Harry Mulisch - Hitler üzerine

The Discovery of Heaven (Cennetin Keşfi - De Ontdekking van de Hemel) okuduğum dördüncü Mulisch kitabı. Bloga başlamadan önce Süreç (De Procedure), Siegfried Kara Bir Aşk Şiiri (Siegfried) ve Suikast (De Aanslag) kitaplarını okumuştum. Hepsinde de ortak bir tema olarak 2. Dünya Savaşı ve Hitler göze çarpıyordu. Hatta Siegfied, bütünüyle Hitler'in bir çocuğu olsaydı teması üzerine kuruluydu.



Mulisch, kısmen otobiyografik sayılabilecek (Max Delius karakteri kendine oldukça benzer, Onno Quist ise yakın bir arkadaşını temsil ediyor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discovery_of_Heaven ) Cennetin Keşfi'nde, Hitler'i etkili yapan 3 tema üzerinde durmuş ve aşağıdaki yorumlarda bulunmuş:

"..... he was the dark man with that dogged face and the 'basilisk's stare' as Thomas Mann once called it, with a pale forehead, those fanatical cheekbones, those smooth cheeks and pinched lips. That appearence counted for 33 percent of his effect."

"..... he had a voice that went right through you, which made everything he said different than if someone else had said it. A second 33 percent of the oratorical impact of his words on the masses can be attributed to his sound."

"And the 33 percent of his power was due to his incomparable body language. On the one hand his terrifying outbursts of rage at the lectern, on the other hand his perhaps even more terrifying silence: his masklike face, the precision of his pose, the tension in event the smallest movement."

"With an incompetent leader things go badly, but without a leader everything sinks into abstract arbitrariness, from which a new leader irrevocably emerges - because despite the optimism of the anarchist, that is the fundamental DNA principle."

"Everywhere the 'Führer principle' prevails: there has to be power, even in democratic societies, and that powercan only be physical. In religion that's been known for a long time, and the first to formulate it was John: 'The Word is made flesh.' "

"Through his total physical discipline, Hitler was able to penetrate people's minds with the equally total chaos of his thinking. And his physical discipline continued in his monstrous parades and processions, all of which he directed himself and which were no more than reproductions of his body. He was actually a movement artist, a dancer, a ballet master of death."

The Discovery of Heaven - Harry Mulisch

"Everyone on earth always marries the wrong person."

"Thought is never action, forward, up and at it, as people think who do not know what thinking is; it is not like a forest explorer cutting back creeping vines, but more like someone letting himself relax into a hot bath."


"The hand lay in hers like an item of lost property."

"Happiness was not freedom from chains but release from chains. Chains were an indispensable part of happiness!"


"Have you ever noticed the area of Protestanism coincides with the area covered by polar ice in the Ice Age? In the Netherlands, the border runs right through the middle: where was ice is the territory of the Protestants, as far as Hammerfest, and where grass grew is Catholic, as far as Palermo. And where did Calvin live? In Switzerland! The only Protestant country in the Catholic area when there are still glaciers."

"Human nature is so conservative that in someone else's place one always tends to sit where one sat for the first time."

"In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what -apart from the eternal innocence of animals- offers an image of hope? ......No the image of hope is someone passing with a musical instrument in a case."

"The good intentions are the worst thing, because they make you powerless."


"Never tell a woman anything, because she'll misuse it to understand you."


"People returning from a journey carry the distances they have traveled with them like outspread wings- until they put the key in their front door. Then the wings fold up, and they are home again, as though in the center of an impassable steel ring on the horizon."

"Everyone dies their own unique death."

"Mankind doesn't really belong in the universe at all, but now that it's there, everything is possible in all kinds of ways."


"That's the marvel of numbness. Nature is the sleep of the intellect. Only in the city does the spirit awaken."

"Perplexed, he wondered whether he had really slept with the grandmother of his child - in the bed of her daughter, who had just been in an accident, dressed in the pajamas of her husband who had just died."

"With every new technological gadget, human life has automatically become more absurd."

"Whoever talks about time also talks about death."

"Hidden side of a man was visible as his wife, just as the hidden side of a woman was visible as her husband."

"The new is always the old. Everything that's old was once new, and everything that's new will one day be old. The oldest thing of all is the present, because there's never been anything else but the present. No one has ever lived in the past, and no one lives in the future, either."

"Between man and woman there should be nothing but misunderstandings, so that they can be overcome by physical intercourse."

"Fidel had his own optimistic design, with the ideal of the New Man in the role of God, and Che in that of his murdered son - Fidel had his blessing."

"Might it be that beauty was geometrically and musically calculable but that, in turn, perfection somehow diverged from it? Just as a straight line drawn with a ruler was always somehow less than a straight line when Picasso drew without a ruler."

"Without people's poor memories, politics would be completely impossible."

"The rise and fall of world empires has gone on forever. Politics are the rippling of the waves in a storm - makes no difference at all to the waves, because they come from somewhere completely different: they come from the moon."