Imre Kertesz, the Hungarian Holocaust survivor who has been awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature, has drawn heavily on his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald to hold up a mirror to history.
The key work in his oeuvre, ”Sorstalensag” (Fateless) is a shocking account of life in the concentration camp told through the eyes of a 15-year-old Jewish narrator, Gyorgy Koves. The boy’s very naivety adds to the horror as Kertesz tells of his own and his father’s deportation during the Nazi persecution without any idea of what might happen next.
At the time of publication, Kertesz came under fire from certain quarters who considered it a scandal that anyone could write of finding moments of happiness in a concentration camp, yet in Kertesz’s hands the story never trivialises nor renders harmless the ever-present menace. Instead, it provides an insight into life in the camp as it unfolds, rather than with the benefit of hindsight, which makes it all the more immediate.
It is this quality which the Swedish Academy recognised in its Nobel Prize citation, characterising his writing as upholding ”the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”
”In his writing Imre Kertesz explores the possibility of continuing to live and think as an individual in an era in which the subjection of human beings to social forces has become increasingly complete,” the Academy said.
For Kertesz (72) Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence, outside the normal history of western Europe. ”It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern existence,” the Academy concluded.
Yet, Kertesz had great difficulty in getting the book published and he remains poorly served by translation into English, with only one other work, ”Kaddish for a Child Not Born” and ”Fiasko” (sic) published in English language versions, although he is immensely popular in Germany.
Born in Budapest to a Jewish family on November 9, 1929, Kertesz was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and released from Buchenwald by the Americans in May 1945 as World War II drew to a close. Having suffered under the Nazis, Kertesz became a victim of Communism in 1951 when he was dismissed from his job on the Budapest newspaper Vilagossag, for which he had worked for three years, when it was declared the official organ of the Hungarian Communist Party.
After his national service, he became a full-time writer and translator, bringing the works and ideas of German writers and philosophers from Friederich Nietzsche to Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein to Arthur Schnitzler and Joseph Roth to the Hungarian people.
In 1975, the publication of ”Fateless”, his first novel, was his literary breakthrough but was received coldly in his native land at first and, while he denied it was autobiographical, he admitted: ”Whenever I think of writing a novel, I always think about Auschwitz.”
He has continued to write and publish works relating to that harrowing period of his life, including his war diaries and since the political upheaval and the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, has found it easier to appear in public, giving readings and lectures. – Sapa-AFP