'Babié, Zivoublé!' Ideology and cultural transfer: De donkere kamer van Damokles

Willem Frederik Hermans’ novel De donkere kamer van Damokles (1958) is considered a quintessential work in post-war Dutch literature, mainly due to its setting in World War II during the German occupation of the Netherlands and its thematization and influence on the perception and processing of that period in Dutch society. Translations of the novel were published in the 1960s in Denmark, France, Sweden, Norway and Finland. Only after Hermans had passed away, a second sequence of translations began to appear, with new editions in English and French, and, amongst others, a Germans and a Czech edition. In this article, we want to focus on the ideological aspects of some of the aforementioned translations, with special attention being paid to the critical reception