Imre Kertész was fourteen years old when he was deported from Budapest to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. He was sent on within days to Buchenwald and from there to its small satellite camp at Zeitz, where he worked through the autumn and winter on construction labour. He was liberated at Buchenwald in April 1945. He returned to Budapest, where most of his family was dead. He spent the rest of his life under the Hungarian communist regime that succeeded the war, working as a translator from German, writing in his own time, and producing in 1975 the novel Sorstalanság, Fatelessness, that would eventually win him the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Sorstalanság was rejected by Hungarian publishers for ten years and finally appeared in 1975 in a small print run. The book takes the experience of a boy who passes through Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz and tells it in flat, careful, almost expressionless Hungarian prose. The narrator does not editorialise. He observes. He notes that the camp had its own logic, its own routines, its own beauty even, in the way the sky looked at evening, and he refuses, at every turn, to use any of the available consoling rhetoric of survival, redemption or meaning. The book is the most thoroughgoing rejection of the standard postwar Holocaust novel ever written. It is also, in its quietness, devastating.
Kertész wrote two further novels in the cycle, A kudarc, Fiasco, in 1988 and Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, in 1990. He also wrote essays, diaries and lectures. The Nobel committee gave him the prize in 2002 with the citation that his work upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history. He was the first Hungarian writer to win the prize.
The reception in Hungary was mixed. The communist regime had ignored him for thirty years. The post-1989 democratic Hungary was more welcoming at first but the rise of the Orbán government from 2010 onwards saw a return of antisemitic and revisionist currents in the public culture, including attempts to rehabilitate the wartime Horthy regime that had deported Kertész and his family. Kertész spoke and wrote against this in his last years. He moved permanently to Berlin in 2003 and lived there for most of the time afterwards.
He died in Budapest on 31 March 2016 at the age of eighty six. His grave is in the Fíumeúti cemetery in Budapest. The Hungarian government, which had given him the Order of Saint Stephen in 2014 over his own and the public’s objections to the politics of the award, gave him a state funeral. He had not asked for one.
The work is in print in most major languages. Sorstalanság remains the central text. Anyone who wants to understand what an honest Holocaust novel can do, after Levi and Wiesel and after the genre had hardened into its standard shapes, should read it.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards