Twenty years ago, the Belgian author Stefan Hertmans discovered that his house in Ghent had been the home of Willem Verhulst, a Flemish nationalist who collaborated with German occupiers during the second world war and joined the SS. The Ascent – a work of autofiction that chronicles Hertmans’s quest to find out more about Verhulst – draws on memoirs, diaries, official documents and interviews to imagine individual lives amid tumultuous historical events and explore family, nationalism and home.
Hertmans, whose novel War and Turpentine was longlisted for the Man Booker International prize in 2017, is haunted by the thought of what might have happened in his “accursed house”. He imagines Verhulst and his wife, Mientje, happily bringing up their small children there before growing apart, as Verhulst starts wearing a Nazi uniform and disappearing for days on mysterious assignments. When Germany invades, Mientje is uneasy about Verhulst’s lucrative salary at a moment when “most people in this neighbourhood can’t afford the salt in their soup”.
