Marente de Moor

WINNER

The greater scope of the novel covers the uncertainty and tensions preceding the Second World War.

In the summer of 1936, Dutch doctor Jacq sends his eighteen-year-old daughter Janna to stay with Egon von Bötticher, a German he befriended as a young man. This aristocratic fencing master, who is to help Janna perfect her own fencing skills, whiles away his days on a country estate, where he organizes the forbidden Mensur for students: a duel in which participants inflict visible injuries on each other as a sign of courage. Egon is an enigmatic figure, as attractive and irresistible as Heathcliff, and Janna inevitably falls for him.

However, De Nederlandse maagd is much more than just a story about love and the loss of innocence. A new, unfamiliar world opens up for Janna, full of riddles about the exact nature of the relationship between her father and Egon. The men met during World War I, in an era that has gone forever now that the Nazis are on the rise. Janna’s initiation into the adult world is a contradictory, confusing experience. The aristocratic code of honour, with its notions of courage and heroism, has proved futile, and an era of barbarism is dawning with the arrival of the Nazis. Through Janna’s experiences, De Moor evokes the unsettled atmosphere of an era as a major historical shift occurs, vividly portraying the uncertainty and tensions that preceded World War II. As Janna reflects, when she returns to the Netherlands at the end of the book: “I could no longer return to the past. This had been a one-way journey.”