MULISH, HARRY KURT VICTOR

(1927– )

Writer. Mulish is among the most widely read postwar authors of the Netherlands. World War II is an important theme in his work, which can be ex plained by the fact that his father collaborated with the Nazis, while his mother was a Jew. His novel Het stenen bruidsbed [The Stone Bridal Bed, 1959], for example, deals with the Dresden bombard ment in 1945, and in Siegfried(2001), he tries to fathom Adolf Hitler. Mulish’s socialist sympathies—he visited Cuban leader Fidel Castro many times and sympathized with the German Democratic Republic — became clear in his Bericht aan de rattenkoning [Message to the Rats’King, 1966], an essay about the Provo revolts in Amsterdam. His novels Twee vrouwen [Two Women, 1975], De aanslag [The As sault, 1982], and De ontdekking van de hemel [The Discovery of Heaven, 1992] were filmed in 1981 (as Twice as a Woman), 1986, and 2001, respectively. De aanslag, which covers the period from the war until the great demonstrations against cruise missiles in the early 1980s, was awarded an Oscar and a Golden Globe for best foreign movie. Mulish himself received many literary prizes for his extensive oeuvre, among others the P. C. HooftPrize (1977) and the Award for Dutch Literature (1995). His work has been translated into at least 30 languages.

See also Dutch language and literature.