De slaap die geen uren kent by Sebastiaan Chabot (2020)

Kurt Kuschfeld, a man in his fifties, lives in Reichsburg, Germany, in 1950. He works nights maintaining the street lighting in the little town, and lives in the tower of the train station. He is tired of life, and plans to ask his physician to help him end his life. After the war, the city council is rechristened ‘committee for post-war reconsiderations,’ to retain an air of responsibility when it comes to the Nazi past, though little has changed: most of Reichsburg’s dignitaries are the same as during the war. It is hinted that Mr Kuschfeld, too, might have had a small but decisive role during the war in Reichsburg. During a meeting of the city council, a young delegate of the federal state arrives, a man famous for bringing war criminals to justice with the use of the electric chair. Everyone in Reichsburg with a less than stellar wartime career starts to panic. 

Four generations later, in The Hague, a twelve-year-old boy named Victor is looking at a portrait of an old man that hangs in the hall of his parent’s house. He knows it’s his great-grandfather, about whom he knows nothing. The portrait scares him. Meanwhile, his parents are getting ready to go: they’re playing doubles with another couple, leaving the children at home to play together: Victor and his younger brother Benjamin, and the two boys of the other couple, Sicco and Tom. Victor looks up to Sicco: people pay attention when he does things. He makes sure they do. Wanting to impress him, Victor proposes to burn the portrait of his great-grandfather in the garden. When the parents come home, father Karl is silent, but later that evening goes up to Victor’s room and for the first time in his life raises a hand to him. Neither of them mentions the incident to anyone else. Victor understands that the man in the picture was Karl’s grandfather, and that he might not have anything else of his. He resolves to fill the void left by the painting with stories: he’ll ask his own grandfather, whom the family talk to on Skype, for stories about him. 

Karl, a poet who has been seized by the urge to write a novel but has yet to act upon that urge, takes up the burning of the portrait as an exhortation to write about his family history. Meanwhile, he has to deal with the fact that his father Gerhardt, who lives in Reichsburg, wants euthanasia in The Netherlands. When they talk on Skype, Gerhardt is very reluctant to tell the family much about his father, the man in the picture: he hints that Kurt Kuschfeld did bad things during the war, and that he, the Gerhardt, chose to distance himself from him. When Karl tries to retrieve some documents necessary for the euthanasia of his father, he makes a startling discovery: Gerhardt Kuschfeld is registered to have died in Germany in 1945.