Throughout this text, I have identified a number of works in Dutch literature which show a marked interest in the history and memory of children of the war, and I have discussed a number of fictional and non-fictional texts published in the Netherlands in the 1980s which use the memory of World War II as their thematic material. Evoking the memory of World War II allows the Dutch authors I have considered to take on any of a number of issues; their reasons for doing so range from predominantly formal concerns to the engagement of notions centrally important to the culture. First, the war as a thematic element can provide challenges to the writer's craft by providing a means to inject excitement and upheaval in a (fictional) society which otherwise sees itself as a stable and placid land populated by persons whose everyday lives are calm and safe. On a more significant level, the use of the war as a subject engages a larger fund of cultural assumptions which may also allow the writer to address various social issues and ethical concerns such as victimization, the question of what exactly constitutes a victim, the definition and consequences of guilt (and the question whether anyone can be wholly free thereof), memory and forgetting, the abuse of the powerless (children and the Jewish victims of the Nazi regime), and the meaning of national identity in a small European country which has always had a lively international orientation toward the end of the Twentieth Century.

But my purpose is not to impose some simple taxonomy for a body of texts which appear within a temporal boundary (i.e., the decade of the 1980s), but rather to tease out the ways in which I believe these texts participate in the formation of taxonomies of their own within the community of Dutch readers, writers, and thinkers. In particular, I have tried to suggest that, taken as a whole, these texts participate in the creation of a kind of “calculus of suffering” and demonstrate some remarkably similar approaches to the notion of what separates the traumas of a “lived present” from a “remembered past”. They interrogate the traditional Dutch cultural notions of “goed” and “fout” and provide a more nuanced account of the events of – and following – World War II.