In 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. "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. 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.
As he explains, this is all an accident of birth. "Both parents came from abroad. My father was an Austrian officer in the first world war. He was one of the occupiers of Belgium and France [in 1914]. In Antwerp he met my future grandfather, who was a German-Jewish banker working at the German bank. There was a little girl playing on the floor with a puppet - my mother. She was seven or eight years old. 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. My father went back to Vienna: hunger, no heating, nothing. He wrote to my mother's father, by now living in Amsterdam: 'Don't you have a job for me?' 'Oh yes, come on.' So he came to the Netherlands and then my mother grew up [they married in 1926], and when she was 19 years old, I was born, in 1927."
When the Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940, Mulisch's parents had been divorced for four years. "She had married this man who was 15 years older, with his traumas of the first world war, having nightmares, dreaming of Englishmen. So she went to Amsterdam, and I stayed with my father." The decision to let young Harry stay with his father, Karl, in sleepy Haarlem, "very rare for those days", probably saved his life, although the means of salvation compromised his father for ever. In the occupation, his mother was arrested and had to wear a star, and having a Jewish mother, of course, made Harry a potential victim, too. But his father had made friends in high places. "One day, I remember, a wonderful Mercedes, open-topped - Germans always rode in these open, wonderful cars - came into the street where we lived. In it was a driver and a general, a colleague of my father, from when he had been an Austrian officer. Now, after the Anschluss, he was a German general. At that moment my father should have said, 'Listen, general, I'm a Dutchman now and you are the enemy, and I can't receive you.' But on the contrary, he said, 'Come in' and all that."
Karl's German friend found him a job. "He became one of the directors of a so-called 'empty' Jewish bank. The Jews had fled, it had no directors. Only three-quarters of a year later, he became aware of what kind of a bank this was." The Lippmann-Rosenthal bank became the central repository for all looted Jewish funds in the Netherlands, including stocks, securities and later, even valuables, all of which had to be deposited there after successive Nazi decrees.
Again, his father was faced with a decision, and again, though later it would seem morally reprehensible, his decision saved Harry and his mother's lives. He stayed in the bank. Because his father knew "these criminals", Mulisch says, because, in fact, he worked with them, he was able to protect his son and get his ex-wife out of custody. "She would have died when she was 35 years old," Mulisch says. As it was, she survived the war, though all her relatives were murdered, and she emigrated to the United States, living to the age of 88. Harry's father, however, had to pay for his decisions. He went to jail for three years after the war.
Mulisch says that this extraordinary childhood experience, "between these two fires" of Jewish victim mother and collaborating father, has coloured his life and his work ever since. Mulisch's formal education ended during the war, when he left his secondary school, the Christelijk Lyceum, in 1944. He had already started writing, but says he never wanted to become a writer. "If somebody wants to become a writer, I know already he isn't one. I turned out to be a writer." He had ambitions to be a scientist but the stories kept coming, and in 1947, with his father still interned, his first story - written two years earlier when he was 18 - appeared in a weekly paper. Five years later he published his first novel, Archibald Strohalm. Siegfried is his 13th, and in between there have been dozens of collections of essays, short stories, poetry and memoirs.
Recognition "came slowly", he says. Nowadays, people stop him on the streets of Amsterdam, where he has lived for more than 40 years, "not from reading my books, but from seeing me on television". Onno Blom, a Dutch literary journalist who worked with Mulisch on a book to celebrate the author's 75th birthday in 2002, points out that "his debut won a prize - and set him off to a blistering start". Since then he has won all the big prizes a writer can win in the Netherlands, including the Libris Prize, the Dutch equivalent of the Booker. Material success has accompanied literary recognition. Mulisch lives and works in a canal-side house in the centre of Amsterdam. It is fairly nondescript from the outside, but his study and sitting room are those of a wealthy and comfortable author. His desk is festooned with pipe racks (Mulisch is often pictured smoking a pipe, and there are about 50 to choose from) and overlooked by bookcases containing, among other works, first editions and translations of his vast output. Occasionally, he will pull down a copy with a practised air to find a passage or make a point.
He has not always been so well off. "I've been very poor, of course, after the war, really poor: no heating, no money to buy a cup of coffee, nothing." He made a bit of money from writing theatre reviews ("horrible"), but he also found a patron. "I had a girlfriend who considered me a genius - she had good literary taste - and she helped me." In the Netherlands, Blom says, Mulisch once had a reputation as a womaniser. Even today, his situation is far from conventional. He married Sjoerdje Woudenberg, an artist, in 1971, the same year his first daughter, Anna, was born. His second, Frieda, was born in 1974. In 1989, however, he met Kitty Saal, and they soon began an affair. Though he is still married to Woudenberg he lives with Saal, the mother of his third child, Menzo, born in 1992, when Mulisch was 65. He remains on friendly terms with his wife, whom he sees almost every day.
Mulisch's first novel to be translated into English was The Stone Bridal Bed, (1962). It tells the story of the return of a former American air-force pilot to Dresden, the city he bombed during the war. The inspiration came when Mulisch visited the city for a conference on the German poet Heinrich Heine. He had been considering writing about a German war criminal, but the sight of Dresden in the 1950s gave him other ideas. "It was really flattened. In the centre it was completely..." - his English, mostly excellent, falters - " ...underground. You had cellars, but..." So he decided to write a book about an American war criminal. He knows that "you're only a war criminal if you lose the war, otherwise you're a war hero". In that book, however, he tried to describe what JM Coetzee described as "the peculiarly male pleasure in violation, a joy in destruction that is to be found as much among Homer's Greeks as among the American airmen who bombed Dresden". The occasion for the Homeric comparison is a moment in the novel when the former pilot sleeps with his East German guide. Mulisch explains: "I thought, this happened before, in The Iliad, you read about a man who is going to destroy a city, Troy, because of a woman, Helen. So there, the city and the woman are in a way the same. What's he after, the woman or the city? I got the idea that I'm not going to describe how those two are having a party in that bed, but instead I'll describe the bombardment in Homeric style."
The German war criminal would return, however, in unexpected fashion. Shortly after the publication of The Stone Bridal Bed it was reported that Adolf Eichmann had been arrested in Argentina. Instead of a novel, Mulisch decided to go to Jerusalem to witness the trial. His dispatches for a Dutch newspaper captured the theatre of the proceedings, but also followed a trail of mythological and literary forebears, from the Golem to Faust. The resulting book - published in Dutch as De zaak 40/61, is still not translated into English, though a French translation, L'Affaire 40/61, has just come out - sees Eichmann not as the embodiment of evil but just as a "policeman, and he did what all policemen do: they obey orders". Mulisch argues that if Eichmann had a propensity for evil, "when he went to the Argentine, he would have led the life of a criminal. He would have carried on killing and murdering. But he worked at the Mercedes-Benz factory, because he didn't get those kind of orders."
During the war, Mulisch says, he witnessed a micro-version of the same thing: Dutch policemen, rather than Germans, rounding up the Jews of Amsterdam. He was travelling on a tram when "all the people in the second carriage had to get into the first one, so the last wagon was empty. And there these policemen with the Jews stepped in. This was the first step on the route to the gas chambers in Poland - to a theatre, from there to Westerbork, the Dutch holding camp, from there to Poland. And I heard the driver of the tram say (I was standing next to him), 'These ugly Germans. How can they do this? These poor people, pulled out of their houses.' But in the meantime he was driving them. And if you had said, 'But you're part of that machine,' he would have said, 'I'm forced. I'm just a tram driver. I have a wife and children, and it's my job.' And no streetcar driver had a trial after the war, of course not. It would sound so silly, if they had. But why not? Eichmann never killed anybody. The only thing he did was organise transportations. This streetcar was one of them." After the war, he says, the Dutch "had the idea they were all in the Resistance".
Love, and a lesbian relationship, rather than war, were the subject of his 1975 novel, translated as Two Women in 1978 (and filmed as Twice a Woman, directed by George Sluizer, in 1981). But Mulisch's first real international success returned to the war years. The Assault was published in 1982 (translated 1985). It contributed to a national process of being more honest about the occupation, and the crimes and compromises it involved. It tells the story of Anton, a boy whose family are killed in reprisal by the Germans after the body of a Dutch Nazi police chief, killed by the Resistance, is dumped on their doorstep. The English critic and novelist Paul Binding, who has met Mulisch and has a passion for Dutch literature, describes The Assault as "superb". Mulisch is most successful, he argues, "when he is purely novelistic", and eschews the tendency towards what Binding calls "cerebral masturbation" that can characterise some of the later writing. The Assault, Mulisch contends, "is not so much a novel about the war as a story of how the war changed in people's minds after the war". The Dutch prime minister at the time, Ruud Lubbers, even sent the novel to former German chancellor Helmut Kohl to persuade him to give up pleas to free German war criminals imprisoned in the Netherlands. According to Mulisch's memoir, it worked.
The book seems to appeal especially to younger readers, for whom the war is at a greater distance. Blom says it "is still at the top of school reading lists, and is appreciated very much". Perhaps its story of a young man's experiences appeals in the same way as that of the Netherlands' most famous literary export, Anne Frank. Mulisch has admitted to avoiding her diary for years. This may have something to do with his interest in the after-effects of events. In The Assault, the deaths of Anton's family reverberate, despite his attempts to forget them, for 40 years. Frank's diary is a moment frozen in time, its power has to do "with reality, not with art".
The Assault was translated into 32 languages, and made into a successful Dutch film, which in 1987 won the Oscar for best foreign film. It was followed in English translation in 1989 by Last Call, a novel about an ageing actor asked to play another ageing actor, in a version of The Tempest. With its Shakespearean influence, and its overt echoes of Edgar Allan Poe, whose macabre atmosphere Mulisch has long cherished, Last Call might be expected to appeal most to Anglophone readers. Binding thinks Mulisch is "at his strongest when most concentrated", and this novel's focus on an old man's relationship with his sister and with his troubled past is certainly that.
Mulisch's own experiences of the theatre came not only as a critic but also in more idealistic circumstances, as the co-author, with the Flemish writer Hugo Claus, of the libretto for a communist-inflected version of Don Giovanni, Reconstructie (Reconstruction, with music by a collective of Dutch composers). Mulisch describes the experience of writing the opera as "very funny". The end-product sounds pretty funny too. In it, a plastic statue of Che Guevara 20 metres high is constructed by a group of workers; at the end it destroys the Don Juan figure, who has been raping not women but Latin American countries. "It wouldn't be possible to perform that thing now," Mulisch admits, "but in those days it had a function."
If the success of The Assault, particularly in the cinema, brought him to the attention of Anglophone circles, it was not until the publication of what can fairly be called his magnum opus, The Discovery of Heaven, in 1992 (translated into English in 1996) that Mulisch's international reputation was assured. The novel is an extraordinary combination of family saga, philosophical, historical and scientific discussion, and not a little conspiracy and downright melodrama. At its heart is the story of a friendship between Max, an astronomer, and Onno, a philologist. Max is in some ways a self-portrait, and the fate of his parents, the mother gassed during the war, the father executed after it, is in a sense what might have happened if Mulisch's parents had been less fortunate, or perhaps if his father had had greater scruples. Onno is modelled, Mulisch says, on a chess player called Donner. "I had a very intense intellectual friendship with this man. The way this Onno talks, his bombastic manner, that's as he talked. I mean I was writing as I heard him say things, and I was sure he would have said it in this way. So it is with everything. I ask myself often what's first, an idea, or something from reality, and I think an idea must be first." These two characters form a triangle with Ada, a musician who sleeps with both of them, and who bears a son, Quinten, a boy with a peculiar, God-given mission. The conceit at the heart of the novel is that although the events and characters are presented in a realistic and just about believable fashion, they are at the same time the exact plans of God.
Blom believes that in The Discovery of Heaven "everything that thrilled Mulisch in his life comes back in a mythical way. The book has an exciting structure and is written in a mature, crystal-clear style." John Updike described it as a meditation on "the persistence of trauma, the rapacity of eros, the fragility of our orderly schemes". Richard Todd, a lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, thinks that "the scope and daring of The Discovery of Heaven mark it out as a world book". Of course, non-Dutch-speaking readers rely on the translator, Paul Vincent, whose translations of Mulisch's recent works have been described variously as "dutiful" and, by JM Coetzee, as "good without being exemplary", but, as Todd argues, "fiction in Dutch doesn't have a major writer-translator partnership".
Mulisch seems untroubled about this aspect of his work. In Siegfried, the Mulisch figure reads from a German translation of his book and reflects that he "hadn't written a word of it himself, as it was a translation". It's a line Mulisch himself has used to English audiences. It betrays, perhaps, something of what Todd calls the "sense of pride in being a prophet in one's own language area, and yet caution when it comes to being transplanted out of it".
Another Dutch writer, Cees Nooteboom, seems far more concerned about translation. He has talked of spotting an error in a German draft of one of his books that turned a group of storks on a rooftop into ostriches. In the English paperback of The Discovery of Heaven, by contrast, mistakes pointed out by Todd and others at first publication are still in evidence. They can be as trivial as someone describing himself as a "cuckoo in the next", or as important as the figure for the number of Holocaust dead being put at 60 million instead of 6 million.
What matters to Mulisch more than such details is the enjoyment of readers. It seems puzzling, however, that a novel as difficult and ambitious as The Discovery of Heaven should have appealed so widely. One reason, Mulisch thinks, is that "the book is about a pact of God with mankind and the devil: to the Germans, this is Goethe, of course, and the Faust myth". His comparisons tend to be this ambitious, with Milton being invoked as an English literary exemplar, but perhaps he puts his finger on the book's popular appeal when he alludes to what one might call its more "conspiratorial" aspects. The Discovery of Heaven "did strange things to people", he says. He pulls out a box file full of letters about the novel, but the one he is looking for is right at the top. It is from a 17-year-old girl, who points out that if you assign numbers to letters of the alphabet, so that A=1 and Z=26, etc, then the three parents of the boy in the novel (no one knows which man is the father), Max, Ada and Onno, add up to the same number as the boy's name, Quinten. "I'm more proud of this than of any wonderful review." But was it intentional? "Of course not. But the idea to do this! Something has happened to you." Checking the sum later, it doesn't seem to add up but Mulisch's delight in the possibility of his fiction encoding unintentional equations is genuine enough.
The play of chance, of destiny and coincidence has always been part of Mulisch's way of working, and of viewing the world. Blom tells a typical Mulisch story about writing The Stone Bridal Bed. "Mulisch paused for a moment, went out for a cup of coffee in the nearby American Hotel. When he came back his ceiling had come down, cracked the table where he was writing, and left his room a ruin. When this happened, Mulisch said to me, 'I knew I was on the right track with this book. My room looked like Dresden.'" It is also this very quality that has put off other readers. The novelist and critic Philip Hensher found The Discovery of Heaven "a deeply frustrating novel... For a long stretch, it was a wonderful, natural, effortless family story, done very, very beautifully... But he seemed to feel that that wasn't enough, and it becomes a 'Euronovel', a frustratingly artificial absurd story, full of Gnostic wisdom and Knights Templar locked in a church at midnight." Binding believes that perhaps a British love of the empirical does get in the way of an appreciation of some of Mulisch's metaphysical journeys. His strengths, Hensher thinks, "are as a domestic observer, which is much more worthwhile, if less earth-shattering. He's the perfect example of somebody mistaking the strengths of his own talent."
In his next novel, The Procedure (1999), Mulisch attempted to combine a story about the construction of a Golem (in Jewish legend, an artificially created human being) in 16th-century Prague with a present-day equivalent, a scientist creating life from strands of DNA. The novel was perhaps too schematic to be wholly successful, but it gave Mulisch's critics something to latch on to in its description of the scientist waiting up for the announcement of the Nobel prizewinners, expecting the call from Stockholm. This was just the kind of thing that some people could imagine of the writer himself. He shrugs it off. "I struggled my whole life with the fact that people don't have a feeling for my self-irony. And then they have a problem with me. And if I were really like they think I am because I've written it down, then I wouldn't have written it down."
With Siegfried, he again portrays a self-confident, successful international writer. Suzanne Holtzer, his Dutch editor for 10 years, says he "enjoys playing that game". It is "part of his way of looking at the world. Very funny, very ironical." Mulisch enjoys the self-mythologising, and he even describes Rudolf, the character in question, "wearing the same suits" as he does. The love-child of Hitler and Eva Braun is at the centre of his latest story. Where did such an idea come from? "I thought there must be something good in him [Hitler] as well. Something of love." In fact, nothing of love does emerge from the novel, which is as pessimistic as ever about this moment of "total destruction".
For his part, the obsessive mining of this dark past has paradoxically created a happy existence. "I have done only those things I wanted to do," he says. He has no hobbies: "writing is my pleasure". That, and "three children, and the mother of my son", and "five or six interesting friends". He seems an extremely robust 76 years old (he survived stomach cancer in the early 1980s), and perhaps that, too, can be attributed to an act of will. "I have the feeling I have endless time. I think you must live as if you will never die. People say you must think each day about death, memento mori. And every book will be your last, and so on. No. Live as if you will never die."
Harry Mulisch - Life at a glance
Born: July 29, 1927.
Educated: 1939-44 Christelijk Lyceum, Haarlem.
Relationships: 1971 Married Sjoerdje Woudenberg (two daughters, Frieda '71, Anna '74); 1992- Kitty Saal (one son, Menzo '92).
Some novels: 1952 Archibald Strohalm; '59 The Stone Bridal Bed; '75 Two Women; '82 The Assault; '85 Last Call; '92 The Discovery of Heaven; '99 The Procedure; 2001 Siegfried.
Some poetry: 1973 Woorden, woorden, woorden; '78 What Poetry Is .
Stage: 1960 De knop; '69 Reconstructie (libretto with Hugo Claus); '72 Oidipous, Oidipous.
Some essays: 1962 De zaak 40/61; '80 De compositie van de wereld.
· Siegfried by Harry Mulisch, translated by Paul Vincent, is published by Viking at £16.99.