. The lack of details on the one hand, and the intense eminence of three or four striking details on the other, is the stuff of uneasy dreams, a style of storytelling most closely associated with Kafka. From the first page of his The Trial:

“At once there was a knock at the door and a man entered whom he had never seen before in the house. He was slim and yet well knit, he wore a closely fitting black suit furnished with all sorts of pleats, pockets, buckles, and buttons, as well as a belt, like a tourist’s outfit, and in consequence looked eminently practical, though one could not quite tell what actual purpose it served.”

The heart of the dream-narrative is in these details, the buckles and buttons, and not, say, in the man’s face, which we do not see. The dreamy atmosphere is also sharpened by the helplessness and bewilderment of Anton and Kafka’s Joseph K., as unwanted strangers beset them in their private sanctuaries. However, while The Trial in its entirety is a wild absurd nightmare, The Assault is a depiction of reality—in this case, a nightmare in itself. As Anton wonders while the Nazis set fire to his house, “Was it believable, this thing happening here?” (Emphasis added.)

While the child’s perspective enables Mulisch to capture the absurd essence of that period, a time when cause and effect lose their logical relationship, the bulk of the story is told from Anton’s perspective as a man struggling with his past. The prose becomes more reflective, matching the complacency of the post-war period, but is just as quickly paced, efficient, and devastating, as here, when Anton returns to Haarlem for the first time since the assault, after many years in Amsterdam:

“The farmhands’ cottages, the little farms, the mill, the meadows; nothing had changed. The clouds had vanished, the cows grazed peacefully in the evening sun. Beyond the horizon, Amsterdam, which he now knew better than Haarlem, but only in the way one knows someone else’s face better than one’s own.”

This is the joy of reading The Assault. There is a magnificent tension in that final sentence, but it doesn’t bulge like an overpacked suitcase; it is powerful, yet lithe and graceful. The reader encounters over and again metaphors as tightly drawn as this one, cinching into one instant the past and the present, the place and the individual, the external and the internal. We realize that Anton’s stroll through Haarlem is not only a reluctant sojourn into the past, but a questioning of the self that he has long avoided. Haarlem and Anton become intertwined, like strands of DNA.

But to take “joy” from any literature associated with the war is problematic for Mulisch, just as it is futile for Anton to expect he can live a normal life. The following scene is of the Steenwijk family before the assault occurs. Peter, Anton’s older brother, has just completed his homework, a translation of a passage from The Iliad, and shown it to his father, Steenwijk.

“‘Just as when rivers, swollen with rain and melting snow, streaming down from the mountains to a valley basin and welling up out of abundant springs gather in their hollow beds—and far away in the mountain the shepherd hears their muffled roar—so sounded the shouting and painful struggle of the soldiers engaged in hand-to-hand battle.’

‘How beautiful this is,’ said Steenwijk, leaning back and taking off his glasses.

‘Sure, great,’ said Peter. ‘Specially after I’ve been working on it an hour and a half, that lousy sentence.’

‘It’s worth a day’s work. Look at the way he evokes nature, but only obliquely, in comparison. Did you notice? What one remembers are not the fighting soldiers but the image of nature—and that goes on existing. The battle has vanished, but the rivers are still there, one can still hear them, and then one becomes, oneself, that shepherd. It’s as if he wanted to say that all of existence is a metaphor for another reality, and that the whole point is to grasp that other reality.’

‘Then the other reality must be the War,’ said Peter.

Steenwijk pretended not to have heard.’”

Just as Anton throughout his life returns to the traumatic episode that haunts him, Mulisch is saying here that literature, too, has changed, and must continually return to the war, that massive assault on European life. What is more real, or unreal, than the war? As Sebald writes in Austerlitz, the survivor is like a raccoon, “washing the same piece of apple over and again, as if it hoped that all this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the unreal world in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own.”

For Mulisch, who wrote The Assault in the 1980s, as well as Sebald, writing in the 1990s and 2000s, the Nazi era is impossible to forget; the characters in their books feel its crushing weight upon them at every instant. But at the same time it is not quite possible, in the truest sense, to remember it either. If in some sense history has failed us in this regard, fiction also finds itself running into insurmountable walls—the horror and incomprehensibility of man’s actions. It is as if both these writers have summoned up all their considerable powers to arrive at the brink of understanding, and from there can go no further. As Mulisch writes in the prologue to The Assault, describing Anton as a boy watching the boats in a canal:

“The motorboats were different. Pitching, their prows would tear the water into a V shape that spread until it reached both sides of the canal. There the water would suddenly begin to lap up and down, even though the boat was already far away. Then the waves bounced back and formed an inverted V, which interfered with the original V, reached the opposite shore transformed, and bounced back again—until all across the water a complicated braiding of ripples developed which went on changing for several minutes, then finally smoothed out.

Each time, Anton tried to figure out exactly how this happened, but each time the pattern became so complex that he could no longer follow it.”

—RS

ESSAIS