- Person
- Imre Kertész
- Lived
- 1929–2016
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Hungarian
The story
Imre Kertész was born in Budapest in 1929 to a middle-class Jewish family, and in 1940 he was placed in a special class for Jewish students at secondary school. He was 14 when he was deported from Budapest to Auschwitz in 1944. Wikipedia records that on arrival he claimed to be a 16-year-old worker, which saved him from the immediate death that awaited younger children. He was later moved to Buchenwald and was liberated in 1945.
The camps left their mark even on the official record. In his Nobel lecture Kertész explained that when he was brought to Buchenwald, two false details were entered in the registry: his year of birth, given as 1927, and his occupation, factory worker. Many years later the director of the Buchenwald Memorial sent him a copy of a camp report that listed prisoner 64,921, Imre Kertész, among the dead.
These events became the heart of his writing. NobelPrize.org explains that Kertész associated himself with the literary concept known as witness literature, in which an author describes a trauma drawn from personal experience. He once said that whenever he thought about a new novel, he thought of Auschwitz, and in his Nobel lecture he said that in his writings the Holocaust could never be present in the past tense. Yet he insisted on artistic freedom, using the form of the autobiographical novel without writing straightforward autobiography.
The Nobel committee praised writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history. NobelPrize.org adds that his novels ask what it means to live under an ideological death sentence, and how one can handle surviving when so many other people died. The Swedish Academy noted that he spares readers ready-made emotions and instead invites a rare freedom of thought.
Kertész saw his task as looking forward as well as back. In his Nobel lecture he said that whenever he thought about the trauma of Auschwitz, he ended up reflecting on the vitality and creativity of people living today, and so, paradoxically, on the future rather than the past.
Why it matters
By turning his own survival into art, Kertész helped ensure that the experience of the Holocaust's victims would be understood by future generations.
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's lectures explored the Holocaust as cultureAfter 1989 Imre Kertész lectured widely, and his talks were collected in books including The Holocaust as Culture (1993) and The Exiled Language (2001).
Sources
- Imre Kertész – Facts NobelPrize.org
- Imre Kertész – Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Imre Kertész Wikipedia
- Imre Kertész: Nobel Lecture NobelPrize.org
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.