The Ascent

A House Can Have Many Secrets

By: Stefan Hertmans, David McKay - translator

Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith

In this revealing and poignant story, Stefan Hertmans uncovers haunting details about the previous owner of his house and the crime he committed as a member of the Nazi police.

In 1979 Stefan Hertmans became obsessed with a rundown townhouse in Ghent. The previous owners were mentioned only in passing during the acquisition, and it wasn’t until the new millennium, long after he had sold the house, that he came across a memoir by the owner’s son Adriaan Verhulst, a distinguished history professor and a former teacher of Hertmans’, which revealed that his father was a former SS officer.

Hertmans finds he is profoundly haunted by images of the family as ghostly presences in the rooms he had once known so well, he begins a journey of discovery—not to tell the story of Adriaan’s father, but rather the story of the house and the people who lived in it and passed through it. Archives, interviews with relatives and personal documents help him imagine the world of this house as they reveal not only a marital drama, but also a connection between past visitors to the house and important figures in the culture and politics of Flanders now.

A stunning and immersive reimagining of a family in a historical moment of great upheaval confirms Hertmans’ always brilliant melding of fiction and nonfiction.

©2023 Stefan Hertmans (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

["“[Hertmans’s] most recent pastiche of fiction, memoir and Sebaldian evidence gathering [is] inspired by the discovery that his former home in Ghent once housed a notorious Nazi collaborator . . . [The Ascent] deftly blends reporting and speculation as he reimagines the lives these rooms once sheltered, laying out the terrible consequences of an ambitious man’s blinkered devotion to the bureaucracy of the Reich.” —The New York Times Book Review

“When Bel­gian author Ste­fan Hert­mans decid­ed to rent a damp old house on the banks of the sludgy Lieveke canal in a run­down neigh­bor­hood of Ghent, he wasn’t think­ing about its pre­vi­ous inhab­i­tants. . . . But many years after he left the three-sto­ry house . . . he learned that, dur­ing World War II, it was occu­pied by Willem Ver­hulst, an SS intel­li­gence offi­cer. . . . Strad­dling the line between non­fic­tion and fic­tion. . . . [Hertmans] presents a grip­ping tale of the house on Dro­gen­hof Street, which con­tains both his own mem­o­ries and the secrets of the SS offi­cer and his family. . . . Using the house as a frame­work, the author pro­vides a vis­cer­al sense of life in the occu­pied city dur­ing the war. . . . Beau­ti­ful­ly trans­lat­ed by David McK­ay. . . . Hertmans’s par­al­lel sto­ries of Verhulst’s treach­ery and his own path to uncov­er­ing the secrets hid­den in the Dro­gen­hof house make for a com­pelling read. . . . the read­er can hard­ly wait to find out what he discovers.” —Jewish Book Council

“A fascinating project of autofiction. . . . Hertmans had already sold his former home in Ghent when he read a memoir by a former occupant that shocked him: before he’d lived there, an SS officer had called the place home. Hertmans uses this jarring revelation . . . to explore the home’s long history and reconsider the meaning of sanctuary.” —CrimeReads