A CASE STUDY: FAMILY DYNAMICS

Before I proceed to discuss the variety of texts published in the Netherlands in the 1980s which engage the memories and histories of the children of the war, I begin with a detailed and deliberate discussion of the novel The Assault, a text which offers opportunities to identify and illustrate many of the issues central to the other texts which contribute to the debate about memory and the history of the children of the war. The detailed analysis of this one representative text will function as a benchmark for more abbreviated treatments of other novels in subsequent chapters, and will permit a careful delineation of the function which language inhabits in mediating the memory of World War II, the Holocaust, and the occupation of the Netherlands in Dutch literature.

This novel has been exceptionally successful. One reason for its popularity is identifiable and particularly instructive as a starting point for this study. The Assault resonated with much of the Dutch reading public because it may be the quintessential story of the Dutch child who survived the occupation. Mulisch's “achievement” (if one wishes to call it that) is two-fold: He has told a story which incorporates many or most of the elements which belong to the cultural store of collected memories of the “war” as experienced, or rather, remembered, by the “average” Dutch person, and – more significantly – he has succeeded in convincingly portraying the child (the novel's protagonist Anton Steenwijk) of a family of bystanders as a war victim. It is worthy of note that The Assault does not mention the (Dutch) Jewish experience of the occupation or the Holocaust; although the secret at the very heart of the novel is certainly connected to that experience, it accounts for a very small fraction of the entire novel. Rather, this text is dedicated to the experience of the ethnically Dutch gentile population who had no direct active involvement in the war or the occupation on either a military, governmental or resistance level. Because of this fact, The Assault paints the image of the suffering of this child without having to deal with comparative issues such as the calculus of suffering often encountered in post-war life and discussions of the past.