Hungarian · b. 1929
Imre Kertész was a Hungarian novelist whose autobiographical fiction transformed his survival of Auschwitz and Buchenwald into a meditation on the relationship between the individual and history.
Born in Budapest in 1929, Kertész was deported to Auschwitz at fourteen, then transferred to Buchenwald, and survived. After the war he returned to Hungary, worked briefly as a journalist, and then found himself under a communist regime that had its own reasons for preferring certain versions of the war’s history. He supported himself translating German-language philosophy and literature — Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Freud, Joseph Roth — while writing the fiction the regime largely ignored. Fatelessness was completed in 1973 and rejected by publishers for two years; when it finally appeared in 1975, it sold poorly and attracted little attention. Its international recognition came decades later. He won the Nobel Prize in 2002. He died in Budapest in 2016.
Fatelessness is his most important novel, and one of the formally most radical works in Holocaust literature. It follows György Köves, a Hungarian Jewish teenager, through deportation, the selection process, and the daily life of the camps, in a tone of bewildered, almost affectless detachment — the narrator describes systematic dehumanisation without the moral outrage the reader brings to the reading, because the reader’s outrage is an after-the-fact understanding the boy does not yet possess. The choice is not a failure of feeling but a radical act of honesty about how experience actually works: horror is not experienced as horror in the moment. It is perhaps the most uncomfortable formal decision in the literature of the Holocaust, and the most defensible.
Kaddish for an Unborn Child and Liquidation complete his most important fictional sequence, working through the impossible position of the survivor — obligated to witness for the dead, unable to fully inhabit the present. His Nobel acceptance speech, “Heureka!,” discussed the relationship between the individual and totalitarian history with the same precision his fiction brings to it.
by Imre Kertész
Fourteen-year-old Gyuri Köves is deported from Budapest to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, narrating his experience in a tone of bewildered, almost clinical detachment that refuses the expected moral outrage — one of the most formally radical choices in all of Holocaust literature.
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by Imre Kertész
A Holocaust survivor—a translator, like Kertész—explains to his unborn child why he refused to have children. The child is not born because the father cannot bring a child into a world that produced Auschwitz. A monologue addressed to an absence, Kaddish is one of the most formally intense works of Holocaust literature.
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by Imre Kertész
An aging writer in communist Hungary attempts to write a novel about a young man who survives the concentration camps—the same story told in Fatelessness. The meta-fictional frame explores what it means to write about the Holocaust from the distance of decades, and the cost of being a witness who survives.
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