Mulisch Harry

Dutch writer, one of the "big three" of the Dutch postwar literature writers, probably the most influential and most honoured star of them. He got even a planetoid named after him on 12 October 2006, the belt asteroid 10251 Mulisch, with an orbital period of 3.56 years. Harry Mulisch was the only child of a German-Jewish mother and an Austrian-Hungarian father who collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of the Netherlands (1940-45). His unusual familial background put definitely a stamp on him. Most of his novels deal with the behaviour of ordinary people under "magic mythic" circumstances like war, death and (re)birth and the consequently, extremely complex matters of morality they result in. His father Kurt Victor Karl Mulisch (10 July 1892, Gablonz an der Neiße - 10 July 1957, Haarlem) was an Austrian military officer and bank director. During WW1 he led a battery of field artillery. After the war he met a German-Jewish banker Schwarz in the Netherlands and obtained a leading job from him. In April 1926 he married his daughter Alice Schwarz (16 March 1908, Antwerpen - 2 January 1996, San Francisco). They got one child: Harry Mulisch (1927, Westerhoutpark 16, Haarlem). In 1936 the marriage broke. They divorced officially on 9 November 1937 and Alice Schwarz moved without her child to Amsterdam. In 1958 she emigrated to Berkeley, California to become an American citizen. From 1933 to 1939 Mulish learned writing at a private school in Haarlem. Here he wrote his fist story "De pottenbakker". Harry was raised by the house keeper Frieda Falk (b. 1891, Posen, now Poland, then Germany). He was raised in the Dutch and German language. During a trip to Berlin the four year old Harry got lost in the famous "Tiergarten" (autumn 1931). He later wrote in the after his death published "Getijdenboek (Book of hours, 2002) that here his writer-ship was born. In the thirties he was interested in chemistry and physics, later he realised it was actually alchemy. During WW2 his father Kurt Mulisch worked for the Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co Nazi bank that was founded to confiscate Jewish money and proprietary in a semi legal way. The "robbery bank" even had a filial in Camp Westerbork, passage station for Auschwitz and other Holocaust hells. Mulisch sr. did the human resources of the Nazi bank in Amsterdam. He managed to keep Harry and his mother out of the hands of the Nazis, but he was arrested and convicted for collaboration after the war. Mulish visited the First Christian Lyceum of Haarlem, attended it irregularly and did not finish it. He failed for his re-examamination on 6 September 1944, the day after Dolle Dinsdag. He became an autodidact writer. He studied the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Mann, Dostojevsky and Jorge Luis Borges, but said I am more a writer than reader. He also studied occult matters like alchemy. He debuted 8 May 1947 in Haarlem as an actor as Kees van Meertens in "Het eeuwige monster van Jan van Dam". On 8 February 1947 he published the story "De kamer" in Elseviers Weekblad. The character is fascinated by a certain room, but does not know why. Later it proves to be his death-room. He worked from 1949 to 1951 on his first novel "Archibald Strohalm" (1952). He won the Reina Prinsen Geerligsprijs of 1951 for young writers with it so that it was published. From 1952 to 1959 he wrote magic or mythic realistic fiction that typically starts with an ordinary scene, but as the book progresses more and more supra-na Read less