The Assault

In the last cold, hungry months of World War II, a Nazi collaborator in Haarlem is assassinated as he rides along a quiet street at night on his bicycle. In retaliation, the Nazis murder a group of hostages and burn down the home of an innocent family. Twelve-year-old Anton is spared, but is so traumatized that he represses his emotions and memories of the night and of his family. Four times over the next 36 years, Anton is confronted with people from his past, and slowly the bigger picture of what happened that night becomes clear.

This is a brilliant book that covers so much ground in only 185 pages. Childhood trauma plays out in so many ways. For Anton, his lack of control at that pivotal moment develops into a life of passivity. He show more drifts along until he bumps into someone from his past who jostles his memories and causes a flareup of emotion. This tension between action and inaction also plays out on a larger scale with collaborators, resistance fighters, and bystanders; those who engage with politics and those who abstain; surgeons who cut and anesthesiologists who numb the pain. It's a book about history and a country struggling with how to treat collaborators and resistance fighters years and decades after the war's end. But it's also about one incident and how interconnected all the players are in that single night's drama. And it asks some big questions about innocence and guilt, justice, and whether acts done with the foreknowledge of fallout carry responsibility for the unintended damage. Engrossing and thought-provoking, it's a book that can be considered from many different angles, all of them multifaceted. show less

In January 1945, a few months before the end of the war, a Dutch Nazi police officer is assassinated by the Resistance as he cycles home from work. The attack sets of a chain of tragic events in which young Anton Steenwijk and his family are caught up.

Mulisch looks at the repercussions of the attack through a series of "episodes" from the next 36 years of Anton's life. He explores how extreme situations challenge our ideas of guilt and responsibility, and how we make ethical choices under pressure. When can we accept the responsibility of causing harm to someone if we know it will prevent a worse harm elsewhere?

Mulisch also has his fun with the irony that Anton, notionally the innocent victim, in practice suffers far less from the show more effects of the incident than any of the other people involved, who all for different reasons have feelings of guilt towards him.

Anton is a bit of an uncomfortable protagonist -- he has something of Camus's Meursault about him, and it surely isn't accidental that Mulisch makes him an anaesthetist, a man who earns his living by suppressing other people's pain. show less

This is a wonderful short novel about the absurdity of notions of guilt vs innocence, especially in times of war. Anton is twelve years old, just trying to survive WWII with his parents and his older brother, when a police officer is gunned down in the street near their house. After the neighbors drag the corpse to the walk in front of Anton's family's house, Anton's parents and brother are murdered in retaliation. The novel explores the role this trauma plays in the rest of Anton's life, and we see the parallels between political and personal paths as they are determined by the vagaries of circumstance. The novel loses half a star for its too many far-fetched coincidences that enable Anton's unfolding consciousness, but the novelist show more can be forgiven for utilizing these devices in order to touch the reader as he does. In the end, the layers of paradox are simply stunning. show less

Right away, I am struck by the imagery of The Assault. The detail with which Mulisch describes people and places is extraordinary. The year is 1945 in occupied Holland. Twelve year old Anton Steenwijk's whole world changes the night a Nazi collaborator is murdered and the body moved to the Steenwijk's front yard. Despite the war being nearly over, just months away really, Holland is still very much under the thumb of the Germans. Retaliation is inevitable and Anton's life is forever changed. The Assault follows Anton through adulthood and the cold reality that no matter how he lives his life he can never escape his past. The Why haunts him. Each chapter is an episode, relating back to the assault. In the second episode, as a 19 year old show more medical student he attends a party in his hometown. He hasn't been back since that fateful night. In episode three the year is 1956 and Anton is 23 years old and married. He runs into a man from his past with tragic stories to tell of his own. By the fourth episode he has passed his final exams to become an anesthesiologist. He attends a funeral and meets yet another man from his past. Each year he becomes more successful and grounded in his present life, but the past continues to circle him until the final episode. By 1981 Anton is 48 years old and has remarried. His second wife gives him a son. The Why of his past becomes an ever widening circle of reason. Explanations expose the answers to all his questions but do they soothe his agonized memory? show less

When I was going through my husbands books he once bought for Dutch class in high school, all considered must-read Dutch 'classics' (some are too new I think to be considered classics) I noticed that a lot deal with World War II, either during or the aftermath. I never really enjoyed books about war, because the horrors hit pretty close to home. My grandparents lived through this, for them this wasn't fiction, it was cold, hard, reality. However, the reason these books are considered classics, and are nearly mandatory reading for all high school students in The Netherlands is because they help us understand what war was like for average people. And that the war wasn't over on May 5th 1945 for most of them. Now my opinion is that it's show more good to learn about that period in history, to understand more about our country, and our family too.
'De aanslag' by Harry Mulisch is one of those books. Anton Steenwijk lives with his parents and brother on the outskirts of Haarlem. One night in January 1945 they are playing a board-game in the kitchen, cold and hungry but together. They hear shots outside and see a body, that of Fake Ploeg, a policeman and NSB member. And then they see their neighbors moving the body from in front of their house, to in front of the Steenwijk's house. Anton's brother Peter goes outside to move the body away from their house, but then the Germans arrive. Peter flees. Anton and his parents are forced outside. His parents are taken away and their house is torched and burns to the ground. Anton is taken to the police-station and ends up at his aunt and uncle's house in Amsterdam.
The rest of the book tells the story of how Anton deals with this event in the rest of his life. In several episodes he meets people who all were connected to the attack, such as the son of Fake Ploeg, one of the resistance fighters involved in the assassination and the neighbors. Because of these encounters he slowly comes to terms with his own feelings, and the feeling of those around him. For example, it takes him a while to realize that his daughter, born after the war, really has a different way of looking at that time than he does.
I really enjoyed this book, for as far as you can enjoy a book about such a horrible and tragic event, based on reality. The book helps the reader empathize with those who survived the war, and to realize that every choice made has consequences for others. When I started I could not put it down, and read the book in one sitting. Five out of five stars. show less

The complete review's Review:

Five episodes from Anton Steenwijk's life are described in this novel, five stations of his life: from 1945, 1952, 1956, 1966, and 1981. It is the first that is the most significant, describing the assault of the novel's title.
Twelve year old Anton lives with his parents and his brother in Haarlem, near Amsterdam. The war is almost at an end, but occupied Holland still suffers great hardship -- there is hardly enough food to eat, the schools are closed in the winter because they can not be heated. One January evening, "in the silence that was Holland then, six shots suddenly rang out." Fake Ploeg, "Chief Inspector of Police, the greatest murderer and traitor in Haarlem" has been shot as he rode his show more bicycle by. The Steenwijk's neighbors rush out and drag the body, which had fallen in front of their house, in front of the Steenwijk's house. Everyone knows the Germans will retaliate. Peter, Anton's brother runs out to move the body elsewhere, but it is too late. The Germans arrive, Peter flees, the Steenwijks are rounded up, their house immediately burned to the ground. Anton is taken away from the scene.
Anton is not treated harshly, the police do not know what to do with him. He winds up in Amsterdam, where an uncle is called to pick him up the next day.
Anton's parents and his brother were killed, though this is only discovered after the war is finally over. Anton is raised by his aunt and uncle. The assault is part of indelible past, but he can not directly confront it. In the second episode, in 1952, he finally ventures back to Haarlm to the scene of the crime. In 1956, during anticommunist demonstrations he runs into Fake Ploeg Jr., the son of the murdered collaborator and a former classmate of Anton's. Ploeg's life was also turned upside down by the events of that evening; he never finished school and now works as repair man. In their conversation Ploeg argues that his father was as innocent as Steenwijk's parents, that his own loss was as great as Anton's, suggesting a different measure of guilt and innocence.
Anton becomes an anaesthesiologist, and he marries. At a funeral in 1966 he meets a man who was involved in the assault on Ploeg, and again questions of guilt and innocence are raised. The assassin, a member of the Dutch Resistance, acknowledges that they knew the Germans would retaliate, that innocents would die as a result of the attack, but he argues that he could only be held responsible for those deaths he actually caused.
Finally, in 1981, Anton runs into one of the neighbors who had moved Ploeg's body in front of the Steenwijk house that night, learning for the first time why they had done this -- and why they had chosen this (and not another) neighboring house.
Told against the backdrop of shifting Dutch post-war society, centered around significant points in that history -- the reaction to the events in Budapest in 1956, the release of Willy Lages (head of the Gestapo in Holland), anti-nuclear protests in 1981 -- Mulisch paints a canvas of the difficulties of Dutch society in coming to terms with the events of the war. There are no easy answers for Mulisch, no simple blame to assign, even where it first appears there might be. The hand of fate lurks strongly here, but Mulisch has a subtle touch with it.
Very well written, The Assault is a morality play for our complex times, a far cry from most simplistic war literature. The difficulty in determining and judging right and wrong is superbly described here.
An important, and very good, book. Highly recommended. show less

I will quote for you the blurb:

“It is the winter of 1945, the last dark days of the war in occupied Holland. A Nazi collaborator, infamous for his cruelty, is assassinated as he rides home on his bicycle. The Germans retaliate by slaughtering an innocent family: only the youngest son, twelve-year-old Anton Steenwijk, survives.

The Assault traces the complex repercussions of this nightmarish event on Anton's life. Determined to forget, he opts for a carefully normal existence—a prudent marriage, a successful career, and colorless passivity. But the past keeps breaking through, in relentless memories and in chance encounters with the other actors in the drama, until Anton finally learns what really happened that night in 1945, and show more why.”

Once again, this novel's magic lies in the author's handling of the narrator. Published in 1985, I have no idea why we didn't read this after reading all those heavy holocaust novels, perhaps because in this novel, there is no easy discussion in the classrooms. But because of the large room of thought this novel creates, I feel it is all the more important.

When I say The Assault is though-provoking, I am freely invoking that cliché. Perhaps you know how deeply personal The Assault was for me as it dealt with things that German children must cope with on their own, guilt, the past, ignorance, excuses, avoidance, et cetera. I'd never inspected my coping methods as acutely as when confronted in spectacular luminosity the way in which Anton avoids the past his entire life. But like the Greeks, he is always facing it.

The Assault reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day its quiet narrator who reflects on events typical of the second world war, but there the similarities end. Had this been eligible, The Assault would have won the Booker prize, but what are awards anyway? Where Remains had been affable in it's avoidance, there is no pretension about what Mulisch and Anton conspire to do. Anton refuses to remember, forced down 'memory-lane' while it is his subconscious that lures him into not turning away the unwanted guest, yearning to be fulfilled.

A reader might be tempted to pity Anton from the blurb, as one freely did after reading Remains, but pity or hate the butler, Mulisch does not bring us through these moments, titled 'episodes', to make us feel sorry. Mulisch, in actuality, feels sorry for us, the readers. But he does not pose questions of morality to us with apology. These are things we all must face in our lives, unless we are like that aloof butler traveling the countryside.

This novel isn't cynical, nor is it hopeful in the way The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherril is. The heart races as the events in Anton's life come to a head, but we do not pity him, not because he is unsympathetic and 'merely' the child of fate, but because Mulisch has written a concise novel that does not have room for misplaced tears. We mourn the lost child, the one whom Anton has forgotten, who died along with the rest of his family. Perhaps because Anton has been indifferent for so long, that when he finally concludes this history and looks to other memories, we only feel immense satisfaction.

I am letting myself imagine, now that the book is shut, that Anton has begun to come to his own conclusions about the many questions that Harry Mulisch poses, as I must now attempt to do. But further, that Anton changes his life, going home and finally climbs up into the cockpit, and finally opens up to the person that he once was.

While I will not answer any of the questions posed within, dealing with our history, the morality of causalities, the innocence of the guilty, I am curious about your own thoughts. The tome is not very long, and it is a fabulous piece of literature, important for many reasons, and I encourage you to read it, if not immediately buy it. Once you have, come back and let me know your thoughts. I gladly welcome discussion in the comments.

185pp. Random House. 1985. show less