Vergangenheitsbewältigung
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
Reviewed by Sarah Selden
In the years after the fall of the Third Reich, Germans coined the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a compound verb that means “working through or overcoming the past.” German culture had to reckon with the horrors of Hitler’s Germany and work to rebuild society in such a way that they would never happen again. This verb became a key motif in postwar German literature, particularly in the works of Goethe prizewinner Siegfried Lenz and Nobel laureate Günter Grass.
Grass’s most well-known novel, The Tin Drum, is a work of magical realism about a man named Oskar, who has one Nazi and one Polish parent and inhabits a body that is perpetually three years old. The fantastical elements of the novel allow Grass to comment on the politics of Nazi Germany distanced from its individual emotional toll. Much of Vergangenheitsbewältigung functions at the macro-level in this way—it is more about society working through its collective culpability than it is about individual stories.
Yael van der Wouden’s Booker-shortlisted The Safekeep is also an act of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, but this time in the Dutch context. Set in The Netherlands in 1961, the novel explores the ramifications of the Dutch people’s knowledge and ignorance of the Holocaust as it occurred, addressing their collective culpability in a way that exposes elements of Dutch history that most readers wouldn’t have otherwise known. Van der Wouden moves beyond Grass’s approach to vergangenheitsbewältigung, though, in how she deftly teases out the long-term impact of Dutch actions during WWII on people who were children while it was happening—people who had no control. To what extent these children should be held accountable is one question posed by such an exploration, but van der Wouden is more interested in the question of how these characters, now adults, should respond to the events of the past as they work through it. Central to her exploration is the notion of home, both culturally and individually. In The Safekeep, home functions as both a refuge from cultural trauma and the site of deep personal pain, and van der Wouden’s characters must ultimately work through both to move forward and grow into their full selves.
Culturally, there is much culpability for these characters to work through. According to the novel, as of the 1960s, The Netherlands (like Germany and much of Europe) had not done much in the way of Vergangenheitsbewältigung after the war. Its citizens didn’t address the reason why so many homes became available during the Holocaust due to foreclosures. They also did almost nothing to make amends immediately following the liberation of the concentration camps. While the Red Cross helped the French and Swiss Jews return home, “the Dutch didn’t send anyone to bring back their Jews,” and when one character’s mother finally returned to Amsterdam, she was told that she was better off in the camps because “at least she’d been fed…the whole of the Netherlands had suffered a great hunger, that’s what the lady told her” (204).
This denial of the past catalyzes the troubles of the novel’s central characters, Isabel and Eva. Isabel, a 27-year-old unmarried woman, narrates much of the first part of the novel. Nearly 20 years earlier, she and her siblings, older brother Louis and younger brother Hendrik, fled Amsterdam with their mother to a house in Zwolle that their uncle bought for them during the air raids. Their father had already died suddenly from an illness a few years before. Isabel’s memories from wartime are marked with intense feelings of homesickness for their life in Amsterdam, but when the war ended, they didn’t return. The Netherlands was too economically unstable during and after the war, and her mother kept the family mostly sheltered from the “great hunger” by staying in Zwolle.
While their home shelters Isabel and her family from some cultural trauma, it cannot protect them from familial trauma. During their teenage years, Isabel effectively loses her brother Hendrik after he reveals his homosexuality to his family, who won’t accept him. Then, when Isabel is 20, their mother dies of an illness. This leaves Isabel alone in the house, as Louis had already grown up and moved away. The pain of losing Hendrik and then her mother completely stifles Isabel, who becomes an increasingly cold, isolated, and emotionally volatile young woman. Following her mother’s death, her central goal in life is to keep the home just as it was and essentially prevent time from passing. She leaves her mother’s room untouched and keeps a careful catalog of all her mother’s possessions, immediately accusing her housekeeper, Neelke, when anything goes missing. The novel opens with Isabel finding “a broken piece of ceramic under the roots of a dead gourd” in the garden, which is a shard of her mother’s favorite china set (1). She takes it inside and cleans it carefully, adding it to her collection of things she will obsessively count and care for as part of her daily ritual.
While Isabel’s attachment to the house keeps her from growing beyond her 20-year-old self, Hendrik’s detachment from it has allowed him to work through some of the trauma he experienced from his family’s rejection. He repairs his relationship with Isabel after their mother’s death, despite the fact that Isabel did not allow his partner, Sebastian, to stay with them during the funeral. A few years later, when Hendrik comes to the house to invite Isabel to meet him again, he tells her, gently, “you don’t have to be her, Isabel…You can be whoever you want to be now. Do you know that? You have all the freedom. She’s gone. You’re not taking care of her, you’re not bound to this house. Go where you want to go. Meet whoever. Love” (89). In her thoughts, Isabel responds, “Bound to this house, he said. As if it was a tether and not a shelter. And not her own love, too” (89).
Despite this deep and ultimately unhealthy love for the house, the central problem Isabel faces is that she does not own it. Her uncle holds the deed, but it is legally supposed to be passed on to the eldest boy in the family, Louis, once he is married. The general expectation is that Isabel will one day marry and move out, but she actively resists any progress toward this stage of life. She is also very resistant to change in Louis’s life, as any new relationship threatens that the house will be “stolen” from Isabel—stolen, despite the fact that it was never really her house in the first place.
Eva, Louis’s newest girlfriend, brings this threat closer to reality when she comes to stay with Isabel while Louis is working abroad for a few weeks. Eva’s relationship with the concept of home is also tenuous. She mysteriously has no family or much of a history to share, which, as a single woman in the early 1960s, leaves her virtually homeless. Feeling unable to intrude on Louis’s roommate while he is away, it is Eva who suggests that she go stay with Isabel after meeting her only once. Louis agrees, since he technically owns the house, and he tells Eva to stay in their mother’s old room, much to Isabel’s chagrin.
Initially, Isabel casts herself as a nearly impossible housemate for Eva. She refuses to talk to her most days and gets angry one evening when she returns from a reluctant date to find Eva sharing a bottle of wine with Neelke. She also suspiciously follows Eva around the house during the day, becoming increasingly suspicious as more items go missing during her stay. But through this tension, Eva begins to soften Isabel. As she and Eva argue about the wine incident, Isabel tells Eva, “This is my life…Do you understand? This is my—,” to which Eva replies, “And what a life it is! You must be bored. Isabel, I am bored beyond measure, and I’ve only been here for a minute. Oh, if you’d just let me—just let me in, let’s—We could talk, we could take walks, wouldn’t that be fun?” (66). While her brothers and her uncle have encouraged Isabel to go out and meet men, Eva is the first person to come to Isabel on her own turf and to get close enough to her to pull her out of her grief. Through Isabel’s relationship with Eva, van der Wouden underscores the importance of community in engaging the past—it cannot occur in isolation.
While this initial conversation between Eva and Isabel ends in discord, it is the beginning of a new phase in their relationship. Eva’s commentary the state of Isabel’s life opens the door for greater intimacy. A few days later, after Eva witnesses Isabel refusing a kiss from her suitor, she tries to talk her through it, telling Isabel, “You worry about it too much. It’s nothing, really, a kiss. It’s such a small thing, you wouldn’t believe,” and, to prove her point, moves forward and kisses Isabel herself (75). This seemingly innocent gesture is the beginning of a passionate love affair between Isabel and Eva, unlocking years of repression and confusion for Isabel and allowing her to experience life in real time again.
As Isabel discovers her own sexuality, her cold exterior softens, as does her fierce protection of the house. When Eva stays with Isabel in her room for the first time, Isabel watches as “Eva walked around the bed and touched things. The mirror’s frame, the picture on the vanity, the bristles of Isabel’s hairbrush,” in stark contrast to how she suspiciously followed Eva around the house earlier in the novel (152). More significantly, she allows Eva to inspect her childhood stuffed animal, a tattered, much-loved hare. Even as she allows Eva to explore these items, Isabel wishes it would be over—“She wanted Eva to come to bed. She did not want to talk about the past” (152). Isabel is softening and letting someone into her space in the present, but she is not ready to fully work through the pain of her past yet.
The pair continues to avoid the past, including the detail that Eva is supposedly still dating Isabel’s older brother, for a few weeks. As they continue their relationship, Isabel becomes warmer, more playful, and even more daring. She convinces Eva to go to a restaurant for a date, where she actively flirts with Eva, sharply contrasting the stifled dates she experienced with men earlier in the novel during which she hardly said a word. While Isabel has moved beyond her former fully-devoted-to-the-house self, she now strives to freeze time again—when Eva tries to bring Isabel back to reality after their date, Isabel tells her very quickly, “Oh let’s not think about it let’s have this just for now we will only live now and what comes will come and we won’t think about it and—” (146).
But Eva will not allow Isabel to deny reality again. Just before Louis returns, Eva makes it clear that their relationship must end there. She tells Isabel, “This is all there is, Isabel. This is all we have. We should make peace with that, yes?... I will have to go with Louis. You understand that, don’t you, Isabel?” (165). In an attempt to convince Eva to stay, an angry Isabel reveals that Louis has told her that he has met another woman and needs Eva to be “gone” (162). But Eva again rejects Isabel’s pleading, saying “Are you listening? I’m telling you: your world is nothing, it’s—it’s—air. What certainty in life do you have? What certainty can you give me? What home?” (170). Eva again reminds Isabel of the cultural gender and sexuality norms they are up against. While it is easier for Hendrik and Sebastian to live together discretely, it is more challenging for two women with no legal right to the home they are living in.
This heated exchange ends with Eva packing her bags and Isabel making a shocking discovery that shakes the very foundations of what she knows about her family, about Eva, and about the history of her home. This discovery forces Isabel to face both the personal traumas of her past and the cultural trauma of her country and her own family’s complicity in it.
This time, Isabel takes action rather than being frozen by grief after losing someone she loves. Realizing Louis is in no way ready to settle down, she convinces him to transfer the deed of the house to her. She also learns to accept herself and her sexuality—she tells Louis, “I will never marry. I’m telling you…Hendrik will never marry” (239). Telling Louis about her own orientation in relation to Hendrik’s underscores how Isabel has worked through her previous feelings about Hendrik’s sexuality, and this has allowed her to accept her own. She knows Louis doesn’t fully accept Hendrik, as she notes how he often reacts when Hendrik’s life is brought up: “Louis glanced around. He did that when Hendrik’s life came up: as if someone might hear and come to some conclusion, and he would have to explain something. Get in some kind of trouble” (239). Yet Isabel’s experience with Eva and subsequent willingness to finally work through the past has allowed her to sit in that discomfort with Louis, which is markedly different from the surface-level relationship they had before.
Whether this work is enough to repair Eva and fully engage in Vergangenheitsbewältigung then becomes the central question of the novel. Through asking this question, van der Wouden comments on the complexity of identity formation—her characters are clearly products of both their cultural and familial histories, despite how young they were when much of the trauma occurred. It is how they address this pain and integrate their histories that is important, and it is Isabel’s ability to finally do this that allows her to attain both personal growth through her own self-acceptance and cultural growth through her defiance of gender and sexual norms. Both women’s journeys to confront the past allow them to achieve some level of healing in the end, and it is through this healing that van der Wouden is able to engage in Vergangenheitsbewältigung for her home country, too. Ultimately, The Safekeep invites its readers to do the same—to work through the pain associated with both our familial and cultural homes and integrate them into our present identities in such a way that will lead to growth and change.
Sarah Selden earned her bachelor's in English and secondary education at Palm Beach Atlantic University and her master's in English and American studies at the University of Oxford. She has taught English in Palm Beach County, in Spain on a Fulbright grant, and currently teaches in Littleton, Colorado.
