The Assault Study Guide

Harry Mulisch was born in Haarlem, the Netherlands, in 1927 to an Austrian father and Jewish mother. During World War II, Mulisch’s father worked for a German bank. Because of his father’s collaboration with the Nazis, Mulisch and his mother escaped being sent to a concentration camp. However, Mulisch’s maternal grandmother and great-grandmother both died in the concentration camps. After the war, Mulisch’s father went to prison for his actions as a collaborator. Mulisch moved the Amsterdam in 1958 and had three children. Over the course of his career, Mulisch authored over 80 works, many of which center around World War II. He is considered one of the greatest Dutch writers. Mulisch lived in Amsterdam until his death in 2010.

The early scenes of The Assault are set against the backdrop of World War II, which began in 1939. In May 1940, the German forces attacked the Netherlands, where the novel is set, and began their occupation there. The Dutch National Socialist movement, headed by Anton Mussert, welcomed the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The occupation resulted in a scarcity of resources, as Germans blocked trade into the Netherlands and imposed strict food rations on Dutch citizens. Forced or voluntary collaboration between the Dutch and the Germans led to the deportation of 70% of Dutch Jews. The Nazi occupation did not only target Jewish people, however: they also targeted communists, critics of the Nazi regime, and people with mental disabilities.  The Dutch resistance, which was organized by the Communist Party as well as independent groups, employed nonviolent and violent tactics to fight the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Throughout the German occupation of the Netherlands, members of the Dutch resistance hid over 300,000 people from German authorities. 

In 2015, Dutch graphic novelist Milan Hulsing adapted Mulisch’s The Assault into a graphic novel of the same name. Aside from The Assault, Harry Mulisch’s most well-known and lauded work is his 1992 novel The Discovery of Heaven. The novel, like The Assault, takes place largely in the aftermath of World War II. Aside from his fiction, Mulisch also wrote nonfiction—for example, a book about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. Readers of his work about the Eichmann case will be interested in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she explores themes of evil in the aftermath of World War II. Finally, Mulisch’s contemporary and fellow Dutch literary great Willem Frederik Hermans also wrote considerably about the Nazi occupation of Holland and was even involved in exposing false Resistance fighters. His most famous work is The Darkroom of Damocles.