Imre Kertész's Fatelessness overcame censorship in 1975

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

The story

Imre Kertész was 14 when he was deported from Budapest to Auschwitz in 1944. He survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was liberated in 1945 and returned home, where he worked as a journalist until 1951, when the newspaper Világosság dismissed him for not following the Communist Party line. After a spell as a factory worker and two years of military service, he made his living as a translator of German-language authors.

In his Nobel lecture Kertész recalled how, on a spring day in 1955, ten years after returning from the camps, he realised that only a few muddled impressions of the experience remained to him. He resolved to take back his own life from History. He began work on his first novel, Sorstalanság (Fatelessness), and wrote it over many years, completing it in the early 1970s.

The novel follows György Köves, a Jewish teenager from Budapest who is deported to Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz and survives. As the Swedish Academy later explained, its unsettling power comes from the way the boy takes the reality of the camp for granted, describing it as an everyday existence without the moral indignation readers expect. He lacks ready-made answers, and the reader is confronted not only with atrocity but with the thoughtlessness with which it was carried out. Kertész said he used the form of the autobiographical novel without writing autobiography.

The book was at first rejected for publication by Hungary's Communist regime, and when it finally appeared in Budapest in 1975 it was received, as NobelPrize.org puts it, with compact silence. Kertész later turned that experience into his novel Fiasco (1988). He also said in his Nobel lecture that he probably could not have written the novel in a free society in the West.

Recognition eventually came. Fatelessness was translated into English as Fateless in 1992 and, in a new translation by Tim Wilkinson, as Fatelessness in 2004. It became part of many high school curriculums in Hungary, was filmed in 2005 with a screenplay by Kertész, and was singled out by the Swedish Academy when it awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002.

Why it matters

Fatelessness has become one of the essential books about the Holocaust, read by students in Hungary and around the world.

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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