In Het behouden huis the unnamed narrator, a partisan, has been fighting the Germans for four years, twice escaping from prison camps. The closely observed dramas of wartime behavior that he then began to compose provoked outrage for decades to come. It is a work, observed the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch, of “bestial destruction.”īorn in 1921 to upwardly mobile parents, Hermans was obliged to interrupt his university studies in physical geography when the Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940. As the story draws to a close, nothing has been preserved and very little deserves to be. If, in the future, works of fiction must carry content warnings, this one will require a red alert.
Het behouden huis-literally “the preserved (or surviving) house”-a novella by the Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans, was published in 1951 and translated into English by Estelle Debrot as The House of Refuge in 1966, then by David Colmer as An Untouched House in 2018.
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