Imre Kertész / Europe’s Oppressive Legacy

Slipping out of the sackcloth

Imre Kertész: Europe’s Oppressive Legacy

Can someone define themselves freely? This is Kertész's great theme in this volume of essays. Collectivism, he states, far from being merely an aspect of totalitarian regimes, "is the most characteristic feature of the twentieth century… and it thoroughly sweeps away both the individual and individuality". – Imre Kertész died five years ago. To mark the anniversary we present László F. Földényi's review on Europe’s Oppressive Legacy from 2009.

László F. Földényi

31 March 2021

Translated by Ottlie Mulzet

“Not long before the change – the change of regime – when the disintegration was already perceptible, I was seized by a desire to come to an understanding of where I was actually living, to discover the roots of my existence, which not only existentially but also historically was perceived and felt as utterly absurd.”

Imre Kertész / Against what, if nothing is resisting?

 

Against what, if nothing is resisting?

Imre Kertész: The Pathseeker

Like many of Kertész’s works, The Pathseeker is not about the trauma of the Holocaust itself so much as the trauma of survival. The self may survive but the triumph of that survival is chimerical.

Thomas Cooper
23 June 2008

The Pathseeker, a slender novel or thick novella by Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertész, is the account of a concentration camp survivor who returns to the place where he had been held only to find himself unable to bear witness to or find catharsis from the injustices he suffered as a prisoner. First published in 1977 in Hungarian as Nyomkereso, it has now been brought out in English translation by Tim Wilkinson, translator of numerous works by Kertész, including the retranslation of his Nobel Prize work, Fatelessness. An experimental novel that adopts contrasting approaches to narration, The Pathseeker, like the rest of Kertész’s oeuvre, explores the experiences of having survived the Holocaust and the protagonist’s inability to find triumph in this survival.

Imre Kertesz / Raw Materials

 

Imre Kertesz

Raw Materials

Martin Kiker

9 August 2013

Two of the great pessimistic proclamations of 20th-century literature — Adorno’s “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” and Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” — have at least one thing in common. They both address the inadequacy of language to articulate reality. Better to say nothing, they both say, or at least that’s the first half of what they say. If Adorno leaves off the productive half of the equation — “I’ll go on” — other writers have supplied it for him, in the form of a very large body of work concerned with the Holocaust that is not only ethically accountable but also incredibly rich and inventive. In fact it is not too much to claim, of Holocaust literature, that the struggle to say what is unsayable has paradoxically yielded some of the most extraordinary literary works we have.

Imre Kertész / A man apart

Imre Kertesz,
Budapest, 1999
Photo by JOHANN SEBASTIAN HANEL

Imre Kertész

A man apart

Imre Kertész was sent to Auschwitz as a schoolboy, and his memories of life there inform his controversial novel Fatelessness and all his later work. He was awarded the Nobel in 2002. He talks to Julian Evans

Julian Evans

Sat 22 Apr 2016

"F

or whom do we write?" asked Sartre in his 1947 manifesto Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (What is literature?), a question of intellectual urgency in a smashed and impoverished Europe. "The universal reader" was a shattered category, and the writer himself, in Sartre's words, knew "he speaks for freedoms which are swallowed up, masked, and unavailable". The writer's own freedom too "is not so pure; he has to clean it".

Imre Kertész bears witness to the arduousness of this process of self-authentication. "I had to establish my independence, my mental independence," he remembers. "I came from two harsh dictatorships, Nazi and Stalinist. I never thought of becoming a writer as such, yet in a lucid moment I recognised what I had to do." His first novel, Fatelessness, which grew out of his experiences as a boy in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, did not appear until 1975. There is a good reason for the 20-year delay from lucid moment to authorship. Europe's 20th-century totalitarianisms, of which Auschwitz was "the ultimate embodiment", created a new kind of humanity, he says. "They forced a person to choose in a way we were never forced to choose before: to become either a victim or a perpetrator. Even surviving involved collaboration, compromises." To choose to become a writer was his way of refusing to collaborate with dictatorship.

Born in November 1929 into a Hungarian-Jewish family, Kertész was deported from Budapest at 14. At the first selection, he lied about his age and called himself "worker" rather than "schoolboy" to appear more useful to camp officials, and survived. He was liberated by American troops a year later, though by a quirk of Nazi record-keeping, the Buchenwald register notes the death on February 18 1945 of "prisoner 64921, Imre Kertész". "I died once, so I could live. Perhaps that is my real story," he said in his 2002 Nobel prize lecture.

He does not discuss the details of his adaptation to peacetime and adulthood. He has the profound charm and good humour of those who have seen life at its vilest and most absurd, but the disturbed pattern of his early years is painfully clear. Having found his life again, he felt he was losing it. "To my horror, I realised that 10 years after I had returned from the Nazi camps ... all that remained of the experience were a few muddled impressions, a few anecdotes." From 1948 he worked for a Budapest newspaper, Világosság, only to be sacked in 1951 when it took the Party line. He then had two years of military service. Mentally, he was adrift. "What happened was that I got so deeply involved in these dictatorships, I was beginning to get lost in them. First, I had to recognise that I was stepping out of line, out of line with the masses." He began to write "pieces of text and then more pieces of text. This was not the novel as you know it, but I tried to create a summary or a description of dictatorship."

Suddenly, "on a lovely spring day in 1955", he realised there was only one reality, himself, his own life, "this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expro-priated by alien forces ... and which I had to take back from 'History', this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine alone." Finding himself against everything that communist Hungary stood for, he started Fateless-ness. Its central proposition was that we are our own fate, connected to every event we make happen and that happens to us: "If there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate."

He is sure he would not have written about the Nazi dictatorship "had I not known the Stalinist dictatorship and the Kádár dictatorship [of post-1956 Hungary]. It was a bit like Proust's madeleine - a real revelation." An advantage of conditions in Hungary was that "all the circumstances were there for you to become a cryptowriter, a hidden writer, because it was a cheap way of life, the outgoings were low, the cost of maintenance was low, there were no status symbols to wish for, and it was a reduced way of life and you could concentrate on your work".

In the intellectual desert of the Stalinist era, he read a great deal. He had his first experience of the power of literature before his deportation, when at 13 he read CS Forester's Captain Hornblower RN. "I'm still wondering how it was possible to publish it in the middle of the war ... Captain Horn-blower [was] a hero I had never seen before: he was weak, he had doubts in himself, he was concerned, and he won every battle. And you had to be very stupid not to see that the usurper Napoleon in this case was really Hitler." In the summer of 1957 he discovered Camus' L'Étranger: "At the time it was simply unimaginable to me that it was possible to write like that. I was looking for a cheap and interesting book and I'd never heard the name before. And it cost only 12 forints! So I took it home, and that became my destiny." L'Étranger and Death in Venice showed him what radical literature was. Later there was Flaubert, Dostoevsky ("the first and most beautiful novel about a camp is The House of the Dead") and Ford Madox Ford (he's read The Good Soldier 11 times). He supported himself by translating Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Joseph Roth, Wittgenstein and Canetti.

When Fatelessness was finally done, he submitted it to the more liberal of socialist Hungary's two fiction publishers. It came back with a rejection letter, so he sent it to the other, "more cowardly" publisher. Two readers wrote positive reports, which meant automatic publication. He finally had his answer to the question of who he wrote for: himself. The novel was received in almost complete silence, viewed as a cynical provocation, a book about the Holocaust that refused to wear the accepted robe of victimhood; it declared everyone, perpetrators and victims, had taken their own steps towards their future. Gyuri, Kertész's hero, tries to explain this to his surviving uncles when he returns to Budapest. "'What!' he bawled, his face red as a beetroot and beating his chest with his fist: 'So it's us who're the guilty ones, is it? Us, the victims!' I tried explaining that it wasn't a crime; all that was needed was to admit it, meekly, simply, merely as a matter of reason, a point of honour, if I might put it that way."

Narrating in a constant present, Gyuri has no hind-sight, every event is new, interpreted by an adolescent personality who enjoys adventures, is easily bored, likes change. Ordered off the bus in Budapest, his thought on learning that he is being sent to work in Germany is that he'll find "orderliness, employment, new impressions, and a bit of fun - all in all, a more sensible lifestyle". He has not heard of Auschwitz. He notes that the sunrise at the railhead is "pretty and, on the whole, intriguing: back home, I was usually still asleep at this time". When he becomes aware that his fellow passengers from the train are burning, he is "well aware that it was not altogether a joke", but his imagination is taken up with how this "fantasy" became a reality, through the ideas of "gentlemen in imposing suits, decor-ations on their chests". Through this demanding formal device, Kertész offers Gyuri's experience as entirely fresh. To see Auschwitz of 60 years ago through Gyuri's eyes is to feel an overwhelming sensation that it is hap-pening now, the result of brick-by-brick, step-by-step cooperation between perpetrator and victim - as of course genocides are still carried out today.

"[I wanted] to write a scandalous book, a scandalous piece of text, some-thing that had never been written about before." He succeeded. Fatelessness, a marvellous, radioactive piece of story-telling, became the first of a trilogy. The second, Fiasco (1988), dealt with his critics' silence, and Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990) brought Gyuri back to speak about the child he refuses to have in a world that allows Auschwitz to exist. He has written two volumes of a fictional diary and three collections of lectures and essays - but when he became the 2002 Nobel laureate it was for an unusually compact body of work. Astonishingly, Fatelessness was not pub-lished in Britain until 2005, and remains his only work available here. A fourth novel, Liquidation (2003), is out in Eng-lish this year, and Kaddish is obtainable in a US edition - a bizarrely small presence for a writer of world stature.

Perhaps the original difficulty remains. There is no getting away from Auschwitz in his work, and what he wishes to say about it is too provocative for general consumption. To his mind, Auschwitz is the culminating point of western civilisation. "What I have discovered is that Auschwitz was an absolute moment in the history of Europe, intellectually. Maybe it sounds strange that I call this awful atrocity which killed millions of people part of an intellectual activity, but allow me to be a cynic ... The traditional values have burnt out, have been emp-tied, and I cannot yet see the creativity which could create new values." Derived from this is the proposition in Fatelessness that it is evil, not good, that is explicable: evil is simply the result of making decisions, whereas good has no logic to it. And post-Auschwitz, good is still out of the ordinary. "Modern life is organised so that you benefit at the expense of the other, and the most extreme example of that is a camp."

Does he mean Auschwitz and capitalism are parts of a single philosophy? He is not sure. But "it's the organisational structure of life, and I can't see a cathartic event that would bring us out of this pattern and make people live or behave differently. The catharsis that such an event could have evoked didn't happen. Everybody can only write about Auschwitz, even if Auschwitz as such is not present in the work. It is so decisive. Beckett never mentions Auschwitz, but his world is ultimately derelict. And one cannot get rid of this. The work of Giacometti, for example, or the latest modern music. We are after something. That's the way we live. What writers can do in this symbolic ice age is to preserve and present individual identities, individual existences that you can pick out from the flow and present as something that moves people, or shocks them." We now live in a state of such conformity that we are in danger of forgetting those existences? "Exactly."

Inspirations

Captain Hornblower RN by CS Forester

L'Etranger by Albert Camus

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

THE GUARDIAN

Obituaries / Imre Kertész

Imre Kestész

Kertész obituary

Holocaust survivor who won the Nobel prize for literature

George Gomori
Thursday 31 March 2016 13.25 BST

‘To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” wrote the German critic Theodor Adorno soon after the second world war. He later modified his statement by saying: “The main question is: can we go on living after Auschwitz?” This was the problem with which the Nobel prize-winning Hungarian Jewish writer Imre Kertész, a survivor of the Holocaust, grappled throughout his life and literary work, until his death at the age of 86.

Kertész’s first and most influential novel, Sorstalanság (Fatelessness, 1975), is the story of a 14-year-old boy, Gyuri Köves, who survives deportation to Auschwitz and captivity in Buchenwald, and, on his return to Hungary, finds it impossible to relate his experiences to his surviving family. The book was at first hardly noticed by Hungarian critics and only became a success many years later once it had been translated into German and then, in 2005, made into a film by the Hungarian cinematographer Lajos Koltai. While lacking the biting irony of Tadeusz Borowski’s Auschwitz stories, Sorstalanság differs from most accounts of Nazi concentration camps in its relentless objectivity, and as such is a unique achievement of its kind.

Imre Kertész

Dossier K by Imre Kertész – review

From Budapest to Buchenwald to the Nobel prize … Read Kertész, says Ian Sansom

Ian Sansom

Sat 13 Jul 2013 08.30 BST

I

n an essay about the work of the Nobel prize-winning Hungarian author Imre Kertész, his English translator Tim Wilkinson quotes a letter from a publisher, politely refusing Wilkinson's offer of a translation: "It's certainly not a question of the merit of the work being insufficient, but simply a keen awareness of the difficulties involved in introducing a new European writer to the UK market." The publishers Melville House either don't recognise the difficulties, or simply don't care. Either way, out of ignorance or in bliss, they have done us all a favour by publishing Wilkinson's translation of Dossier K. Though exactly what kind of favour is not entirely clear.

In his prefatory note, Kertész describes the book as "a veritable autobiography". He then adds: "If one acknowledges Nietzsche's proposition that the prototype of the novel as an art form was to be found in the Platonic dialogues, then the Reader is in fact holding a novel in his or her hands." So, novel, or autobiography? Both, perhaps.

Structurally, the book is also rather ambiguous. Apparently inspired by a series of conversations between Kertész and his editor, Zoltán Hafner – and yet not a transcript of those conversations – Dossier K takes the form of an interview with an unnamed interlocutor.

This, of course, is the characteristic Kertész method – simple and direct, yet somehow also swerving, like a dog across a field. His novel Fiasco (in Hungarian, A kudarc), for example, begins: "The old boy was standing in front of the filing cabinet. He was thinking … He had plenty of troubles and woes, so there were things to think about." And at the beginning of Liquidation (Felszámolás) the hero of the story, the dim, dull, troubled Kingbitter, stands at his window and looks out into the street below: "He was quite capable of frittering away whole half hours of his (as it happened, worthless) time by the window." Kertész, like his characters, stands before the window, or before the filing cabinet, before the facts, and thinks about them. It's an obvious way to begin. An interesting way to proceed. And it certainly leads to some unexpected conclusions.

Born in 1929, Kertész was taken from Budapest at the age of 14 and transported first to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald. In a memorable phrase in Dossier K he says that he eventually realised it was his job to reclaim his life, "which I had to take back from 'History', this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine alone". This life's work of reclamation has provided Kertész with his great theme, and a fascination with what he calls fatelessness, sorstalanság – the title of his most famous novel – which he defines here as "that specific aspect of dictatorships, the expropriation, nationalisation of one's own fate, turning it into a mass fate, the stripping away of a human being's most human essence".

Kertész's presence is extraordinary. It consists of a number of attributes and strongly held ideas and opinions. He famously objects, for example, to the word "Holocaust" – "a euphemism, a cowardly and unimaginative glibness". Quizzed by his interlocutor – himself? – about Theodor Adorno's statement that "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," Kertész responds clearly and robustly: "Well, if I may give a straight answer, I consider that statement to be a moral stink bomb that needlessly pollutes air that is already rank enough as things are." The stink comes from what he sees as "the assertion of an exclusive right to suffering, the appropriation, as it were, of the Holocaust". Always forthright, he also remarks – as again he has illustrated many times in his novels – that "the only thing two Jews have in common is their fears".

Throughout Dossier K he is unsparing also about his work – "art is nothing other than exaggeration and distortion" – and about himself. "All in all, I'm on the side of cheeriness. My error is that I don't elicit that feeling in others." He even grows impatient with his own questions: "It's been done to death. I've already covered that a hundred times."

And yet Kertész's harsh objectivity – severity, one might say – is matched by a rather sweet strain of melancholy and nostalgia, and much of the pleasure of the book derives from his recalling of details of his early life in Hungary, of matzos crumbled in coffee, and Herzegovina cigarettes, the sound of his father crunching garlic on toast, his childhood enthusiasm for CS Forester's Hornblower novels.

It's important that Kertész should remember and rehearse all of this, because it's being forgotten in Hungary. In a recent, short but important article in the New Yorker, the novelist Hari Kunzru interviewed a number of writers, musicians and intellectuals who expressed grave anxieties about the tendencies and policies of the country's rightwing government. George Szirtes, the Hungarian-born British poet, sounded the most serious warning: "In effect, it wants to return the country to the condition of the 30s … the atmosphere is full of hatred … inimical to the country I have loved and admired. Little by little, I find every part of it is being dismantled and banished." Heed Szirtes. Read Kertész.

• Ian Sansom's new novel The Norfolk Mystery is published by Fourth Estate

THE GUARDIAN

Portrait / Imre Kertész
Getting Started with Imre Kertész
Imre Kertesz / 'Schindler's List? Kitsch'
Dossier K by Imre Kertész / Review
Obituaries / Imre Kertész
Imre Kertész / A man apart
Imre Kertesz / Raw Materials
Imre Kertész / Against what, if nothing is resisting?
Imre Kertész / Europe’s Oppressive Legacy

Imre Kertesz / 'Schindler's List? Kitsch'

'Schindler's List? Kitsch'

Nobel winner Imre Kertesz thought the movie industry would ruin his Holocaust memoir Fateless. Was he right? 


By Geoffrey Macnab
Tue 23 Aug 2005

N

ot long before he went to Sweden to accept the 2002 Nobel prize for literature, the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz received a brown envelope in the post. It had been sent to him by the Buchenwald Memorial Centre and contained a copy of a report, dated February 18 1945, about the camp's prisoners. Among the deaths listed was that of prisoner number 64, 921 - a certain Imre Kertesz. He was described as a factory worker, born in 1927. In fact, Kertesz was born in 1929: he had lied about his age when he entered the camp so the Nazis wouldn't think him a child, and said he was a worker rather than a schoolboy to appear more useful. "In short, I died once so I could live," he said of the report in his Nobel prize acceptance speech. "Perhaps that is my real story."

Kertesz's experiences at Auschwitz and Buchenwald form the backcloth to his 1975 semi-autobiographical novel, Fateless, which the Nobel academy singled out in its citation. And it is largely thanks to the Nobel prize that Fateless has now been made into a movie.

Directed by Lajos Koltai - best-known for his photography on Istvan Szabo films including Being Julia - the film has had a troubled history. The most expensive production in Hungarian history, it was dogged by financial scandal, and almost abandoned when the original producer walked out. Even Kertesz says he wasn't eager to see Fateless turned into a film. But now it's finished he's happy with the results. "I was completely overwhelmed. I saw it as if I was a stranger. Paradoxically, despite the content, the film is very beautiful."

A small, balding man with a kindly demeanour and a mischievous smile, Kertesz is a self-deprecating and surprisingly humorous interviewee. He confides that he went on set only once during shooting. "When I was there, I lost my glasses and the whole crew started looking for them. That's not really what you want to call a fruitful cooperation."

Reviews for the film have been enthusiastic so far, with some critics comparing it to Spielberg's Schindler's List - although Kertesz dismisses Spielberg's movie as "kitsch" and the storytelling in each movie is very different. There is nothing spectacular in the way Fateless unfolds. As in the book, events are seen entirely from the perspective of 15-year-old protagonist Gyuri Koves (Marcell Nagy) as he is rounded up with thousands of other Hungarian Jews and put on a train to Auschwitz, then taken to Buchenwald.

Kertesz finished the book in Hungary in the mid-1960s but had to wait almost a decade to find a publisher. "Because I didn't write what the communist government wanted to see, I was cut off and alone with my work," he says. "I never thought my book would ever be published, and so I had the freedom to write as radically as I wanted." Even when the book did appear in 1975, critics paid little attention.

It wasn't until after the fall of the Iron Curtain that Kertesz began to win international literary awards - and producers became interested in making a movie of his best-known work. A screenplay was commissioned from a professional scriptwriter. This, to Kertesz's dismay, began with a famous violinist returning to Budapest from New York and then, in flashback, showed him as a teenager in the concentration camp. "I looked at his script and I realised that many things were wrong," Kertesz says. He decided to write a new screenplay, but it wasn't until he won the Nobel prize that anyone was willing to fund it.

Maybe potential financiers were put off by the way Fateless broke the "rules" governing Holocaust stories. Gyuri (like Kertesz) is a non-believing Jew. He is not educated according to Jewish traditions. "He is a non-Jewish Jew," Kertesz says, "and he had to share in the fate of so many Jews and he feels this is kind of an absurdity."

Among the film's most disconcerting scenes is the arrival at Auschwitz. The mood is perversely upbeat. We see a woman put on lipstick and some of the older men try to engage the guards in conversation. "The Hungarian Jews didn't know what to expect," Kertesz says. Reports about the death camps had reached Hungary by early 1944, but the Jewish Council had decided not to publish them. "So many people came to Germany who were simply clueless. They didn't know what to expect and since they hadn't been treated very well by the Hungarian gendarmerie, they were hoping things would turn out for the better."

Equally eerie is the scene in which the boy returns to Budapest after the US forces have liberated Buchenwald. His home is occupied by someone else. People don't know how to respond to him. They speak about his experiences in cliches and grow frustrated when he won't see himself as a victim. They're appalled when he expresses homesickness and nostalgia for the camp.

Like Gyuri, Kertesz was presented with a tantalising choice after the camps were liberated. He could go to the US or to return to Hungary. He chose the latter. Soon, though, Hungary fell under the yoke of Stalin. Kertesz, who lost his job as a journalist for not being respectful enough to his communist masters, was exposed to a new kind of dictatorship. This, he claims, liberated him as a writer.

"In a democracy," he says, "I would never have been able to understand and realise what happened to me back then in the camps. As an adult, I survived this dictatorship and this dictatorship told me what had happened to me when I was young."

THE GUARDIAN

Portrait / Imre Kertész
Getting Started with Imre Kertész
Imre Kertesz / 'Schindler's List? Kitsch'
Dossier K by Imre Kertész / Review
Obituaries / Imre Kertész
Imre Kertész / A man apart
Imre Kertesz / Raw Materials
Imre Kertész / Against what, if nothing is resisting?
Imre Kertész / Europe’s Oppressive Legacy

Getting Started with Imre Kertész

 

Getting Started with Imre Kertész

By Gary Adelman

Vol. 25, Nos. 1-2 (2004)

I.
Little more than thumbnail sketches are available to English readers of Imre Kertész, the Hungarian-Jewish novelist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in literature for such Holocaust books as Fateless (1975) and Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990), which are the only two of Kertész’s works that have been translated into English as of this writing.1 Kertész was one of seven thousand Budapest Jews deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. He was fifteen at the time, the same age as the narrator-protagonist of his autobiographical first novel, Fateless. In that book, George emerges from the camps with a mental clarity that promises a successful rehabilitation. In the later Kaddish, the unnamed survivor-protagonist is, in contrast, haunted, isolated, and suicidal. The two novels (reputed to be the first and third in a trilogy) represent two contradictory interpretations of the Holocaust, one potentially redemptive and the other nihilistic. The contrast of these two readings of extreme experience could not be more important to Kertész (as they were to Dostoevsky, beginning with his prison memoir, The House of the Dead). At issue is the recovery of one’s freedom, on the one hand, and on the other, existence seen as an absence agitated by memories and “panting towards the grand apnoea.”2

Portrait / Imre Kertész

 

Imre Kertesz in Berlin, 2006.
Photo by Isolde Ohlbaum/
Credit...Isolde Ohlbaum

Imre Kertész

Portrait

Imre Kertész is the first - and to this day only - Hungarian Nobel-prize laureate in literature, and, for this reason, probably one of the most talked about Hungarian writers in recent years.

7th April, 2004

He received the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his novel entitled Sorstalanság (Fateless), which records the experience of a young Hungarian Jewish boy during the Holocaust. His works have been translated into many languages, including German, English, Swedish, French, Hebrew, etc.