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A review by blackoxford
The Assault by Harry Mulisch
5.0
Unconditional Love Doesn’t Cut It
The Winter of 1944-45 was a national tragedy for The Netherlands. As the allied armies advanced through France and Belgium, the country, particularly the Northern provinces of Holland, were isolated behind the German lines. More as a matter of spite rather than strategy or even revenge, the Germans starved the Dutch population while they carried out massive oppression and retaliatory executions of civilians in response to the growing Resistance.
Anton, Mulisch’s young teenage protagonist, is a victim of this deprivation and violence. His parents and brother are assassinated, and his house in Haarlem burned to ashes because a collaborator is murdered on the street in front of it. Although he does not witness the killings and is reasonably kindly treated by the Dutch police and German Army officers, he is, of course, traumatised by his experience.
Mulisch wrote his book just at the time that the American medical profession was formulating its condition of PTSD for soldiers who had been involved in the American War in VietNam. Two of the key criteria for diagnosis of the condition are the intensely pointed avoidance of thought about the traumatic “stressor” events; and the equally intense reactions to even the most subtle reminders of these events in everyday life. Mulisch compares the condition to that of divorce, an extreme and sudden break in one’s life that cannot be confronted rationally.
In Mulisch’s account, it is not just Anton but also a very large part of the Dutch population that is simply unable to reveal much less discuss their agonising experiences in the final months of the war (W.G. Sebald’s analysis of the allied carpet bombing of Germany has a similar theme: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2895936078). Anton can’t bear to hear about the war, return to Haarlem, or acknowledge his own feelings of fear for years into adulthood. There is simply no one to talk with. Everything will pass, he believes, if he only forgets. The discontinuity in his existence is too extreme to cope with.
As with similar personal tragedies like rape, physical abuse, and intra-familial isolation, the victim cannot bear to report or even recognise the relevant events. The existential threat represented by this discontinuity - the obvious fragility of life, the arbitrary circumstances of survival, the superficiality of ‘civilisation’ and its justice - overwhelms any attempt to deal with it except by hiding it somewhere buried in the most inaccessible part of the mind. From which it emerges in any number of apparently self-destructive ways.
There are, of course, millions of Antons, with untold thousands being created every day through civilian as well as military violence, by domineering parents, law-makers, and corporate executives. These people have little awareness of the profound and lasting effects their actions have on those other than their immediate victims, or on themselves. Perhaps because they too have been subject to the same arbitrary violence and injustice such actions are taken as normal, perhaps even heroic.
Even more remarkable is that perpetrators are so often defended by those closest to them. One of the most grim comments by Anton after listening to the defence of the murdered collaborator during a chance meeting with his son is chilling in its implications: “How could anyone embroil himself in such a web of lies? Love was what caused it all—love, through thick and thin.” Yet it is at this moment that Anton starts his slow recovery. Obviously, despite its emotional depth, this is not a novel of sentiment and easy salvation.
Postscript: At the end of the book, in the centre of Amsterdam Anton is caught up in an enormous demonstration against nuclear arms. This was 1981 when I lived on the Herengracht. Although I wasn’t part of the demonstration, I did get caught up in its dispersal by the police in the evening. Having been let out of a restaurant behind whose shuttered entrance I had passed a couple of hours unaware of external events, I made a dash for home. Only to encounter a phalanx of riot police followed by a motorised water cannon moving toward me on the Speigelstraat. I was the only one on the street, but that mattered not at all to the green horde with its baton-banging clatter. They were doing a job and they clearly were going to finish it. I had the presence of mind to jump into a recessed house-entrance just as they reached me. They neither hesitated nor even looked my way as they trundled past in perfect formation. I must be having one of Anton’s post-traumatic moments.
The Winter of 1944-45 was a national tragedy for The Netherlands. As the allied armies advanced through France and Belgium, the country, particularly the Northern provinces of Holland, were isolated behind the German lines. More as a matter of spite rather than strategy or even revenge, the Germans starved the Dutch population while they carried out massive oppression and retaliatory executions of civilians in response to the growing Resistance.
Anton, Mulisch’s young teenage protagonist, is a victim of this deprivation and violence. His parents and brother are assassinated, and his house in Haarlem burned to ashes because a collaborator is murdered on the street in front of it. Although he does not witness the killings and is reasonably kindly treated by the Dutch police and German Army officers, he is, of course, traumatised by his experience.
Mulisch wrote his book just at the time that the American medical profession was formulating its condition of PTSD for soldiers who had been involved in the American War in VietNam. Two of the key criteria for diagnosis of the condition are the intensely pointed avoidance of thought about the traumatic “stressor” events; and the equally intense reactions to even the most subtle reminders of these events in everyday life. Mulisch compares the condition to that of divorce, an extreme and sudden break in one’s life that cannot be confronted rationally.
In Mulisch’s account, it is not just Anton but also a very large part of the Dutch population that is simply unable to reveal much less discuss their agonising experiences in the final months of the war (W.G. Sebald’s analysis of the allied carpet bombing of Germany has a similar theme: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2895936078). Anton can’t bear to hear about the war, return to Haarlem, or acknowledge his own feelings of fear for years into adulthood. There is simply no one to talk with. Everything will pass, he believes, if he only forgets. The discontinuity in his existence is too extreme to cope with.
As with similar personal tragedies like rape, physical abuse, and intra-familial isolation, the victim cannot bear to report or even recognise the relevant events. The existential threat represented by this discontinuity - the obvious fragility of life, the arbitrary circumstances of survival, the superficiality of ‘civilisation’ and its justice - overwhelms any attempt to deal with it except by hiding it somewhere buried in the most inaccessible part of the mind. From which it emerges in any number of apparently self-destructive ways.
There are, of course, millions of Antons, with untold thousands being created every day through civilian as well as military violence, by domineering parents, law-makers, and corporate executives. These people have little awareness of the profound and lasting effects their actions have on those other than their immediate victims, or on themselves. Perhaps because they too have been subject to the same arbitrary violence and injustice such actions are taken as normal, perhaps even heroic.
Even more remarkable is that perpetrators are so often defended by those closest to them. One of the most grim comments by Anton after listening to the defence of the murdered collaborator during a chance meeting with his son is chilling in its implications: “How could anyone embroil himself in such a web of lies? Love was what caused it all—love, through thick and thin.” Yet it is at this moment that Anton starts his slow recovery. Obviously, despite its emotional depth, this is not a novel of sentiment and easy salvation.
Postscript: At the end of the book, in the centre of Amsterdam Anton is caught up in an enormous demonstration against nuclear arms. This was 1981 when I lived on the Herengracht. Although I wasn’t part of the demonstration, I did get caught up in its dispersal by the police in the evening. Having been let out of a restaurant behind whose shuttered entrance I had passed a couple of hours unaware of external events, I made a dash for home. Only to encounter a phalanx of riot police followed by a motorised water cannon moving toward me on the Speigelstraat. I was the only one on the street, but that mattered not at all to the green horde with its baton-banging clatter. They were doing a job and they clearly were going to finish it. I had the presence of mind to jump into a recessed house-entrance just as they reached me. They neither hesitated nor even looked my way as they trundled past in perfect formation. I must be having one of Anton’s post-traumatic moments.