W.F. Hermans Timeline

W.F. Hermans 40

1921 W.F. Hermans born in Amsterdam Willem Frederik Hermans is born in Amsterdam to Johan Hermans, a grammar-school teacher, and Rika Eggelte. The family lives in the "Old West" district in an apartment block built specifically to house teachers. His father is ambitious for his children and sends them both to the prestigious Barlaeus Gymnasium.
1929 Family moves within Amsterdam The Hermans family moves to a larger apartment on the fourth floor of a nearby building in the same block, where his older sister Corry occupies a large room in the attic. The tight financial circumstances of a teacher's household in Depression-era Amsterdam shape Hermans's lifelong sense of precariousness.
1933 Enrolls at Barlaeus Gymnasium Hermans enrolls at the elite Barlaeus Gymnasium in Amsterdam, where most teachers hold doctorates. Initially a mediocre student, he fails a year but resolves never to repeat the experience, buckles down, and falls entirely under the spell of literature — a conversion that defines the rest of his life.
1936 Discovers his vocation as a writer As a teenager Hermans begins writing obsessively, filling notebooks with fiction and essays. His early reading — biographies of Edison, chemistry histories, science fiction — gives him a fascination with epistemology and the limits of knowledge that will underpin everything he writes.
1940 Sister Corry and cousin commit suicide When the German forces invade the Netherlands in May 1940, Hermans's older sister Corry and a cousin take their own lives in despair at the occupation. Hermans is eighteen years old. The double loss is devastating and plants the seeds of the nihilistic worldview — the belief in the fundamental pointlessness of existence — that runs through his entire oeuvre.
1940 – 1944 Studies physical geography at the University of Amsterdam During the German occupation, Hermans studies physical geography at the University of Amsterdam, later also studying Dutch language and literature. He writes continuously throughout the occupation years, publishing in literary magazines.
1943 First publications in literary magazines Hermans begins publishing short stories and essays in literary magazines during the occupation, establishing himself in Amsterdam's small wartime literary underground. The experiences of occupation — betrayal, arbitrary violence, the impossibility of certainty — go directly into his fiction.
1945 Liberation; begins serious literary career At the end of the war, Hermans is 23 years old and determined to make literature his life. He attempts to live as a full-time writer but the postwar Netherlands, exhausted and impoverished, offers almost no market for serious fiction. He supplements his income with academic work.
1946 Publishes first novel "Conserve" Hermans publishes his debut novel Conserve, a dark, experimental work that establishes his voice — sardonic, bleak, formally uncompromising — from the very beginning. The Dutch literary establishment is unsettled by its refusal to offer comfort or resolution.
1947 Publishes "Moedwil en misverstand" The short story collection Malice and Misunderstanding (Moedwil en misverstand) confirms Hermans as a genuinely original voice in Dutch literature — one entirely unlike the moralistic, humanist fiction preferred by the literary establishment of the time.
1948 Publishes "Paranoia" The story collection Paranoia expands Hermans's reputation. His fiction inhabits a world of miscommunication, misunderstanding and bad faith — a universe in which good intentions produce catastrophic results and certainty is always illusory.
1949 Publishes "De tranen der acacia's" The Tears of the Acacias (De tranen der acacia's) is Hermans's first major novel, set against the backdrop of the Second World War. The book explores the war's moral chaos and the impossibility of knowing the truth about any human action. It is precisely the kind of war novel the Netherlands does not yet know it needs.
1952 Publishes "Conserve" sequel and "Het behouden huis" The novella The House of Refuge (Het behouden huis, later published in English as An Untouched House) is published — a perfectly constructed war novella in which a soldier occupies a pristine bourgeois house behind enemy lines. It is later recognised as one of the finest short works of 20th-century Dutch literature, described by the Times Literary Supplement as "a masterpiece."
1952 Publishes "De god Denkbaar Denkbaar de god" The novella De god Denkbaar Denkbaar de god further establishes Hermans as the most formally inventive and philosophically rigorous writer of his generation.
1952 Publishes "Ik heb altijd gelijk" — first major scandal I Am Always Right (Ik heb altijd gelijk) provokes a public scandal. The novel's protagonist voices contempt for Catholics, causing the Catholic Church and members of parliament to demand prosecution. A court case follows. Hermans is unrepentant — the scandal cements both his notoriety and his literary significance in the Netherlands.
1953 Appointed lecturer in physical geography at Groningen University Unable to sustain himself on writing alone, Hermans accepts an appointment as a lecturer in physical geography at the University of Groningen, beginning a dual life as academic and writer that will last twenty years. He resents the compromise but commits to both pursuits with characteristic intensity.
1954 Marries Emmy Sevenich Hermans marries Emmy Sevenich. The marriage provides domestic stability during his most productive decade. The couple eventually settle in Groningen, where Hermans teaches while writing his most important novels.
1955 Publishes "Zijn wij slaven of pioniers" — essay collection Hermans establishes himself as one of the sharpest literary critics in the Netherlands, attacking sentimentality, piety and mediocrity in Dutch letters with an energy that makes him simultaneously celebrated and despised.
1956 Publishes "De god Denkbaar" revised edition As his reputation grows, Hermans's earlier works are reassessed and republished, building the foundation for what will eventually be recognised as the most important body of prose fiction in postwar Dutch literature.
1958 Promoted to reader (universitair hoofddocent) at Groningen Hermans is promoted within the geography department, gaining greater academic independence — a status he will exploit by writing during university time, which later provokes a parliamentary inquiry.
1958 Publishes "De donkere kamer van Damocles" — the masterpiece The Darkroom of Damocles (De donkere kamer van Damocles) is published, immediately recognised as a major work. The novel follows a wartime Dutch resistance worker who receives orders from a mysterious contact named Dorbeck — orders that may or may not be genuine, a contact who may or may not exist. The question of whether the protagonist is a hero or a murderer is never resolved. It becomes one of the most widely read Dutch novels of the 20th century and is translated into more than fifteen languages.
1961 Publishes "Nooit meer slapen" (Beyond Sleep) Beyond Sleep (Nooit meer slapen) is published — Hermans's other great novel. A young Dutch geologist travels to northern Norway to find meteorite craters that will validate his doctoral thesis, only to discover that his entire scientific project may be built on a misidentification. The novel — a slow, suffocating masterpiece — explores the relationship between scientific ambition, failure and self-knowledge. Translated into English in 2006.
1963 Publishes "Mandarijnen op zwavelzuur" Mandarines in Sulphuric Acid (Mandarijnen op zwavelzuur) is a collection of vitriolic literary criticism in which Hermans attacks nearly every celebrated figure in Dutch letters. The book is reprinted multiple times and becomes one of the most infamous documents in Dutch literary culture — read partly for its critical intelligence, partly as a spectator sport.
1966 Refuses P.C. Hooft Prize for 1964 Hermans refuses the prestigious P.C. Hooft Prize — one of the Netherlands' most important literary awards — as a gesture of contempt for the literary establishment that controls it. The refusal is characteristically provocative and entirely consistent with his philosophy of radical independence.
1967 Publishes "Herinneringen van een engelbewaarder" Memories of a Guardian Angel extends Hermans's formal experimentation, employing an unreliable narrator whose memories may be fabricated — a device that forces the reader to inhabit the epistemological uncertainty that is the central theme of all his work.
1970 Wins P.C. Hooft Prize — accepts this time After refusing the prize in the 1960s, Hermans accepts the P.C. Hooft Prize in 1970 — apparently satisfied with this particular recognition. The reversal is very Hermans: principles are applied situationally, not dogmatically.
1972 Parliamentary inquiry into his university conduct A Calvinist member of parliament accuses Hermans of using his university position to write fiction rather than lecture. A parliamentary committee investigates and concludes that his chief offence was using university stationery for his manuscripts. Hermans considers the entire affair a vindication of his contempt for institutional authority.
1973 Resigns from Groningen; moves permanently to Paris Hermans resigns his academic post and moves to Paris, France, where he lives as a full-time writer for the rest of his life. Paris gives him distance from the Dutch literary world he finds suffocating and the freedom to write without institutional constraint.
1975 Publishes "Onder professoren" Among Professors (Onder professoren) is a bitter, satirical roman à clef about academic life at Groningen University, written entirely on the blank sides of university correspondence — a final gesture of contempt toward the institution. The novel is funny, vicious and unmistakably personal.
1976 Exposes Friedrich Weinreb as a fraud Hermans plays a key role in publicly demolishing the reputation of Friedrich Weinreb, a Dutch-Jewish man celebrated as a wartime resistance hero who had in fact exploited Jews seeking help during the occupation. Hermans's meticulous demolition of the Weinreb myth — published as a book-length investigative essay — is one of his most important non-fiction works and a classic of Dutch polemical writing.
1977 Wins Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren — the highest Dutch literary honour Hermans receives the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren — the most prestigious literary award in the Dutch language, presented every three years alternately by the Dutch and Belgian monarchs. The prize is presented by the Belgian king Baudouin. It is the formal recognition by the literary establishment that Hermans had spent his career attacking.
1978 Publishes "Drie melodrama's" Three Melodramas (Drie melodrama's) is published, further demonstrating Hermans's range — he writes in a variety of forms and registers, always keeping genre conventions at a sardonic distance.
1981 Publishes "Uit talloos veel miljoenen" From Countless Millions (Uit talloos veel miljoenen) continues Hermans's satire of academic and professional life, mining the Groningen years for material with undiminished contempt and precision.
1985 Publishes "Au pair" Au pair is published, one of the more accessible novels of Hermans's later career, received warmly by critics who note that his bitterness has curdled into something approaching dark comedy. He remains one of the three great figures of postwar Dutch literature alongside Harry Mulisch and Gerard Reve.
1988 Publishes "De laatste resten tropisch Nederland" The Last Vestiges of Tropical Netherlands is published. In his late career Hermans's novels become shorter and more focused — the elaborate structural games of the 1950s and 1960s distilled into concentrated, acerbic fictions.
1990 Honorary doctorate from the University of Liège Hermans receives an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège (Luik) — one of two honorary doctorates he accepts in his final years, and a measure of his international standing that his own country's academic world had taken decades to acknowledge.
1993 Honorary doctorate from the University of Pretoria A second honorary doctorate, from the University of Pretoria in South Africa, confirms Hermans's standing as an internationally recognised figure in European literature.
1995 Posthumous reassessment begins In the years following his death, Hermans is increasingly recognised outside the Netherlands. The Darkroom of Damocles and Beyond Sleep are translated into English and receive major critical attention. An Untouched House is named a Spectator and Sunday Times Book of the Year upon its first English publication in 2018.
1995 W.F. Hermans dies in Utrecht aged 73 Willem Frederik Hermans dies on 27 April 1995 in Utrecht, aged 73. He leaves behind a body of work — novels, stories, essays, plays, scientific writing, literary criticism — of extraordinary range and consistency, unified by a philosophical pessimism that never became despair and a formal intelligence that never became mere cleverness.
2018 "An Untouched House" published in English — Spectator Book of the Year The first English translation of Het behouden huis (An Untouched House) is published to outstanding reviews and named a Spectator and Sunday Times Book of the Year — introducing Hermans to the English-language literary world more than sixty years after its original publication, confirming that his work loses nothing in translation.