Imre Kertész wrote the screenplay for the film Fateless

Person: Imre Kertész
Lived: 1929–2016
Field: Literature
From: Hungarian

The story

Imre Kertész's novel Fatelessness tells the story of György Köves, a Jewish teenager from Budapest. His father is sent to a labour camp, and soon afterwards the boy is taken off a bus with other Jews and deported to Auschwitz. By lying about his age he unknowingly saves his own life. He is moved on to Buchenwald and then to a camp at Zeitz, falls gravely ill, and survives to return to a city whose people have only just begun to hear what happened in the camps.

The book drew on Kertész's own deportation at the age of 14 in 1944. Rejected at first by Hungary's Communist authorities, it was published in 1975 and met with silence, but over the following decades it found readers at home and abroad, and in 2002 Kertész became the first Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Three decades after the novel appeared, it was adapted for the screen in Hungary, and Kertész wrote the screenplay himself. The film, Fateless, was directed by Lajos Koltai and starred Marcell Nagy as György. It premiered at the Hungarian Film Festival on 8 February 2005, was selected for the competition at the Berlin International Film Festival that year, and was shown at the Telluride and Toronto festivals before opening in the United States in January 2006. The British actor Daniel Craig appears in a cameo as an American army sergeant, and the music was composed by Ennio Morricone.

A co-production of Hungary, Germany and the United Kingdom, the film cost about $12 million, making it one of the most expensive films ever produced in Hungary. It was nominated for European Film Awards for its cinematography and its score. Wikipedia notes that some reviewers found it more openly autobiographical than the novel.

The film brought Kertész's story to a wider international audience than ever before. Fatelessness had by then become part of many high school curriculums in Hungary, and the film gave students and cinema audiences a new way into the book's unsentimental account of how an ordinary boy experienced the camps.

Why it matters

The film carried Kertész's testimony beyond readers of literature, helping new audiences understand the Holocaust through one boy's eyes.

About Imre Kertész

Budapest-born survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald whose novel Fatelessness transformed Holocaust literature; in 2002 he became the first Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Imre Kertész

1929–2016 · Literature

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