In 2000, the author Stefan Hertmans was disturbed to discover that the house in Ghent he had lived in for more than 20 years and restored from dilapidation had once been home to a Flemish collaborator with the SS, Willem Verhulst. On the pink and brown marble mantelpiece which Hertmans had become so fond of Verhulst had kept a bust of Hitler.
The fact that Hertmans would use this as a springboard to write a work of auto-fiction seems inevitable, given that his International Man Booker longlisted novel War and Turpentine (2016) and his later novel The Convert (2019), have their roots respectively in notebooks belonging to his grandfather and a historical essay about the village in Provence that Hertmans now lives in.
In The Ascent, which has been translated from the Dutch by David McKay, Hertmans draws on a memoir written by Verhulst’s historian son, but uses it not unquestioningly as he asks: ‘How much reality can a person bear, when the subject is his own father?’
Verhulst’s early life is compelling.
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