Imre Kertész

• Born: November 9, 1929
• Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
• Died: March 31, 2016
• Place of death: Budapest, Hungary

Biography

Imre Kertész (KEHR-tays) was born to a Hungarian Jewish couple in Budapest on November 9, 1929. His father owned a small factory and his mother was a housewife. In 1944, between 500,000 and 600,000 Hungarian Jews and Gypsies were belatedly sent to Nazi labor camps after the German army occupied Hungary, a wavering ally, in the spring of that year.

Kertész was fourteen years old when, on June 30, 1944, he was rounded up on a city bus with others wearing the mandatory yellow Star of David on their clothing. In a freight car carrying sixty people, he was first sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland and then to the Zeitz and Buchenwald camps in Germany. Earlier, his father had been shipped to the Mathausen labor camp in Austria. The year young Kertész spent in the concentration camps was to be the signal event in his life and later writings.

Liberated by American forces in May 1945, Kertész returned to Budapest to find that his father had died at Mathausen, his stepmother had remarried, and strangers were now living in the family’s former home. Even more shocking to the repatriated Kertész, according to his autobiographical novel Sorstalanság (1975; Fateless, 1992), was the indifference, even hostility, Hungarians showed to the returning prisoner, who was still wearing his striped camp uniform, as he searched for his mother. Being a secular Jew, he had never given much thought to his Jewishness until, he explained, it was foisted on him by the Holocaust. Even in the concentration camps he was sometimes derided because he did not speak Yiddish, the language of Eastern European Jewry, or Hebrew, the language of their faith.

After completing high school in 1948, Kertész found work with a newspaper, Világosság, in 1949, but he lost his job in 1951, when the newspaper adopted a strictly Communist and Stalinist editorial policy. By then, Hungary had a large Soviet military presence and was part of the Soviet empire. Kertész did a mandatory stint in the Hungarian army. Upon his release, he survived financially as a freelance radio reporter and eventually wrote librettos for musical comedies. He later became a Hungarian translator for German publishing houses specializing in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schnitzler, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Bernhard, and other German-language writers, some of whom influenced his own work. In 1953, he married his first wife, Albina, who died of cancer in 1995. The couple was childless because Albina was unable to bear a child.

Kertész decided to remain in Hungary in the fall of 1956, when Hungarians revolted against the country’s Communist government and its Soviet-imposed policies. He later explained that leaving the country would have ended his aspirations to write in his mother tongue. When he was in East Germany in 1962, Kertész revisited the concentration camp at Buchenwald and found things much changed since his departure in 1945.

Kertész worked on the manuscript of his first and best-known novel, Fateless, for thirteen years and eventually found a publisher in 1975, by which time Hungary had become more liberal than its previous hardline Stalinist incarnation. Still, very few Hungarians knew of or read the book. Fateless is Kertész’s own story of an adolescent’s coming-of-age in the midst of humanity’s ever-recurring cycles of barbarism. Like Kertész, the boy, György Köves, survives the Holocaust and later survives his liberation by blending into anonymity and silence during Communist rule.

Kertész authored several other novels and nonfiction books, a few of which were translated into English and other languages.

With the fall of communism and the Soviet Union from 1989 through 1991, Kertész took advantage of his new freedom to travel to Israel, Western Europe, and the United States, where his second wife, Magda, had lived since she escaped from Hungary in 1956. Magda Kertész is fluent in English and was an articulate spokeswoman and translator for her husband.

Kertész was catapulted into fame and relative affluence in October 2002, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. When Kertész, the first Hungarian to win the prize, returned to Budapest after being honored in Sweden in December 2002, he was greeted as a hero. Some seventy thousand copies of Fateless were sold within a few weeks, and the Hungarian parliament revoked the tax that would have been due on his $1.1 million award.

Despite the fact that Kertész continued to characterize himself as a secular Jew, he still blamed Hungarian society for its participation in the systematic elimination of much of the country’s Jewish minority during World War II. Even after his triumphant return to Hungary, he spent as much time as he could in his Berlin apartment rather than at his Budapest home, since, in his judgment, the Germans had accepted their responsibility for the Holocaust much more readily than the Hungarians, and he believed that Hungary was still suffering from a continuing latent anti-Semitism.

The year after receiving the Nobel Prize, Kertész published the novel Felszámolás (Liquidation, 2004), about an editor searching for the suspected lost work of a friend, a writer and Holocaust survivor, who had taken his own life. After receiving the Goethe Medal in 2004 and publishing the book K. dosszié in 2006 (Dossier K, 2013), he wrote and published three more works, with the final being the more untraditional novel A végső kocsma (2014). That year, he was also honored with Hungary's Order of St. Stephen. Having reportedly struggled with Parkinson's disease for several years, he died on March 31, 2016, at the age of eighty-six at his home in Budapest.

Analysis

Imre Kertész’s first novel, Fateless, is a fairly conventional, chronological narrative of an adolescent boy’s reminiscences. It begins with the family’s preparations for and farewells to their father after he receives notification that he will be taken to the Mathausen labor camp in Austria. The emphasis is on plain, unsentimental detail in a novel where the young and unsophisticated narrator tries to understand his situation in the concentration camps to which he is dispatched and where death is a constant possibility. The tale, however, has a dreamlike quality and at times is upbeat as its author allows that everyday life in the camps contains moments of happiness—even as the youth adapts to a radically threatening reality, where individuals are ciphers and where survival becomes a collective act.

In contrast, another one of Kertész’s novels, Kaddis a meg nem születetett gyermekért (1990; Kaddish for a Child Not Born, 1997), is a breathless, obsessive, unrelenting monologue. It is part meditation, part memoir, part highly abstract, nonchronological, and inconclusive narrative in the first person touching on a series of scenes, images, and issues, all written in a somber tone about a man who refuses to father a child in a world that has produced, and can again produce, an Auschwitz. The work gives the impression of being written in one long paragraph and in endless sentences. It is a novel of repetition, ambiguity, and uncertainty narrated by a middle-aged Holocaust survivor, his life work being the translation of experience into fiction.

Felszámolás (2003; Liquidation, 2004) is an investigation into the suicide of an Auschwitz survivor focusing on a play of the same name within the novel. Along the way, important details about the private lives of some of the leading characters come to light. Despite some humorous touches, the book is brooding and exudes melancholy.

Viewing the Holocaust in the context of the Communist rule that followed Nazism, Kertész concludes that the totalitarianism that both events typified was not peculiar to the Nazi or Communist regimes but was a general and human condition. Thus for Kertész, the concentration camps of the Holocaust were not a coincidence but a logical and unavoidable consequence of European culture—especially in Hungary, where extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism had resurfaced several times and where laws defining work and other quotas for Jews preceded the Nazi occupation of 1944.

Fateless

First published:Sorstalanság, 1975 (English translation, 1992; also as Fatelessness, 2004)

Type of work: Novel

A Hungarian Jew recounts his adolescence spent as a prisoner in three concentration camps during the last months of the Holocaust.

The book’s title refers to the fact that there was no certainty in the destiny of those sent to the Nazi labor/extermination camps. It is a disturbing novel about a guileless Hungarian Jewish boy’s experience in the last months of World War II, including the freezing winter of 1944–45, at the Auschwitz, Zeitz, and Buchenwald camps. As such, it is a highly autobiographical tale about the coming-of-age and survival of an innocent youth, whose lack of sophistication makes him focus on everyday questions of existence rather than on his dismal and threatening environment.

Upon arrival at Auschwitz, the most notorious camp in occupied Poland, the boy is advised by other prisoners to add a couple of years to his declared age so he may be assigned to a work detail rather than be “eliminated” as excess baggage as a matter of course. The narrator, György Köves (Imre Kertész), dwells on the minutiae of daily camp life, also of concern to his captors, so that perpetrators and victims are perversely though unintentionally bonded. For example, the narrator is constantly worried about his daily turnip and kohlrabi soup, concerned whether his portion will be ladled out from the top of the urn, so he will get mostly broth, or whether he will be lucky enough to receive his share from the bottom, where there are vegetables, and, on a lucky day, even a potato or a piece of sausage.

In the camps he tries to adjust to his situation by imposing the logic of a bright, sensitive teenager. His moments of joy are derived from some of his idle time between the end of the working day and the evening roll call, and, more generally, his happiness stems from the solidarity he feels with some of his fellow inmates. He is especially happy that the medical personnel among the political prisoners, who enjoy more privileges than the others, are willing to assign him a hospital bed and treat his severely infected, injured knee before the officials discover that he has become a disposable resource. Joy also flows from his occasional thoughts of possible freedom.

In fact, Köves even feels some rapport with his German captors, whose presence is sensed only remotely in the camp, since the immediate supervision of prisoners was often left to other prisoners—intermittently brutal Kapos—in exchange for privileges granted to them. The boy sees the Germans as being caught, just as himself, in the inevitable web of history or the universal dictates of human nature comprising both good and evil. The novel is effective because it makes no attempt to sensationalize, editorialize, or embellish but describes reality as the boy sees it.

On his return to Budapest in 1945, the adolescent’s former neighbors and friends, even some Jews, urge him to put the ordeal out of his mind, advice that baffles him since “what happened had happened.” He also cannot relate to the words of a sympathetic journalist, who says he should feel outraged for having spent time in “the lowest circle of hell.” As for the overall reaction of citizens to that episode in Hungarian history, at times it makes Köves (Kertész) nostalgic for the solidarity he experienced in the labor camps. Thus, at the end of the novel the adolescent is left to ponder the meaning of his experience, for which Kertész finds additional voice, insight, and analysis in his later novels.

Fateless is a carefully crafted novel, with the author trying hard to say things the right way. It is a simple narrative by a young boy who does not have a complete grasp of where history had taken him.

Kaddish for a Child Not Born

First published:Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért, 1990 (English translation, 1997; also as Kaddish for an Unborn Child, 2004)

Type of work: Novel

A middle-aged Hungarian Jewish writer, a survivor of the Holocaust, refuses to father a child in an uncertain and brutal world.

The protagonist of this novel, a middle-aged writer and concentration camp survivor, addresses himself to the child he would not have. In his imagination, he is reciting Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, for his unborn child. He figures that the horrifying events of the Holocaust, given historical evolution as well as the evil streak in human nature, could recur, as he explains to a friend at a writers’ retreat. He does not wish to bring into the world a child who could experience the same fate (or fatelessness), since in his view the Holocaust was only one example of an extreme form of domination by a public authority at the expense of individuals’ lives, self-respect, and freedom—a pathology of modern society and not an isolated case of Nazi Germany victimizing Jews. “What happened to me, my childhood, must never happen to another child,” he muses.

As he reviews his life he considers his many disappointments, such as his marriage, which failed because of his refusal to accede to his wife’s longing for a child, and his unsuccessful literary career. His sense of void is enhanced when he contemplates the picture of his former spouse’s attractive children from her second marriage, children that could have been his own.

Both the narrator and his former wife are Jewish. Unable to fully come to terms with that aspect of his identity, especially as the narrator lacks the emotional and spiritual ties to his Jewish heritage, he is left to consider writing as the only creative act of which he is ostensibly capable. He is unsuccessful even at that. In the midst of long metaphysical musings, his stream of consciousness is peppered with the intermittently recurring word “no,” the defining trope of the novel, as the author keeps recalling his refusal to have children years earlier. However, his wife, who admits that the narrator had taught her how to live with herself, now wants more—not just marriage but also family.

Kaddish is a bumpy novel, but there is purpose in Kertész’s choice of language, innumerable repetitions, and emphasis on the contradictory. The tone is introspective yet unsentimental.

Liquidation

First published:Felszámolás, 2003 (English translation, 2004)

Type of work: Novel

A middle-aged Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, who was born in this concentration camp, commits suicide after his accurate prediction of his friends’ future.

This book is about the termination (or liquidation) of various things. About the time of the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, B., also called Bee, is a well-known writer who was born in and survived the Nazis’ Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland during World War II. He also lived through the Communist aftermath of the Holocaust. Now, however, he has committed suicide with a morphine overdose. The letter “B” and four numerals tattooed on his thigh, instead of his tiny arm when he was a baby, testifies to his origins.

Fellow workers come to his friend Kingbitter’s office to discuss B.’s literary affairs. Among the papers that Kingbitter has salvaged from Communist authorities is the manuscript of a play entitled Liquidation. As he reads the script to his colleagues at the office, Kingbitter is amazed at the prescient way in which B. foretells the personal and political crises that Kingbitter and B.’s other close friends now face. These include the liquidation of the bankrupt, state-owned publishing house—a remnant of the Communist era—where they work, which has been considering the publication of B.’s literary efforts. Because of these events and B.’s liquidation of his life, as well as the liquidation of his full-length manuscript (allegedly at B.’s orders to his girlfriend), and, more generally because of the liquidation of the art of literature in favor of dilettantism and ideological spin during Communism, the members of the group are left with a sense of lost identity, despair, and chaos to confront their moment in history.

Kingbitter, who is managing B.’s literary estate, is desperate to understand his friend’s suicide and searches for the longer manuscript (never found), of which the play, he believes, is a synopsis. In his search for the lost novel, he contacts Sarah, who was B.’s lover at the end of his life, and then Judit, B.’s former wife. Their marriage had broken up when B. told his spouse that because of Auschwitz she should not want him to father a child. His wife is driven to divorce him, since she does not want to see the world as a place filled with murderers but rather as a place where it is also possible to live.

Kingbitter, the consummate editor, tries to make sense out of B.’s life, personal and literary. Along the way, however, he finds that his friend’s life has in fact been more intimately linked to his own than he had realized. For example, Kingbitter now discovers that the two friends had been involved with their respective women. Another character of some note is Kürti, also employed by the publishing house, a cuckolded and embittered intellectual, who has similarly suffered from history’s cruelties. In short, the novel is about life’s losers.

Kertész seems to create a fragmented plot as a way to address the fate of those who have none following the Holocaust and four decades of Communist totalitarianism. There are few substantive answers and the seemingly incoherent organization of the work highlights that fact. The author restates one of the basic themes in most of his Holocaust writings, namely, that “Auschwitz has been hanging around the world since long ago, perhaps for centuries.” The play Liquidation lacks cohesion, as does the novel of the same name, because its fragmented construction is meant to reflect the incoherent chaos of the world. However, Kertész’s main theme echoes that of his earlier novels: The Holocaust is not inexplicable; rather, it is a given within which there are other givens.

Summary

The Holocaust and the subsequent rise of Communist totalitarianism are the major themes of Imre Kertész’s work. While specifics may change, he believed such events would recur because they are generated by ever-present ideological, cultural, historical, and human reasons. Some individuals caught in these events are able to survive, while others do not, their lives liquidated by a totalitarian public authority or by their own hands. To Kertész, the Holocaust was not a morality tale but merely a specific example of history’s many cruelties.

Bibliography

Basa, Enikö Molnár, editor. Hungarian Literature. Griffon House, 1993. Includes insights into the novels of Kertész and the influence of conditions in Hungary on his writings.

Czigány, Lóránt. The Oxford History of Hungarian Literature from the Earliest Times to the Present. Oxford UP, 1984. Documents the style and contributions of Kertész to novel writing in Hungary.

Kandell, Jonathan. "Imre Kertesz, Nobel Laureate Who Survived Holocaust, Dies at 86." The New York Times, 31 Mar. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/04/01/world/europe/imre-kertesz-dies.html. Accessed 22 Dec. 2017.

Nagy, Moses M., editor. A Journey into History: Essays on Hungarian Literature. Peter Lang, 1990. Explores some of the contributions and impact of Kertész through his writings about conditions and circumstances associated with the Holocaust.

Vasvári, Louise O. and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, editors. Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature. Purdue UP, 2005. A collection of essays that analyze Kertesz’s works and examine the impact the Holocaust had on forming his cultural and ethnic identity.