© Opale

Imre KERTÉSZ

Nobel Prize 2002

 

"For writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history"

 

Imre Kertesz was born on the 9th of November 1929 in Budapest (Hungary) into a modest Jewish family. His father was a wood merchant, his mother a worker. In 1944, at the age of 15, he was deported to Auschwitz, and then transferred to Buchenwald. This painful experience would affect him deeply and would influence all of his literary work.

Having returned to Hungary in 1945 he found himself destitute. His entire family had been swept away by the war. In 1948 he began to work as a journalist. In 1951, however, the paper for which he worked became the official voice of the Communist Party and Kertesz was sacked. Following this he worked for some time in a factory, and then in the press service of the Ministry of Industry.

Made redundant in 1953, he dedicated himself to writing and translating. From the beginning of the 1950s and all through the 1960s, he wrote musical comedies to earn a living. He translated many works written by German authors, such as Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Freud, Roth, Wittgenstein and Canetti, authors who would go on to influence his literary production. In the 1960s, he began to write Fateless, a largely autobiographical account of a young Hungarian deportee. This story only appeared in 1975 and received at best only lukewarm response, occasionally a very critical one. The world was unprepared for a story about concentration camps. Kertesz would speak of this violent rejection in Le Refus (1988), which he considered to be the second part of Fateless. It is only after its republication in 1985 that the first tome would meet with success. It was translated into French in 1997.

In 1976, he wrote Detective Story, which featured a political upheaval taking place in Latin America. In the book, the establishment of a dictatorship offers the policeman Antonio Martens the opportunity to enter into the army, where he meets Diaz, his superior, and his acolyte, the sadistic Rodriguez. They begin to weave a web of intrigues in which a number of innocent citizens became caught up. A short time after this Rodriguez installs an instrument of torture in their office and sets about learning how to use it. Martens has to face up to his own feelings – he is too weak to call his actions into question, but too strong too be utterly insouciant about that which is going on. To what point will he keeps his eyes closed?

In 1977 Le chercheur de Traces tells the story of the return of a man to a region years after indelible crimes have been committed there.

Marginalised by the Communist regime, Kertesz only began to be recognised as a major writer at the end of the 1980s, following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Kaddish for an Unborn Child (the third part of the Fateless tetralogy) appeared in 1990. In Judaism, the Kaddish is the prayer for the dead. The author addresses this prayer to a child, a child that never was, that he never wanted to have. The text is an interior monologue, the tale of a wasted life, a life of suffering the origins of which can be traced to the atrocities encountered in the death camps.

The English Flag, set in Budapest at the time of the Uprising in 1956, deals with the torments of memory and the tricks it plays. Today it is available in French with Procès-Verbal, which tells the story of a trip from Budapest to Vienna, a short time after the fall of the Berlin wall, a trip which turns into a bureaucratic nightmare.

Liquidation was published in 2003. The hero is a writer living in Budapest. His country is reconciling itself to democracy, but he no longer believes in anything. His name? A single letter, B, tattooed on his thigh by his torturers in the barracks in Auschwitz where he was born in December 1944. From such a starting point no individual can ever recover. B. therefore decides to kill himself. A philosophical gesture, a premeditated death that shocks his friends. Among them is a publisher who is sure that B. has written a novel to explain his death. But the manuscript has disappeared.

Imre Kertesz obtained the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002 – the first Hungarian to do so, for “"for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history".

A certain number of Hungarian intellectuals criticised the decision to award the prize to Kertesz, who left Hungary for Berlin.

Fateless was adapted for the cinema by the director Lajos Koltai in 2005.