The Ascent
A House Can Have Many Secrets
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
In this revealing and poignant story, Stefan Hertmans uncovers haunting details about the previous owner of his house and the crime he committed as a member of the Nazi police.
In 1979 Stefan Hertmans became obsessed with a rundown townhouse in Ghent. The previous owners were mentioned only in passing during the acquisition, and it wasn’t until the new millennium, long after he had sold the house, that he came across a memoir by the owner’s son Adriaan Verhulst, a distinguished history professor and a former teacher of Hertmans’, which revealed that his father was a former SS officer.
Hertmans finds he is profoundly haunted by images of the family as ghostly presences in the rooms he had once known so well, he begins a journey of discovery—not to tell the story of Adriaan’s father, but rather the story of the house and the people who lived in it and passed through it. Archives, interviews with relatives and personal documents help him imagine the world of this house as they reveal not only a marital drama, but also a connection between past visitors to the house and important figures in the culture and politics of Flanders now.
A stunning and immersive reimagining of a family in a historical moment of great upheaval confirms Hertmans’ always brilliant melding of fiction and nonfiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Flemish Belgian writer Hertmans (The Convert) delivers a thoughtful and unflinching narrative in which he imagines the life of his Ghent home's previous owner, who was an SS officer. Hertmans purchased the mildew-covered house as a young man in 1979. In 2000, he discovered it was formerly occupied by Willem Verhulst and his family. Recreating the lives of the Verhulst family during the grisly period of Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1945 and beyond, Hertmans chronicles how Willem becomes a high-ranking Nazi informant, traces his exploits as a Flemish nationalist rabble rouser after WWII, and explores his romantic attachments—particularly to his Jewish first wife, Elsa, who died in 1926, and with whom he requested to be buried. The most fascinating character is Mientje, Verhulst's second wife and the mother of his children, who despises the SS, but loves her husband, despite his affair with devoted Nazi Griet, whom he marries after Mientje's death. Hertmans adds nuance by drawing on interviews with Verhulst's daughters Letta and Suzanne, now in their 80s, and the memoirs of Verhulst's son, Adriaan, who was Hertmans's history professor in the 1970s. Images of Elsa's death certificate and other documents, along with excerpts from various letters and journals, convey the depth of the author's immersion. In Hertmans's hands, the dusty rooms of history come alive.
