This paper below was delivered at the Embassy of Hungary on April 7, 2002 in the cultural series programs. The event was hosted by Ambassador András Simonyi and Mrs. Náda P. Simonyi. In the introductions, Ambassador Simonyi read a letter from Imre Kertész, who was unable to come himself. The lecture was complemented by readings from Fateless and The Union Jack by Sonia Debreczeni of Channel 8 in Washington D.C.

When the Swedish Academy announced the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2002, most people asked, “Who is Imre Kertész?” Of course, it could have been almost any Hungarian author and the reaction would have been the same. Still, Kertész is less well known in the United States than for example Péter Esterházy or Péter Nádas translations of whose works have received much more attention. It is not unusual for the prize to go to a relatively unknown writer, however, and actually Kertész had been considered among the contenders for a few years.

The prize was awarded “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” The Academy noted that the topic of his work has been Auschwitz, which “[f]or him . . . It is not an exceptional occurrence that like an alien body subsists outside the normal history of Western Europe. It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern existence.” As I will point out later, it is also a concept that goes beyond the one camp to embrace all such camps, Nazi or Communist. Sorstalanság, 1975 (translated as Fateless, 1992, tough Fatelessness would be more accurate) was Kertész first novel and defines his work. Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért, 1990 (Kaddish for a Child not Born, 1997), and Kudarc (Fiasco 1988) elaborate on his examination of what becomes for him the central question of 20th century western thinking. I do not agree with the Academy in that for Kertész “the spiritual dimension of man lies in his inability to adapt to life,” or that “individual experience seems useless” when “considered in the light of the needs and interests of the human collective.” Rather, he has taken from this negative experience and affirmed the humanistic values of Western Civilization. As he said in his Nobel speech: “In the Holocaust I have always recognized the human condition, the final end of the great adventure to which European man has arrived after two thousand years of ethical and moral culture . . . This serious situation was perhaps most precisely identified by the Hungarian Catholic poet János Pilinszky when he called it a ‘scandal,’ meaning that Auschwitz occurred within Christian culture and so it cannot be lived down . . . We have to create our own values, from day to day, and with that steadfast, yet invisible ethical activity which will finally bring these values to the surface, and will possibly in time become empowered in a new European culture” (2).

Kertész was born in 1929 and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. He actually spent only a few days in that camp before being transferred to Buchenwald and Zeitz. However, as he points out, Auschwitz has gained a symbolic meaning that goes beyond the one geographical location (“Táborok maradandósága” 11). He returned to Budapest in 1945 and worked for the newspaper Világosság from 1948 to 1951 when the consolidation of Communist rule and the Stalinist dictatorship led to his dismissal. For a while he worked in a factory, later he supported himself, like so many other authors who could not–or would not–publish during those years, as a translator from German. Sorstalanság was not published until 1975, and then in a small press run which seems to have been quietly withdrawn from the bookstores. He had begun writing it in 1960 and completed it in 1973.

In reporting the news of the Nobel prize the international press has pointed out that Kertész was a loner on the Hungarian literary scene that he was not well known even in Hungary. It is true that he did not belong to any of the organized groups, refusing even to join the Writers Association because, he said, “I refuse to adapt or integrate myself” (New York Times A6). On the other hand, he had been known. Reviews of Sorstalanság appeared in the leading newspapers and several journals upon its publication. Most were favorable, yet it was another ten years before his work began to receive the attention deserved. By then his second novel had been published and the cultural climate had also changed. For example, Benedek Várkonyi wrote in Magyar nemzet: “at times, works come to the surface which can take their place in world literature. Such is Imre Kertész’ novel” (7). György Spiro wrote a study for the literary weekly, Élet és irodalom in 1983 (no. 30, 5), and included a slightly longer version in his collection of essays, Magániktató published in 1985. A review of his Gályanapló (Galley Diary, 1992) by Péter Dávidházi appeared in Holmi in 1993 and was published in his book Per Passivam Resistanciam in 1998. Others also recognized Kertész as an important representative of postmodernism. Prizes also came his way–at least twelve Hungarian ones between 1983 and 1997, including Hungary’s highest award, the Kossuth Prize, and some German prizes as well. In April 2002 a conference was held on his works and a book, Az értelmezés szükségszerűsége (The Necessity of Interpretation), based on these presentations, revised and expanded for publication, was already in the works before the Nobel Prize was announced. He has hardly been absent from the Hungarian literary scene, yet he himself commented: “I have been deeply touched by this outpouring of love. But I know my books are not so popular here because the Holocaust is not embedded in Hungarian consciousness” (ABC News).

The Holocaust is the theme of his novels, but his writing has also been influenced by his living forty years under communism. “My work is a form of commitment to myself, to memory, and to humanity,” he has said (New York Times A6). His novel, Az Angol lobogó (The Union Jack, 1991) depicts the years of “catastrophe” in the 50's and the Revolution of 1956, and his next one will address the problems of life under Communism. “This will be my last novel about the Holocaust. It takes place in Budapest at the time of the change of political system and deals with people who did not experience the Holocaust directly, the second generation, who still have to deal with the Holocaust,” he pointed out (ABC News). We must not take the portrayal of the Holocaust literally, for his is basically a symbolic approach. And, pessimistic as his appraisal of the Holocaust as showing the failure of Western civilization is, Kertész actually draws positive values from it. What he argues is that the values we have accepted as a legacy of our culture must be created from within us. Only then will they not fail in the face of challenges. As Dániel Lányi pointed out, “one reason Fateless is a great novel lies in its ability to turn around the rationale of the concentration camps, which reduced man to a body, to matter that could be terminated, burned, used up, by circumventing the ethical categories and traditional thinking that had failed in the face of Auschwitz” (671)

Kertész noted in connection with his novel, Fateless: “I wished to traumatize the reader. The conception of my work is based on the premise that the fear, the loss of footing, which is cited as lacking in the narrator should be found in the reader.” This imperative to involve the reader accounts for the success of the work. It is a mark of Kertész’ mastery of the art of narrative and of his skillful and precise use of language that he is successful. Significantly, his models were Voltaire’s Candide, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from a Dead House, and Kafka. He was not influenced by earlier Hungarian writers in this work, though Gyula Krudy and Sándor Márai are models in later works. Indeed his ironic style is outside the tradition, though not outside contemporary concerns.

Spiro’s essay on Kertesz had already noted that he presents a “philosophy of existence which almost explodes the boundaries of literature” (381). The reader is brought into the experience slowly, almost imperceptibly, while the narrator seems to accept each step as “natural.” Thinking he is being taken simply to work, he “mistakes” the inmates for real convicts–criminals serving sentences. He finds himself inexorably carried along by the crowd until the realization of where he is almost sinks in: “I don’t know who took action, nor what happened exactly. I can only remember that some pressure weighed on me, some momentum moved, thrust me, stumbling a little yet in my new shoes, amid a cloud of dust and behind me a sound of strange thumps as if someone’s back were possibly being hit, ever forward, towards newer yards, newer barbed wire gates, barbed wire enclosures, expanding and enclosing fences finally swimming together and becoming disturbingly entangled before my eyes (112).

In time, the hunger, deprivation, work, and dehumanizing conditions do affect him and he gives up, surviving only by seeing his own body as something separate and foreign: “For my own part, I did not doubt that I lived, if only flickering, as if with the flame turned entirely down, but something still burned within me, the flame of life, as they say, that is, my body was here, I knew everything about it, merely myself, somehow, no longer lived inside it” ( 208). It is as an observer that he relates his rescue when he is not dumped on the heap of bodies headed for the crematorium. A voice–his own though he barely recognizes it–mutters “ I … ob … ject” and he is taken to the hospital ward instead (p. 136). Inexplicably, here he is treated well. Again the irony becomes apparent as he notes:

At any rate, after a while, even if only little by little, guardedly, carefully, I had to see, had to accept the proof of facts, namely that–it seems–this is also possible, this is also believable, merely that it is more unusual, and then undoubtedly more pleasant of course, but for all that essentially not in the least stranger, if I think of it, from any other strangeness, which in the final analysis–in a concentration camp–all, all is possible and believable, like this, and also the reverse, truly natural. But on the other hand, precisely this is what perplexed me, disturbed, undermined in a certain way my security: after all, if I looked at it rationally, I could see no reason for it; nothing logical, nothing familiar, nor was I able to find any motive acceptable to my reason that I should be here, as it happens, and not rather somewhere else” (230-231)

Susanna Nirenstein comments: “Nothing is obvious; in fact, what he lives through and how he lives through this harbors a strange duality: the reader knows the history and dimensions of the concentration camp, the narrator ‘I’ does not” (4).

Only upon his return home does the narrator begin to understand–to reflect upon–what had happened. Answering laconically the interrogation of a journalist, he finally says: “‘In a concentration camp,’ I said, ‘they are very natural.’” Namely: hatred, horrors, deprivation (180). It is in this logic–or denial of logic–that the incomprehensibility of Auschwitz is expressed. György Vári sees the preservation of the “senselessness” of Auschwitz as the goal of the novel at a time when the memory of Auschwitz is being ritualized (7). I believe, however, that there is more to the novel than that. Even in the eyes of the narrator his experience assumes significance because he does not dismiss it merely as something he passively endured. Unlike those who remained at home and lived through their own horrors, he has changed. That is why he argues with his former neighbors, Fleischmann and Steiner. They relate the events as something that happened to them: “the star-marked house ‘came’, October 15 ‘came’, the Arrow Cross ‘came’, the Ghetto ‘came’ the Danube bank ‘came’, liberation ‘came’” (284). Moreover, it all seems as if compressed into a moment in time. The narrator, however, points out: “‘but it was not quite so, that it ‘came’: we also went. Only now does everything seem complete, finished, unalterable, final, so immensly fast and so terribly blurred, so that ‘it came’: now, only afterwards, when we look at it backwards, from the reverse side’” (287). Spiro takes this train of thought to explain the conclusion drawn by the novel. “The hero changed: here he can fully expound the outlook which in the beginning of the novel lurked in the irony of the style… And this is the question which ties the novel to the already known question, and whose variations we must face at least in our century” (389). The explanation of the title of the novel is also found in Kertész’ statement: “if there is fate, then freedom is not possible; if on the other hand … there is freedom, then there is no fate. That is … then we ourselves are fate” (289).

The message emerges slowly in the last pages, and it is well demonstrated in the essay, “Ficioalkotás és történelemszemlélet” (The Creation of Fiction and Historical Perspective) by Gábor Tamás Molnár. He points out that the narrator regains his identity only in the last pages, as a result of his conversations with the journalist and the two old friends who make him articulate his thoughts (10). He takes responsibility for his past because, as he says, “they can’t take everything from me, it’s not possible that I be neither victor nor victim, that I could not be right and that I could not be mistaken either, that I be neither the cause nor the consequence , simply … I cannot accept that stupid bitterness that I am merely innocent” (290). I believe this is what leads the narrator to affirm life and yet to feel a certain nostalgia for the concentration camp: “I am here, and I well know that I accept all reasons as the price for being able to live” (291). As Molnár points out, if one “accepts Auschwitz as ‘completed’ from where the innocent victims returned, he cannot make it speak and must abdicate from self analysis” (10). The puzzling and possibly disturbing statement about happiness in the camp is explained by Imre Szász as part of the instinct for self-preservation which the young Köves asserts enabled him to survive. When the narrator says, “Why even there, beside the chimneys there was something in the pauses between torments which resembled happiness. Everyone only asks about the vicissitudes, the ‘horrors’ whereas for me maybe this experience remains the most memorable. Yes, this is what I should talk about to them, the happiness of the concentration camps, next time, when they ask” (291). It does not mitigate the horror, but makes it deeper (54).

Fateless is the most precise and literal evocation of Kertész’ basic theme, but his other works serve to broaden the concept. His contention that Auschwitz is symbolic, that in a sense it is a tragedy of the mass culture and mass rule that characterizes 20th century dictatorships, is developed in later works and expounded in his statements. Deep in each of his self-reflexive heroes, however, is the will to live and the conviction that by making a choice he asserts his humanity. Tamás Turai argues that the true theme of Kertész’ work is survival which actually can only be understood in terms of avoiding death. Such survival, however, is basically an intellectual act, and the survivor becomes a witness (310-311).

These ideas are developed in his later works, at which I will now look briefly.

Kudarc (Fiasco) is in a sense a continuation of Fateless, relating the story–in the novel within the novel–of Köves as a young man making his way through the senselessnes that the Communist regime had brought to Hungary. While death and executions are not an everyday occurrence, fear and uncertainty rules the lives of all. The “hero” is almost as clueless and innocent as in the first novel. The frame is provided by the narrator’s diffident efforts to write the novel, connecting the narrator of the ‘80's with the protagonist of the ‘50's. In order to make his naiveté believable, and to emphasize the senselessness of the bureaucracy he faces, Kertész has his hero arrive at his destination expecting to visit a friend who had emigrated to the West, only to find himself in what is strangely familiar yet still unfamiliar territory. The Kafkaesque setting thus introduces the Budapest of the late forties or early fifies–though both the locale and the date are left vague. As Miklós Györffy put it: “Köves arrived from Budapest to Budapest for in one sense he came back from the today, the eighties, from the present of the Old One; in another, having survived the concentration camp, he arrives home, to another city than that from which he had been dragged away, as a different man from the one who left. A different man to such an extent that it is as if his past did not even exist in the story; we can only infer from it, that the novel whose idea finally emerges in his mind is the same as that which the Old One has already written, that it is about Auschwitz” (986).

Grayness, neglect, ruins, broken-down streetcars, trucks full of families being “relocated,” soldiers and policemen rule the streets. A group he takes to be customs officers are omnipresent and wield mysterious power: they assign his place of residence and decide where he will work, for example. It is not hard to make the leap from the Hungarian word for the customs officer, vámos, to AVOS, i.e. the state (secret) police. Everything is decided by “someone” who of course is never named. The decisions are completely arbitrary and invariably harmful. He is dismissed from his job before he even gets to start working there and assigned to a factory. On the first night he shares a park bench with a pianist who does not return home lest he be dragged away from his bed in the middle of the night. The pianist is nevertheless arrested, spends time tending corn and pigs before being forced to play for his guards under such circumstances that he becomes disgusted and gives up music. The president of his building is also taken away, probably “resettled” in some village or farm, and Berg slowly goes mad with guilt for a mysterious past, probably as an executioner for the regime.

Fortunate turns are just as inexplicable. Köves is called into a manager’s office and scolded for working in the factory when he should be doing intellectual work, and reflects: “They throw him out of everywhere, they are barely willing to employ him in a steel mill, as a grown man he must become an apprentice locksmith, and then they reproach him, as if it had been his idea to become a fitter?” (261) When he protests that he is not suitable for a job in the Press Office of the Ministry, he is told that “a higher design” (265) decided and he must accept. His ignorance is only excused because he has just returned from abroad.

The corruption of the system and the way everyone is implicated is also made clear. It turns out that he actually got the job through his friend Sziklai, and loses it because his boss suspects he saw through an allegorical ballad he was asked to critique. Sziklai, who does seize the opportunity and leaves in 1956, represents the type of con man who could survive and even prosper in those turbulent years. He manages to ingratiate himself into positions of power and knows exactly how to use connections, bribery and threats to turn the corruption of the system to his advantage.

Az angol lobogó (1991) (The Union Jack, 2002) distills the experience of the same era into a tight monologue. Viktoria Radics has called it a Bildungsroman (137) and in the old professor’s reminiscences we do find traces of his youthful career and a sense of the steps that brought him to the present moment. The motto, taken from Mihály Babits, “before us fog, behind us fog, and beneath us a sunken country,” captures the essence in a tale where the crux is the “friendly, maybe even sympathetic” wave of a British diplomat as he leaves the streets of Budapest to the Soviet tanks (17). The terror, the senselessness of life, the feeling that some power was always threatening, permeates the story: “anyone, at any time, can be taken away by the black car” (5). Gyula Illyés had distilled the essence of tyranny in “Egy mondat a zsarnokságról” (One Sentence on Tyranny); Kertész presents it here from the distance of a philosophically inclined old gentleman, but its message is just as gripping.

Kaddish a meg nem született gyermekért approaches what is Kertész’ central motif– the problem of the value of human life in a totalitarian system– through a breathless musical movemen which reflects Celan’s “Todesfuge,” a few lines of which serve as the motto for the book. The recurring “No” forms a refrain-like thread that allows him to express his views on life: can we chose who we are, or do others chose this for us? What are our choices, and the possibilities of choice? What is the relationship of free will and constrains? The role of goodness? In one section he reflects how he had become a writer and translator only by subterfuge and cleverly evading the “bull-headed monster” which had not meant him to be a writer. And even so they trampled him, for “they did not tolerate thought in any form, except perhaps in the form of prisoner-thoughts, that is, in no way at all; these circumstances only praised slave labor” (111-112). Through the story of the teacher who gives his portion of food to another even in the concentration camp he asserts that there “exists a pure concept, an idea, not so contaminated by our bodies, our souls, our wild animals which live in all our minds equally and as the same” (112). As Erzsébet Berkes pointed out, this is “not the novel of the Jewish minority experience, but an accounting of the life that can be chosen” (118).

Kertész himself makes it clear that he is writing not about one particular camp, that he has made Auschwitz the symbol of all such atrocities. At a gathering when everyone names the place where they had suffered: Mauthausen, Don-bend, Recsk, Siberia … the villages of the resettlement … the prisons after ‘56 , etc., “Auschwitz” trumps all because it stands for all suffering endured by man at the hands of totalitarian regimes (56). Here he comes close to Pilinszky, as Márton Szilágyi points out: “For both of them, Auschwitz is the axis of the interpretation of the world, but according to Pilinszky, since ‘sin showed itself in proportions not seen to this time’ in Auschwitz, the ever-present strength of a triumphant redemption also becomes recognizable through it. Imre Kertész does not state claim something contrary to this, but rather accepts the full tragic weight of the Heideggerian death experience” (72). The wisdom that emerges is a quiet acceptance–poignantly expressed in the “Amen” that concludes the novel, so that Szilágyi is right when he calls the novel “a synthetic summary of all that cultural heritage which we in a word call European” (73).

Gályanapló (Galley journal, 1992) is a diary-novel culled from entries ranging from 1961 to 1991. It provides a glimpse into the genesis of his works, biographical details and philosophical deliberations. In it, perhaps more clearly than in the novels, he addresses the problem of determination and free will and “seeks the possibilities of the individual in a totalitarian dictatorship;” the entries “ponder the essence of today’s culture and arts, its task and its possibilities” (Gács 857). Thus in December 1980 Kertész writes that in the 20th century the masses rule and this has had disastrous consequences. The intellectuals too often join some mass movement and thus they cease to be the “carriers of that denial” which in today’s mob-society, mob-life, mass destruction and destructiveness could be the only thing that is authentic, true, authoritative. The masses and spirit were always opposite concepts. But the masses had never before been in power, in monopolistic, in total power… the masses, more precisely the power which seeks to legitimize itself through the masses, is in a position where it can destroy all higher forms of life; and without these there is no value (and I fear no reason) for life. This is a 20th century phenomenon” (91). This quote sheds light on Kertész other statements about the rule of the masses, which of course he does not equate with the rule of the people but that of a mob controlled by a small clique who have seized power without knowing how to use it or what to use it for. As the arrests and trials of the inner circles of such a systems shows, they cannot even use it for their own good, while the good of others is automatically excluded from their thinking.

Kertész explores the problem of the individual versus power, of freedom vs. tyranny not in isolation but within the context of the 20th century. This is what makes his message so immediate and important. An entry for July 1990 reads: “I saw the dissolution of the Buchenwald concentration camp in ‘45, the settling in of the red abomination in ‘48, its dissolution in ‘56, its reestablishment in ‘57, etc. … It would be foolish to believe that this is merely the failure of the so-called Communist empire, and not that of the whole human world. Of the moral and rational world.” This is so because the 70 years of the one (and the 12 years of the other) favored “irrationality, chaos, terror, and the vegetative possibilities of the lowest human form” while camps, killings, general psychopathy, abasement, repression were daily occurrences (214). Still, he escaped, and so did others, and it is this “miracle” that gives hope for a better future, founded on principles of the spirit, of creativity, of life that a new civilization can rise on the ashes of the old, preserving its values but not its vulnerabilities.

In later statements Kertész makes the universality of this lesson even more explicit. He states that the concept embraced by the word “Auschwitz” actually applies to all totalitarian dictatorships. Thus, the lessons to be learned, the lesson that the narrator of Fateless (as indeed the narrators/heroes of his other works) learned does not only concern Jews or a particular historical situation. The Holocaust is a defining concept in the 20th century because it is open to this universal interpretation. The horrors are not so much the expression of ideology or prejudice as of totalitarianism:

The Jews–it is true–did not die because of their religion, and they were not killed–it is true–in the name of another religion. Totalitarianism killed them, the totalitarian state, the totalitarian party power–this monster, this epidemic, this plague of the century which is more destructive than any destructive religion … Totalitarianism exiles from itself and places outside of law man himself (Holocaust 28).

In one of his other talks on the meaning of the Holocaust he is even more explicit in defining this as a central theme in Western consciousness:

[Auschwitz has become] a universal example, on which the seal of permanence has been placed; which encompassed in its simple name the whole world of the Nazi concentration camps, the shock of the universal spirit over this, and whose mythical locale has to be maintained so that pilgrims can visit it, as they visit, for example, the hill of Golgotha … In Auschwitz, not for a moment are good and evil blurred (11) … There is no benchmark for suffering, there is no thermometer for injustice. The Gulag, the Nazi camp system were created by the same goals, and that they reached their goal, millions of victims are the witness (18-19).

Whether all of this was clear in the author’s mind when he began writing Fateless may be debated, but his later works and comments certainly support the realization which is seminal in this first novel: the Holocaust was a catastrophe for all of European civilization. In a recent interview he elaborated on this: “The Holocaust is not history’s one-time mistake. It belongs to European history, and with it, the European values of the Enlightenment collapsed” (Rider, B5). In view of the kinship Kertész feels with the other newly “discovered” Hungarian writer, Sándor Márai, it is interesting to note his comments on how he became a writer and how he preserved his independence under Communist rule. In 1955 he had a vison of people representing “forgetfulness, conformism, resignation. Belonging to this marching group meant losing my identity. I had to step out of line. It was why I decided to become a writer” (B5). But he also chose to remain outside the establishment, as he noted in a recent interview: “I have always remained an outside observer, sometimes frightened, sometimes shocked, sometimes indifferent, but always an outsider” (B5). But whereas Márai, who was an established writer in 1948 when he decided to leave Hungary, Kertész did not chose to leave. As an outsider, he notes, “Your perspective on life is totally your own and cannot be influenced… You are not thinking about being successful. You expect to make no impact. It’s hopeless. And if its hopeless, you might as well stick to the truth. And you have an awful lot of time to think. I had nothing else to do all day. The isolation and hopelessness of the situation gave you freedom” (B5). For Márai, leaving was the only alternative: “I had to leave it not just because the Communists would not let me write freely, but mainly and even much more so because they would not let me be silent freely.” (357).

The totalitarian regimes of Central and Eastern Europe did not want to face the Holocaust–that would have meant a self-examination, which leads to cleansing, which in turn is the means of an ascent and of joining a spiritual Europe. The dictatorship, however, wished only disunity and the permanence of disunity, for this served its purpose (Holocaust 26). Paradoxically, Kertész also feels that it was the very denial of the Holocaust in the Communist world which allowed him to work through his dilemma and retain an optimistic outlook on life. Many of his contemporaries, Auschwitz survivors who wrestled with the problem, committed suicide. After Auschwitz the Stalinist society in which he found himself proved that there can be no question of “freedom, liberation, a great catharsis, etc.: all that of which in a more fortunate world intellectuals, thinkers, philosophers not only spoke, but in which they clearly believed; [this society] guaranteed a prison life for him which excluded all possibility of error … Since not only was I a prisoner, but the nation in which I lived was a prisoner also, I had no problems of identity” (42-43). But passive resistance is a great tool in the hands of writers, and Hungary has a long tradition of this, as Péter Dávidházi points out in his book, Per Passivam Resistanciam which examines the relationship of power and the writer.

In the interpretation of his works, too, the universality of Kertész’ message is connected to man’s responsibility. As he says in “Táborok maradandósága” (The Endurance of Camps), “Since we learned from Nietzsche that god is dead, the question of who is responsible for man … has become a real problem; … before whose sight do we lead our lives, to whom is man responsible for reckoning, in the ethical sense of the word, and yes … in its transcendental sense” (9). The Hungarian poet, Zsfófia Balla comments with feeling on how Kertész’ definition of the Holocaust affects everyone, even one born four years after the war, but one who spent years in the “hard” dictatorship of Romania. The “shadow of the Holocaust falls over all of civilization, since “anything, that is everything, can happen to a person, because in his defenselessness neither god, nor morals, nor custom protects him. Barbarity not only vanquishes culture and trust; it not only dispossesses it, but also mocks it with degradation in suffering”. Unfortunately, the 20th century was marked by “the methodical, institutionalized degradation and killing that was tolerated by everyone, that was excused, became routine” (3). Only through the artistic expression of memory can human dignity be preserved. All acts of humanity are a rejection of Auschwitz. Kertész himself suggests this role for his work on the Holocaust when he writes in “A Holocaust mint kultúra” (The Holocaust as Culture) that its “tragic world view” may renew a European consciousness struggling with its own crisis as the Greek spirit, facing the barbarian Persians, created the “eternal example of antique tragedy. If the Holocaust has created a culture for today–as undeniably it has happened and is happening–its literature is from here: it takes its inspiration from Holy Scriptures and the Greek tragedies, the two sources of European culture, so that an unredeemed reality can bring forth redemption, the spirit, the catharsis” (47).

Enikö M. Basa, 2002

Works Consulted
ABC News.com. Oct. 18, 2002. Web site.
Balla, Zsófia. “Ajándék” [Gift]. Élet és irodalom, 46. 43 (25 Oct. 2002): 3.
Berkes, Erzsébet. “Az ésszerű lét nyomorúsága.” Mozgó Világ. 16.11 (Nov. 1990).
Dávidázi, Péter. Per Passivam Resistenciam; Változatok hatalom és írás témájára. Budapest: Argumentum Kiadó, 1998.
———. “Révben a gálya.” [The Galley has Arrived in Port] in Holmi, 7 (1993): 1017-1021.
Az értelem szükségszerűsége. Tanulmányok Kertész Imréről [The Necessity of Meaning. Studies on Imre Kertész]. Budapest: L’Harmattan Kiadó, 2002. Reviewed in Élet és irodalom, Dec. 13, 2002.
Gács, Anna. “Egy különös regény.” Jelenkor. 35.10.
Györffy, Miklós. “Kő és hegy” [Stone and Mountain]. Jelenkor, 32.10 (Oct. 1989).
Kertész, Imre. Az angol logogó. Elbeszélések [The Union Jack]. Budapest: Magvető, c2001. This collection contains several other narratives which had been published separately also. Page references are to the web site. A translation of the title story has just appeared: Tim Wilkinson, “The Union Jack.” The Hungarian Quarterly, 43.168 (Winter 2002).
———-. “Heureka” Address on Accepting the Nobel Prize in Élet és irodalom, 46. 49 (8 Dec. 2002).
———-. A Holocaust mint kultúra; három előadás. [The Holocaust as Culture: Three Speeches]. Budapest: Századvég Kiadó, 1993.
———-. Kaddish a megnemszuletett gyermekért. Budapest: Magvető Kiadó, 1990.
———-. A Kudarc [The Fiasco]. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó,1988.
———-. Sorstalanság. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1975. Some citations are based on the original with my translations.
Lányi, Daniel. “A ‘Sorstalanság’ kisérletete.” Holmi. 7.5 (May 1995)
Magyar Narancs. “Interju: Nem érzem magam téves helyen, amikor Németországban olvasok fel” [Interview: I do not Feel Myself out of Place when I Read in Germany]. Online viewed 10 Oct. 2002.
Marai, Sándor. Memoir of Hungary, 1944-1948. Trans. with an introd. and notes by Albert Tezla. Budapest: Corvina in Association with Central European University Press, 1996.
Márton, Gábor. “A Sorstalanság folyamatossága.” Népszabadság. 21 Oct. 1985: 7.
Molnár Gábor Tamás, Fikcióalkotás és történelemszemlélet; Kertész Imre: Sorstalanság” [Fiction Creation and Historical Perspective]. Alföld, Aug. 1996. Online version: 1-14.
Nirenstein, Susanna, “Aki megmenekült Auschwitz poklából,” [The One who Escaped from the Hell of Auschwitz] from La Repubblica. Élet és irodalom , 46. 42 (18 Oct. 2002): 4.
Radics, Viktória. “A rejtőzködő kreatúra” [The Hidden Creature]. Holmi. 4.1. (Jan. 1992)
Riding, Alan. “Nobel for Hungarian Writer who Survived Death Camps.” The New York Times. Friday, 11 Oct. 2002: A1, A6.
———. “Nobel Hero Insists Hungary Face its Past.” The New York Times, Wednesday, 4 Dec. 2002. Art Section.
Spiró, György. Magániktató. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1985.
———-. “Non habent sua fata. A Sorstalanság–ujraolvasva.” [Fateless–reread]. Élet és irodalom 30 (1983): 5.
Szász, Imre. “Ismeretlen birtokok [Unknown Estates],” in Háló nelkül. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1978.
Szilágyi, Márton. “Kertész Imre: Kaddish a meg nem született gyermekért.” Alfold. 41.12 (Dec. 1990).
Svenska Akademien. Press Release 10 Oct. 2002. “The Nobel Prize in Literature.” Web site.
Túrai, Tamas. “A hiten túl, a pusztulás előtt.” Jelenkor. 34.4 (Apr. 1992)
Vári, György. “A Sorstalanság történelemszemléletéről” [The Historical Perspective of Fateless] Élet és irodalom, 46.42 (18 Oct. 2002): 7.

Translations from the Hungarian are mine.