The house in Ghent haunted by Hitler

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.

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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. He had a fit at the age of four that was so severe he lost the sight of one eye. Doctors suggested unconventional and excruciatingly painful remedies, none of which worked. In later life, his daughter described his unseeing eye as looking ‘clouded… matt and grey, [like]a dead fish in the ice’.

This didn’t prevent him from becoming catnip to the ladies, apparently. Verhulst himself writes at one point: ‘Pretending I hadn’t seen a thing was often useful in later life.’ The same could be said of his long-suffering wife Mientje, who tolerated his lengthy and unexplained absences as well as his donning of a Nazi uniform, as long as he removed it when he returned to the house. As his daughter Letta tells Hertmans:

Whenever Papa came home, he could take off his boots and the uniform she detested, put on his ordinary clothes, leave the uniform in the front room and face his family as an ordinary civilian.