A Budapest childhood
Imre Kertész was born in Budapest on November 9, 1929, the son of László Kertész and Aranka Jakab, a middle-class, largely assimilated Jewish couple. His parents separated when he was about five, and he spent part of his childhood at a boarding school. He grew up as a secular Hungarian boy, with little sense of what being Jewish meant beyond the fact itself.
The world soon taught him. Hungary in the late 1930s passed a series of anti-Jewish laws restricting Jews’ access to the professions, the universities and public life, and in 1940, when Kertész began secondary school, he was placed in a special class for Jewish pupils. Later he would say that he had never chosen to be a Jew; to a large extent, he told an interviewer, it had been imposed on him.
Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Zeitz
Hungary’s Jews survived the first years of the war largely intact, but in March 1944 Germany occupied its ally, and within weeks Hungarian authorities, working with Adolf Eichmann’s officials, began deporting Jews from the provinces to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some 437,000 were deported in less than two months, most of them murdered on arrival. In 1944 the fourteen-year-old Kertész was among the Jews deported from Hungary to Auschwitz.
On arrival he told the selectors that he was a sixteen-year-old worker, a lie that spared him from the gas chambers. He was sent on to Buchenwald and to its subcamp at Zeitz, where prisoners laboured in brutal conditions for a synthetic-fuel works. He survived starvation and illness, and was liberated in 1945. He returned to a Budapest where, as his fictional alter ego would discover, people who had not been deported were only beginning to grasp what had happened.
Years of silence under Communism
Kertész finished secondary school in 1948 and went to work as a journalist for the Budapest newspaper Világosság. In 1951, when the paper was brought into line with the Communist Party, he lost his job. He worked for a time in a factory and then in the press office of the Ministry of Heavy Industry, and served two years in the army. From 1953 he made his living as a freelance writer and translator, translating German-language authors into Hungarian, among them Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Elias Canetti.
Translation was a living and also a school. The German philosophers and writers he rendered into Hungarian shaped his understanding of language, totalitarianism and the self, and gave him the intellectual tools with which he would confront his own experience.
Fatelessness
Over more than a decade, working in near isolation, Kertész wrote his first novel, Sorstalanság, Fatelessness. Rejected by the state publisher, it finally appeared in Budapest in 1975, and it met with almost complete silence.
The novel follows György Köves, a fourteen-year-old Budapest boy, from his father’s departure for a labour camp through his own deportation to Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz, and his return home. What makes the book unlike almost any other Holocaust narrative is its voice. György narrates in the present of his experience, without hindsight, without moral commentary, with a disconcerting politeness and a teenager’s eagerness to understand and fit in. He takes the camp as he finds it, step by step, and the reader is left to supply the horror he does not name. At the end, back in Budapest, he refuses the comforting idea that what happened to him was simply fate, an incomprehensible catastrophe outside time: it was a sequence of steps, each of which he had taken. Hence the title, the denial to the victim of his own destiny, his own fate.
English-speaking readers came to the book late. A first translation by Christopher C. and Katharina M. Wilson appeared in 1992 as Fateless; a new translation by Tim Wilkinson, published in 2004 as Fatelessness, brought it to a much wider audience. The 2005 film adaptation, with Kertész’s own screenplay, starred Marcell Nagy as György, with Daniel Craig in a brief role as an American sergeant at the liberation.
Kertész insisted that the Holocaust was not an aberration but something that grew out of modern life itself, and he was scathing about representations that turned it into consoling drama, famously criticising Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List as kitsch.
The trilogy and after
Fatelessness became the first part of a loose trilogy. A kudarc (Fiasco, 1988) is a novel about a writer whose book about the camps is rejected, mirroring Kertész’s own frustrations under the regime. Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért (Kaddish for an Unborn Child, 1990) is a long, incantatory monologue by a survivor, a writer, explaining why he refused to bring a child into a world that had allowed Auschwitz. His journals of the Communist years, Gályanapló (Galley Diary, 1992), record the inner life of a writer working in obscurity.
Later books included Felszámolás (Liquidation, 2003), set during Hungary’s transition from Communism to democracy, whose central character, a writer and survivor, has taken his own life; Dossier K (2006), a book-length self-interview about his life and work; and A végső kocsma (The Last Refuge, 2014). After the fall of Communism he lectured widely, and his essays on the Holocaust and its meaning for European culture were collected in several volumes. He also wrote the screenplay for the 2005 film of Fatelessness, directed by Lajos Koltai.
Recognition, in Germany first
For years Kertész was far better appreciated in Germany than in Hungary. German publishers and critics championed his work in translation through the 1990s, and he received a stream of German literary prizes. In 2002 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” He was the first Hungarian to receive the prize in literature.
Honours accumulated, at home as well as abroad. In Hungary he received the Attila József Prize in 1989 and the Kossuth Prize, the country’s leading cultural award, in 1997, and Budapest made him an honorary citizen in 2002. Abroad he won the Brandenburg Literature Prize, the Herder Prize, the Welt-Literaturpreis and the German order Pour le Mérite, and in 2003 YIVO, the institute for Jewish research in New York, gave him a lifetime achievement award. In 2009 he received the Jean Améry Prize, named after another survivor-writer who had wrestled with what Auschwitz meant for the mind.
He lived for long periods in Berlin, which he came to regard as a second home, and he left his literary archive to the city’s Academy of Arts in gratitude for the welcome he had found in Germany.
A non-believing Jew in a troubled homeland
Kertész described himself as a non-believing Jew. Judaism was not a faith he practised but a fate the twentieth century had forced on him, and which, through writing, he made his own. His fiction and essays return again and again to the question of what it means to have survived, to live with Auschwitz not as a memory of the past but as a permanent condition of the modern world.
His relationship with Hungary was uneasy. In a 2009 interview with the German newspaper Die Welt he called himself a Berliner and described Budapest as completely Balkanized, provoking angry reactions in the Hungarian press; he later said he had meant the remark constructively and that Hungary remained his homeland. In 2014 he accepted the Hungarian Order of Saint Stephen, the country’s highest state honour, from the government of Viktor Orbán, and he said that year that a New York Times reporter had wanted him to call Hungary a dictatorship, which he declined to do, positions that disappointed some of his admirers abroad.
Marriage, illness and death
Kertész was married first to Albina Vas, who died in 1995, and in 1996 he married Magda Ambrus. In his last years he suffered from Parkinson’s disease and recurrent depression, and in 2013 he had hip surgery after a fall at home. He eventually returned to live in Budapest, where he died at home on March 31, 2016, aged eighty-six.
Legacy
Fatelessness is now recognised as one of the essential works of Holocaust literature, alongside the writings of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and Tadeusz Borowski, and it is read in schools and universities around the world. Its refusal of sentiment, its cool, guileless narrator and its insistence that the camps were made by human beings, step by step, changed how writers and readers think about representing atrocity.
Kertész himself remained a solitary, uncomfortable figure, a writer who would not let either the victims’ suffering or the perpetrators’ responsibility be turned into a story of fate.
Sources & further reading
Imre Kertész, Wikipedia · Imre Kertész, Jewish Virtual Library · Fatelessness, Wikipedia · Imre Kertész, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.