‘Everyone asks me that,” replies Imre Kertész when I ask, isn’t it ironic that he spends so much time in Berlin? “It’s not ironic, because it was in Germany that I made an impact as a writer, where my book was understood and published. I felt I could say something. I could do something. And anyway it was here, not Germany, that I first experienced fascism.”
We are in Budapest, in the café of the Gresham Palace. Kertész has arrived with his second wife, Magda, smiling as if he’s just heard a good joke. Somehow you expect a Nobel Laureate, a man who was shipped to Auschwitz at 14, pronounced dead at Buchenwald and who spent decades living a hand-to-mouth existence as an unfashionable author working in a language only spoken by 15 million people, to be less… good-humoured. His smile is partly the smile of the victor, partly the smile of a man at ease with fatelessness.
Berlin has become a second home for several Hungarian writers. Many British writers would be hard-pressed without German royalties, but most established Hungarians simply wouldn’t be able to eat. There’s an element of “sorry we tried to gas you” in relation to older Jewish writers such as György Konrád and Kertész, but the links of history and geography are strong in any case. “There was great interest in the Holocaust,” says Kertész of his reception in Germany in the 1990s. “I didn’t moralise and they understood something about the past with Hungarian help.”
Talking about the Holocaust in London is very different to talking about it in Budapest, where 437,000 citizens were transported to Auschwitz. The Gresham Palace is a few yards from the Danube, where in the final days of the Second World War, when marshalling them became too tricky, Jews were shot and dumped in the river.
Kertész’s first novel, Fatelessness, was published in 1975. He didn’t have an easy time with his semi-autobiographical account of the camps. “There were two publishers in socialist Hungary. One rejected it on the grounds that it was anti-Semitic. I still have the letter.” But publication doesn’t guarantee acclaim. Here is the entire entry on Kertész from the Oxford History of Hungarian Literature: “eg. Imre Kertész”. His reception back home was little better.
There was a curious attitude towards the Holocaust in the Communist era. On the one hand, it was the work of the Fascists, and therefore highly eligible for condemnation, and was in its rightful place in the history books. On the other hand, no one really wanted to dwell on it too much. It’s hard to say whether this was an anti-Zionist stance (Israel having sided with the West), good old-fashioned anti-Semitism, or a reflection that so much Jewish property had ended up in the hands of the Communists. The ex-communist prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány lives in a villa expropriated from a Jewish family.
Kertész made a living writing musicals and doing translations, publishing short works every few years. He was well-respected, but when he won the Nobel Prize in 2002, a wave of “Imre Who?” swept the country. Fellow-novelist Akos Kertész, no relation, also enjoyed a boost in sales.
“I lived through Auschwitz. I lived through the 1948 Communist takeover. It was a harsh dictatorship. Stalinist. I lived through it. Kádár’s crushing of the 1956 revolution [and] the consequent consolidation created a type of man… it reshaped the population in an awful way. They assimilated to the ’soft’ dictatorship.” Surprisingly, Kertész adds that his insight into one totalitarian system was as much inspired by another – the regime of János Kádár, put into power by the Soviet Union in 1956. “The Kádár system brought about the viewpoint of Fatelessness.” So why didn’t he leave with the other 200,000 Hungarians who walked out to the West? “I was 27 and I wouldn’t have stayed if I hadn’t started to write. At 27 I couldn’t learn how to write in another language. It was because of language that I didn’t leave.” …more>>
11/01/2008...10:19 am
Imre Kertész: Memoirs of a survivor
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