Few knew Imre Kertész, as in November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. At that time he lived with his first wife in a 28 square meter studio in Budapest. The most important book of the later Nobel laureate, Fateless was indeed published in 1975 in Hungary, but the edition disappeared already after two weeks from the bookstores, and landed in a camp just outside Budapest. Even Detective Story and the novel fiasco that were printed before the turn, took almost imperceptible. It was not until 1995, the Fateless was published in a new German translation, Kertész got the recognition he deserved long. But he got them initially not in Hungary, he got it in Germany. This was due mainly the theme that has marked all his books: Auschwitz and the Holocaust. “The Germans and the Jews. All the others have forgotten it,” he wrote in 2001 in his journal Last Einkeh r .
Kertész was born 1929th In 1944, the Hungarian Gendarmerie arrested him on the way, along with 17 other fourteen, fifteen year old Jewish boy. Already at night, during an allied air raid, threatened the gendarmes to shoot the squatting in a barrack Jews should fall only one bomb – luckily flew the bombers another object and Kertész remained alive. Shortly afterwards, however, he was deported to Auschwitz, then to Buchenwald, where he survived only by a miracle and it 1945, the Americans liberated.
It was mainly this Hungarian experience willingly Eichmann’s specifications-converting police who had Kertész Holocaust conceive as a universal catastrophe of European culture. In Hungary it has many did not like that he has repeatedly pointed to this send raw chapters in the history of the country. Instead allowed after 1989 anti-Semites and the openly fascist Arrow Cross Party, whose supporters had tens of thousands of Jews murdered during the German occupation of Hungary, openly propagate their hate speech. The anti-Semitic atmosphere and the realization that his readers mainly live in Germany, he and his second wife caused to be in Berlin to rent an apartment 2,001th From now on, he shuttled back and forth between Berlin and Budapest, which he took fortiori evil Hungary rights.
As Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, they called him names in a newspaper, which is close to the now incumbent Fidesz party of Viktor Orbán. At the same time, however, more than 70,000 copies of his books were in Hungary after the announcement of the Nobel Prize in a few weeks has been sold.
Life Imre Kertész was a life in a kind of transit space, a life in permanent exile. Only in Berlin he has arrived in the past few years a bit, enjoyed the openness and multiculturalism of the city. How he ever had the feeling of being needed in Germany. “I feel,” he wrote in his diary, “in Germany to have a job; how small the effect is also capable of having a writer, and I have it, what I write, fall on fertile ground.” Simultaneously him his life off-side has made independently, only by the regime of real socialism, then the indifference to nationalism and anti-Semitism in Hungary after the turn. Only through this independence his radical work in the study of the Holocaust and its consequences was possible.
A radical, in the Fateless was a provocation against the conventional representations of the Holocaust. After Auschwitz, Kertész wrote, could no longer speak of Auschwitz in the language of before Auschwitz. It was necessary to find a new, atonal language. He wrestled with this new language, and then the story of his fourteen year old narrator who is deported to a death camp to tell from the naive view of a child, which occurs the operation of a death camp as a logical and obvious Thirteen years. Everyday life and the hell were nothing Different, but the same.
Kertész came to realize that with Auschwitz not include the factory-style murder of people alone to German but also to European culture. And that we later generations therefore the consciousness of always possible bankruptcy of this culture will not leave and must.
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