The gardener and the garden

The Nobel-winning writer Imre Kertesz's work revolves around the Holocaust and its lessons for Europe today.

THE news that Imre Kertesz had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature reached Hungary on October 10, one day after the announcement of the list of new member-states in the European Union. Hungary's entry into to the E.U. in 2004 was confirmed in Brussels. The choice of Kertesz (his name means gardener), whose writing revolves around the Holocaust and its lessons, brings into focus political, historical and cultural issues. In political terms it sends a clear message to the perpetrators of racism and the parties of the radical right that gathered strength in the 1990s. In historical terms it points to the responsibility of generations of those Europeans who in the course of history were ready to exploit and annihilate peoples they considered biologically inferior because of their religion, race or civilisation. Culturally, it points to the fact that Auschwitz is part of the image of Europe and that the European is part of the course of development that led to the Nazi concentration camps.

This is the first Nobel Prize awarded to a Hungarian writer, even though Hungarian prose and poetry have always had something specific for its readers in spite of its linguistic isolation (it is a Finno-Ugrian language unrelated to any of the Germanic or Slavic languages of its neighbours). Hungarian literature has always been the tool of dissent and critical analysis and a sensitive indicator of events. Czech and Serbian critics stress that the choice of Kertesz for the Nobel Prize is a recognition of a `small language'.

Imre Kertesz was born in 1929 in a lower middle class Jewish family that did not practise religion. He was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and released from Buchenwald in 1945. He completed school and worked as a journalist at the newspaper Szikra in Budapest. At that time, Kertesz considered himself to be a leftist who "thought radically" and joined the Communist Party in 1945. But in 1949, at the time of the `construed trials' of Rajk and others, he distanced himself from politics. In 1950, after he was sacked from his job, Kertesz was called up for army service. In 1953, he returned to Budapest, the city to which he says he returned "with the instinct of a stray dog". In spring 1955, he arrived at what he calls the "shocking idea" that he would become a writer and that for this "he would have to save himself from the depressing influence of his surroundings".

In 1958, Kertesz started writing novels and found the idea for Fateless. It took him 13 years to complete the novel; during this period, he made a living by working in a factory, writing libretti for operettas, pieces for the cabaret and doing translations. Fateless, completed in 1965, was first rejected by publishers but in 1975 the Szepirodalmi Publishing House decided to bring it out. In the 1960s and 1970s, the experience of the concentration camps was discussed in Hungary in an ideological and linguistic context that is different from today's. Jewish presence in the concentration camps was emphasised less than the Communist presence. In the narration of the Second World War and the anti-fascist struggle the concentration camp experience was not the ultimate theme. It was merely treated as one detail of the narrative. An example of a different aesthetic approach is Jorge Semprun's The Great Journey (1963). Semprun's protagonist, an adolescent on his way to Buchenwald, formulates his dilemma in the statement: "I don't want to die a Jewish death." Kertesz's protagonist Gyuri, also an adolescent, thinks that he does not have the existential choice of whether he wants to die a Jewish or non-Jewish death.

After he moved away from politics in 1949, Kertesz developed an `anti-political', isolated position and did not court power for publication or favours. He stayed in small flats and wrote at worn-out desks and kitchen tables and listened to records of classical European music, his favourites being Bach, Mahler and Schoenberg.

In his second novel Fiasco (1988), Kertesz sneaks home "with the conscience of a thief" to write "with increasing passion" after the first night of his musical. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kertesz translated works of German literature and philosophy by authors such as Hugo von Hofmannstahl, Joseph Roth, Elias Canetti, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. Kertsz has always been known for his integrity and he saw the fragility of his personal existence when, after the `velvet revolution', he realised that in Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, "the time-machine does not move forward but backward... to somewhere where it stopped in 1919".

In the 1990s, Kertesz turned to the genre of the philosophical essay and novel. Several collections of his essays were published - The Holocaust as Culture(1993), Silence for Thought till the Firing Squad Reloads (1998) and Language Exiled (2001). This was also the time when Kertesz gave a new name to his Auschwitz experience - Holocaust. This change in terminology - from concentration camp to `burning sacrifice' - shows that Kertesz considers the Holocaust to be the basis of his poetic imagination, a source of culture that can be re-entered into history, society and personal life with the help of the aesthetic.

In the essay "Holocaust as Culture", Kertesz points to the "existential fear" that permeates the survivor's life. He had not only handed over all power to the SS, but also accepted his subjection as logical. He cites the examples of concentration camp inmates like the Romanian-German Paul Celan, the Italian Primo Levi, the Polish Tadeuzs Borowski and the Austrian-Belgian Jean Amery. All of them committed suicide after surviving the camps because they could not cope with silenced trauma or their transformation into commonplace conformists. Kertesz refers critically to the end of Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List, which suggests that humanity triumphed at the liberation of Auschwitz and got away from the concentration camp unharmed. Kertesz also deals with the various forms of Holocaust industry, Holocaust sentimentalism and the linguistic taboos of dealing with the Holocaust.

Kertesz's writing is linked to the history of Hungarian Jews who in the 19th and 20th centuries settled down in Hungary and Austria and responded to the demands of industry and modernisation. Many of them left traditional occupations and entered professions in the newly developing fields of trade, industry, academics and research. Jews adapted to Hungary and identified themselves with the political and cultural strivings of the Hungarians. By the end of the 19th century it had become clear that Hungarians wanted Jews to accept assimilation in exchange for the rights of emancipation.

Resistance to liberal plans were made clear in 1882 by the creation of the Hungarian Antisemitic Party. The recapturing of territories lost by Hungary to Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia and growing anti-Semitism combined and blended into a common ideology of a greater Hungary after the First World War. The law limiting the entry of Jews into higher education was passed in Hungary in 1920, much before the anti-Jew laws of Nuremberg, in retaliation for the Jewish participation in the Workers Republic of 1919. This atmosphere of revenge in the 1920s is depicted by the description of a school map in Fiasco, where the borders of Hungary are shown painted in blood in order to remind schoolchildren of Hungary's mutilation in the post-First World War Trianon Treaty (1920). But the Holocaust, the mass murder of six million Jews, was an event that was unforeseeable even for the anti-Semites of 19th and early 20th century Europe. After the Second World War, the Holocaust has become a point of comparison and racism could not be considered innocent any longer.

It was a contradiction that in spite of the official Hungarian ideology of anti-Semitism and in spite of the German and Italian examples of fascism and anti-Jew laws in 1938, 1939 and 1941, Hungarian Jews still looked at their future with acceptance and complete naivete. This point emerges in the debates about the Holocaust and its victims, perpetrators and unwilling participants. The first person narrative of Fateless, where the language of Gyuri shows no resistance to the ideology-filled phraseology of the adults, reflects this. The writer in Fiasco describes it as follows: "I was educated, my consciousness was taken into possession, I was enclosed. Sometimes with loving words, sometimes with strict admonitions which slowly made me fit for extermination. I never protested, I strove to do what I could, with listless goodwill I fainted into my neurosis of good manners. I was a modestly industrious, not always outstanding member of the silent conspiracy plotted against my life."

THE award of the Nobel Prize to Kertesz is considered to be a provocation for the Hungarian Right, for whom Kertesz has always been a favourite target because he did not shy away from speaking out against rightwing political forces. It marks a new phase in the ideological cold war in Hungary where political fault lines cannot be crossed on any issue. The central right and the left liberal coalitions have each served a parliamentary term since 1990 and it appears that the central right, especially the Party of Young Democrats led by former Prime Minister Viktor Orban has inherited the language and the political following of the neo-fascist Party of Hungarian Truth and Life.

In an interview Kertesz describes his indignation over the state funeral arranged for Miklos Horthy, Hungary's Governor from 1920 to1944, who collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the deportation of Hungarian Jews in the countryside. Kertesz stresses that events like the Horthy funeral falsify history and distort Hungarian historical consciousness. A large section of Hungarian intellectuals consider the Holocaust to be a personal experience for those who went through the experience and are not ready to deal with it as a matter of political responsibility for the Hungarians. Historical research has proved that the Hungarian administration, its legal and executive powers and several organisations (such as the railways and postal service) collaborated in the annihilation of 600,000 Hungarian Jews. The unwillingness to confront and bring these issues into the realm of public discourse is termed as "preventive anti-Semitism" by Kertesz. He also claims that `anti-Semitism' takes different shapes in our age, targeting foreigners and Gypsies and the anti-fascist slogans that were considered to be a part of history, have become extremely relevant in recent times.

Margit Koves is a writer based in New Delhi.