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”.
A memorable scene, in which Verhulst accidentally shoots the plaster of paris bust of Hitler on his mantelpiece, epitomises Hertmans’s depiction of a narcissistic man who is both dangerous and pathetic, full of patriotic delusions that would be laughable if they didn’t have deadly consequences, and prone to waving guns around while drinking schnapps.
Verhulst condemns his compatriots to concentration camps as casually as he has extramarital affairs. Decades later, his son Adriaan, who became a respected historian, cannot confront some of his father’s crimes, leading Hertmans to ask: “How much reality can a person bear, when the subject is his own father?”
After the war Verhulst languishes in prison unrepentant, writing doggerel and fantasies in his diary, while outside, Europe lies in ruins under an apocalyptic “ashen sky”. Hertmans, in David McKay’s lucid translation from the Dutch, illustrates his text with photographs, inviting comparison with WG Sebald. The Ascent lacks the originality and weight of Austerlitz, but Hertmans’s hybrid of history and fiction is nevertheless a powerful and humane reminder that the horrors of the past century are inexhaustibly fascinating and reverberate today.
• The Ascent by Stefan Hertmans, translated by David McKay, is published by Harvill Secker (£20) in the UK and by Text ($32.99) in Australia in January 2023 . To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
