In Memoriam: Harry Mulisch 1927-2010
Harry Mulisch, one of the greatest writers the Netherlands has produced and an international author of stature, died at his home in Amsterdam on Saturday 30 October. The Dutch Foundation For Literature mourns the loss of a great writer, a remarkable character and a literary friend.
Harry Mulisch was born in the Dutch city of Haarlem in 1927. His origins conceal the great tragedy of the twentieth century: ‘I am the Second World War,’ Mulisch said of himself. His father was Austro-Hungarian by birth, his mother a German-speaking Jew born in Antwerp.
During the war his father collaborated with the German oppressor and managed to keep his son and ex-wife out of the hands of the Gestapo. Mulisch grew up with his father and their housekeeper, Frieda. After the war his mother left for the United States. Mulisch never finished high school. ‘I knew too much,’ he once said. He was a true autodidact, acquiring an encyclopaedic knowledge of a broad range of disciplines, yet he had no qualms about bending his novelistic reality to suit his own ends. When an editor working on The Discovery of Heaven pointed out that his characters disembark at ‘Westerbork Station’, when in fact there is no station at Westerbork, he said there certainly was a station, it was there in the novel, which automatically made it true.
With the publication of Criminal Case 40/61 in 1962, a journalistic book about the 1961 trial in Israel of one of Hitler’s most important henchmen, Adolf Eichmann, it became clear that the Second World War was Mulisch’s greatest source of inspiration. The war is all-pervasive in the novels The Storyteller (1970) and The Assault (1982). The latter tells the story of a reprisal by the Germans for an attack by the Dutch resistance. It became his bestselling book, with 700,000 copies sold in the Netherlands and Belgium. Often included in school reading lists, it has been translated into twenty-nine languages.
In 1951 he submitted a manuscript entitled archibald strohalm for the Reina Prinsen Geerligs Prize for authors ‘under 24 years old’. He won, and the prize marked the definitive start of his career as an author. In the 1960s he became increasingly politically engaged. He demonstrated against the war in Vietnam and in 1969, along with others including Reinbert de Leeuw, Louis Andriessen and Hugo Claus, he wrote Reconstruction, an opera about Che Guevara. Mulisch supported President Fidel Castro of Cuba. In early 2010 he acknowledged on television that in his heart he still stood behind Castro.
In Two Women (1975), Mulisch showed himself to be the kind of writer who explores social themes. Two women begin a lesbian relationship together; one of them tries to fulfil the desire they both have for a child by entering into a relationship with the other’s ex. The major novel The Discovery of Heaven (1992) has been called his magnum opus, and indeed it seems to involve all the themes of his life and work: love, science, politics, friendship, the war, philosophy and art. It is the counterpart to his least known book, The Composition of the World (1980), in which he presents his philosophical world view.
Harry Mulisch has been honoured many times. He won the P.C. Hooft Prize in 1977 for his oeuvre as a whole, the Libris Prize for The Procedure (1999) and the Dutch Literature Prize in 1995. Fons Rademakers’ film of The Assault won an Oscar in 1986 and 2001 saw the release of the film The Discovery of Heaven, directed by Jeroen Krabbé.
Mulisch’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages. For a full list see below. Among his most important foreign publishers are Gallimard and Actes Sud in France, Carl Hanser Verlag in Germany, Penguin UK and Penguin US, and Tusquets in Spain. For years Mulisch was regularly named as a contender for the Nobel Prize. The French Ministry of Culture appointed him Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2001 and he received the Bundesverdienstkreuzes 1. Klasse from the German government in 2003. He also won the Italian international literary prize the Premio Flaiano in 2003 and the Premio Nonino in 2007.
In Germany Mulisch’s work has had a powerful influence on the way the country deals with its wartime past. Responses to his death have appeared all over the world. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that Harry Mulisch gave Dutch letters ‘a classic of world literature’ and in the New York Times he was honoured as ‘an enormously influential figure in the Netherlands and (…) abroad’. His books were often extremely well received in other countries. When The Discovery of Heaven appeared in English the American press drew parallels with Homer, Dante and Goethe. Mulisch liked to compare himself to Thomas Mann.
He frequently took part in festivals and literary events abroad, often at the invitation of the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, one of the forerunners of the Dutch Foundation For Literature. In Copenhagen he appeared in conversation with Jens Christian Grondahl, for example, in Budapest with Péter Esterházy and in London with the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. Harry Mulisch was a major name on the European literary stage.
Harry Mulisch leaves three children, his daughters Anna and Frieda from his marriage to Sjoerdje Woudenberg and his son Menzo, from his relationship with Kitty Saal.
The Dutch Foundation For Literature remembers Harry Mulisch as a great writer who meant an enormous amount to Dutch literature and to world literature and will continue to do so. He has had an enormous influence on many younger writers, who have taken his outlook on life and his literary insights to heart. He has also been of huge significance internationally. Foreign interest in Dutch literature would never have been what it is without the success of The Assault, The Discovery of Heaven and The Procedure. Harry Mulisch remains in our thoughts, and the Dutch Foundation For Literature will do its best to keep his work alive in Dutch and in many other languages.
By Maria Vlaar
More information
- Mulisch translated (translation database)
- Mulisch translated (translation database including anthologies)
- On the Dutch section of our website translators Philippe Noble, Gregor Seferens and Paul Vincent, and editors Cristoph Buchwald, Claus Clausen and Jean Mattern remember Mulisch. continue…