One of the most remarkable features of Harry Mulisch’s The Assault, first published in Dutch in 1982 and now reissued in English by Serpent’s Tail, is the way it captures how trauma settles into the crevices of ordinary life, freezing memory like a photograph in a burned-out room. The fire, we learn, came from a flamethrower, courtesy of the Wehrmacht. The image is what remains, internalised, warped, flickering. Mulisch, whose own biography mirrored the contradictions of occupied Holland (his father collaborated with the Nazis to save his Jewish mother), was perhaps uniquely placed to write the novel that many in the Netherlands still regard as the definitive literary reckoning with the war.
The Assault is not so much a historical novel as a novel about the incompleteness of history. It proceeds episodically, through five chapters that unfold over four decades—1945, 1952, 1956, 1966, and 1981—each functioning as a discrete but interconnected return to the scene of the crime. Mulisch’s structure is precise, almost geometric: every new decade becomes an excavation site, each encounter revealing more of the hidden architecture of guilt, responsibility, and silence. History in The Assault is not linear but layered, like geological strata or repressed memory. What happened in Haarlem that night is never stable; it is reinterpreted, misremembered, ideologised. The truth shifts because the world does.
In 1952, Anton is studying medicine. He attends a sunny afternoon gathering in Haarlem, hosted by two well-meaning student friends. Over wine and post-lunch cigarettes, the talk turns to geopolitics. Indonesia is mentioned—briefly, in passing, already receding from memory. The focus is on Korea, which one of the guests insists is a righteous conflict. “In Korea, it’s different,” she says. “It’s about freedom.” Anton says little. The Dutch imperial war in Indonesia of summary executions, torture, colonial reprisal—is allowed no moral weight. Mulisch doesn’t belabour the point; he lets the asymmetry speak for itself. Anton leaves the party early. For the first time, he feels compelled to return to the scene of the crime. As he walks through Haarlem, something underfoot catches his eye: the herringbone pattern of the brick pavement. He had never really noticed it as a child, but now it seems suddenly familiar, as though memory has risen through the ground. He turns the corner onto his old street. The site of his childhood home is vacant, banal in its emptiness. “He had thought he could forget it, but it had never left.” Mulisch places the moment with care: convivial liberalism, rhetorical righteousness, and then the return of the repressed.
In 1956, Anton is living near the headquarters of the Dutch Communist Party. A violent protest breaks out, a precursor to the Cold War street battles that would define the coming decades. In the confusion, he finds himself face to face with a familiar figure: the son of Fake Ploeg. Once a classmate, now embittered and volatile, Ploeg Jr confronts Anton with a twisted version of history. “Your friends murdered my father,” he says. “They called it justice, but it was murder.” He insists his father wasn’t a real Nazi, just a policeman doing his job. He only joined the NSB when the war was already lost, because he believed Stalin was worse. And wasn’t he right, the son implies, about communism, about the camps, about everything?
It is not just denial, it is revisionism. Mulisch lets the son speak long enough to show how fascism returns through rhetorical sleight-of-hand: not by denying the past, but by reframing it as a kind of prophetic realism. The myth of the ‘reluctant fascist’ is carefully laid out, only to be dismantled ten years later. In 1966, Cor Takes tells Anton who Fake Ploeg really was: the man with the barbed-wire whip, the man who shoved a hosepipe into a prisoner’s rectum and turned on the water until he vomited through his nose. “He enjoyed it,” Takes says. The polite mask of ‘law and order’ is ripped away. Ploeg wasn’t a tragic nationalist, he was the violence of the state made flesh. What Mulisch shows us is that fascism is not a position, it is a practice.
In 1966, Anton travels with his wife and daughter to a small village north of Amsterdam for the funeral of a wartime figure linked to the resistance. The gathering is more than a commemoration, it’s a reunion of those who fought. There he meets Cor Takes, one of the men who participated in the assassination of Ploeg. What follows is a long conversation, first in the café, then in Takes’s flat, about guilt, consequence, and historical necessity. Takes, gruff and unapologetic, admits his role and describes the thinking behind it. Anton, who has spent much of the novel resisting memory, begins to absorb the full scale of what happened. In this episode, the novel’s central narrative tension resolves not through confession, but through recontextualisation. “It was like pulling back a curtain,” Anton reflects, “only to discover that the room beyond was already part of the house.” The meaning of that night is not disclosed, it was there all along.
Continuities of Fire
The clearest political assertion in The Assault, and one of its most urgent, comes during this 1966 conversation with Takes. It’s here that Anton, for the first time, breaks from his reflexive detachment and draws a connection between his private trauma and wider historical violence:
“Could you swear, your hand in the fire, that at this very moment someone’s house somewhere isn’t being set on fire by a flamethrower? In Vietnam, for instance?”
It’s not a rhetorical flourish. It collapses the moral distinction between Nazi atrocity and imperial counterinsurgency. Anton, the liberal survivor, finally recognises that the violence which shaped his life is not unique, but structural. The flames that consumed his home in Haarlem are the same ones incinerating villages in Southeast Asia. Mulisch draws the line plainly—from Wehrmacht to US Army. The novel’s most damning insight is that fascism was not defeated; it was absorbed. Imperialism is not a break from occupation, but its continuation by other means.
In 1981, Anton finds himself, somewhat reluctantly, at the centre of an anti-nuclear demonstration in Amsterdam. He’s made a deal with his old university friend Paul, now a dentist and the same man who hosted the 1952 student party. If Anton comes to the march, Paul will squeeze him in for emergency dental work. It’s a pragmatic arrangement, but symbolically rich: the story loops back to where it began, from postwar student dinner table to the mass politics of the 1980s. The march is peaceful, euphoric, multigenerational. Among the demonstrators is Anton’s daughter, Sandra, and his younger son Peter. Here, finally, he begins to feel the faint tremors of political solidarity—fragile, belated, but real. It is not a resolution, and certainly not redemption. But it is a moment of integration: the private story, the national myth, and the global threat collapse into one another. The final image is not of Anton alone in memory, but walking forward, shoulder to shoulder with others, into a world still on fire.
Anton, who becomes an anaesthetist, is anaesthetised himself. Emotionally frozen, politically disengaged, he embodies the post-war Dutch consensus: pacified, decent, but ultimately evasive. What he cannot admit—what the novel itself dances around until it can’t—is that liberation was not the end of history but the beginning of its forgetting. The Dutch Resistance, like its French counterpart, became post-war national myth; collaboration, quietly folded into bureaucracy. The neighbour who dragged Ploeg’s corpse onto Anton’s doorstep disappears from the narrative, but not from Anton’s life. No tribunal awaits him. Instead, we get the half-life of coffee mornings and bourgeois routine. Mulisch isn’t interested in heroes and villains; he is interested in the sediment of violence that sits under every foundation. “The war was not over,” Anton thinks. “It was not something in the past. It was something in people.”
There are echoes, unmistakably, of Sebald and Kundera, the turning bicycle wheel, the repeated image of snow, the way light falls in remembered rooms. One memory haunts the narrative, playing over and over: “In the middle of the deserted street… lay a bicycle with its upended front wheel still turning.”
Mulisch differs from the cold postmodernists in allowing warmth, even redemption, to seep in. In the novel’s most luminous scene, a young Anton is imprisoned overnight in a dark cell and comforted by an anonymous woman, possibly a communist, certainly a resistance fighter, whose body and presence imprint themselves onto him like a watermark. The human connection is immediate, tactile, political. She tells him, with the clarity only possible from those who have truly chosen sides: “You must never forget that it was the Krauts who burned down your house. Whoever did it, did it, and not anyone else.”
What Mulisch gives us here is not just moral instruction, but political position. The assault is not only physical; it is interpretive.
For a British reader today, The Assault reads like a meditation on a Europe that is both distant and eerily familiar. In Starmerite Britain—quiet, technocratic, forgetful—the spectres of the past are managed, not exorcised. The far right is no longer jackbooted; it sits on the Supreme Court, runs migration policy, or edits The Spectator. What Mulisch shows us is how fascism can be a residue, a stain that remains even after the street has been cleared and the bullet casings swept away. The complicity of the bourgeoisie is not in action, but in inaction, in allowing history to become myth.
One might object that Mulisch’s novel does not centre the resistance, and this is true. But neither does it sentimentalise liberal innocence. The choices made that night in Haarlem, who moved the body, who said nothing, who threw the key away, are not given neat arcs or pious lessons. They remain what they were: ambiguous, fraught, imperfect. But the novel insists, with extraordinary moral clarity, that this ambiguity is not an excuse. Evil may be banal, as Arendt said, but it leaves a mark. Mulisch, who believed in a kind of historical dialectic, ends the novel not with closure, but with illumination. Not truth, perhaps, but understanding.
It is Cor Takes who puts it most plainly: “He who doesn’t play the game doesn’t know how it is played.” Not a proverb, but a verdict, on Anton, on liberal detachment, on history itself. Mulisch puts us in the game, in its coldest hour, and asks us not to forget—not the crime, not the complicity, and not the silence. “It was not the case that he was lying here,” Peter Steenwijk says, trying to move Ploeg’s body from in front of their house, “but now it is the case.” In that sentence, the entire structure of historical contingency is contained. What is most remarkable is how The Assault, over forty years after its first publication, feels more like a dispatch from the present than a report from the past. In the ruins of Anton’s childhood home, we see not a resolved past, but a history that remains unfinished, unspoken, unaccounted for, and still shaping the present. Mulisch said he was not a novelist of the Second World War, he was that war, this book tells those stories.
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