- Person
- Imre Kertész
- Lived
- 1929–2016
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Hungarian
The story
Under communism, Imre Kertész had few chances to speak publicly. A survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he lived for decades as a translator while his own novels found little appreciation in Hungary. NobelPrize.org notes that after the political upheavals of 1989 he was able to make more public appearances, and the Jewish Virtual Library records that he lectured extensively after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.
His lectures and essays were gathered in several collections: A holocaust mint kultúra (The Holocaust as Culture, 1993), A gondolatnyi csend, amíg a kivégzőosztag újratölt (Moments of Silence While the Execution Squad Reloads, 1998) and A száműzött nyelv (The Exiled Language, 2001). In them he reflected on memory, language and the meaning of Auschwitz for European civilisation.
Kertész refused to treat the Holocaust as a closed chapter or as a conflict between Germans and Jews alone. As the Swedish Academy summarised his view, Auschwitz was not an exceptional event standing outside the normal history of Western Europe but the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern existence. In his Nobel lecture he said that the Holocaust had undeniably created a culture, and that its aim must be to turn an irredeemable reality, through the spirit, into restoration and catharsis. He was equally demanding about how it should be shown, regarding as kitsch any portrayal that failed to grasp the link between our own distorted way of life and the possibility of the Holocaust.
He also kept a fictional diary, Galley Diary, covering the years 1961 to 1991 and published in 1992, in which he carried on a dialogue with writers and thinkers from Pascal and Goethe to Nietzsche, Kafka, Camus and Beckett. He continued it in Valaki más (I, Another: Chronicle of a Metamorphosis, 1997), notes from the years 1991 to 1995. Together these books form a long, searching record of a survivor's inner life under dictatorship and in the new democracy.
His works have been translated into many languages, including German, Spanish, French, English, Czech, Russian, Swedish and Hebrew, and his essays remain a reference point for writers and teachers thinking about how the Holocaust should be remembered.
Why it matters
Kertész's essays and lectures helped shape how Europe thinks and teaches about the Holocaust.
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.
More about Imre Kertész
- Imre Kertész wrote the screenplay for the film FatelessImre Kertész wrote the screenplay for Fateless, the 2005 Hungarian film of his Holocaust novel, directed by Lajos Koltai.
- Imre Kertész's Fatelessness overcame censorship in 1975Imre Kertész's novel Fatelessness, about a Jewish boy in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was first rejected by Hungary's Communist regime but published in 1975.
- Imre Kertész completed a Holocaust trilogy with KaddishImre Kertész's novels Fatelessness (1975), Fiasco (1988) and Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990) form a trilogy about surviving the Holocaust and its aftermath.
- Imre Kertész translated Nietzsche, Freud and WittgensteinImre Kertész supported himself for years as a translator, bringing Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Schnitzler and Canetti into Hungarian.
- Imre Kertész gave voice to witness literatureNobelPrize.org describes Imre Kertész's novels as part of witness literature, in which an author writes about trauma from personal experience.
Sources
- Imre Kertész – Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Imre Kertész Jewish Virtual Library
- Imre Kertész: Nobel Lecture NobelPrize.org
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