![]() ![]() ![]() My father went back to Vienna: hunger, no heating, nothing. They had to flee Belgium in 1918 and there was only one country they could flee to - the Netherlands, because it was neutral in the first world war. There was a little girl playing on the floor with a puppet - my mother. In Antwerp he met my future grandfather, who was a German-Jewish banker working at the German bank. ![]() He was one of the occupiers of Belgium and France. ![]() My father was an Austrian officer in the first world war. Yet that war was much closer for him, just around the corner in time." Mulisch has said "I am the second world war", and his oeuvre, only a fraction of which is translated into English, returns again and again to those six years, to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and to the Holocaust.Īs he explains, this is all an accident of birth. "What was further away: the bloody business in Yugoslavia or the vast exterminations in Auschwitz? Forty-five minutes from Vienna and you were in the Balkans, but the 55 years to the second world war could never be bridged. I n Siegfried, Harry Mulisch's new novel, a Dutch writer very much like the author muses on his obsession with the second world war while on a book tour in Austria. ![]()
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