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Imre Kertész (1929- ) | |
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Hungarian novelist, essayist, and translator, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. In his semiautobiographical novels Kertész has analyzed the experience of the individual during barbaric times, especially exemplified in the Holocaust. Kertész early prose exhibit existentialist traits but his works are difficult to classify within any stylistic trend. "Auschwitz must have been hanging in the air for a long, long time, centuries, perhaps like a dark fruit slowly ripening in the sparkling rays of innumerable ignominious deeds, waiting to finally drop on one's head." (from Kaddish for a Child not Born, 1990) Imre Kertész was born in Budapest into a family of Jewish descent. In his youth Kertész experienced the horrors of the Nazi system. Germans occupied Hungary in 1944 and began exterminating Jews and Gypsies. Kertész was deported together with 7,000 Hungarian Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz and from there to Buchenwald. In 1945 he was liberated by the Soviet Army. After the war Kertész worked as a journalist for Világosság, a Budapest newspaper. He was dismissed in 1951, when it adopted orthodox Communist ideology during the intellectual terror, which lasted from 1948 to 1956. After serving in the army in 1951-53, Kertész devoted himself entirely to writing. After the Hungarian uprising of 1956, literary life did not return to normality until 1963. Like many dissident writers in Eastern European countries under Communist dictatorship, Kertész supported himself as a translator, focusing on such German language writers as Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler, and such philosophers as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. For the theatre he wrote musicals and other light pieces. With his wife he lived in a small one-room flat; it was his voluntary "prison cell" for decades. Kertész's first novel, Sorstalanság (1975), was a detached account of a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy's experiences in concentration camps. Kertész do not regard it as an autobiographical book, and in an interview he has said that he has never wanted to write about his own life. Sorstalanság was completed in 1965, but not published until 10 years later in a limited edition. The work met a wall of silence, perhaps because of the touchy subject of the book, the deportation of Jews, a.shameful episode in Hungary's recent history. However, the novel started a trilogy, which continued in A kudarc (1988), and Kaddis a meg nem születetett gyermekért (1990, Kaddish for a Child not Born), written in a stream of consciousness technique. In it the protagonist is a middle-aged survivor of the Holocaust. His marriage has failed, he feels disappointed in his career, and he refuses to bring a child into a world which has given birth to the Holocaust. Paradoxically he had felt at home in a concentration camp after a miserable childhood. The young witness of the Shoah in Sorstalanság is physically imprisoned in a concentration camp, but he realizes that "It is true that our imagination remains free even in captivity. I could, for instance, achieve this freedom while my hands were busy with a shovel or a pickax - with a moderate exertion, limiting myself to the most essential movements only." The protagonist of A kudarc lives in a totalitarian state without freedom of speech. He has finished his first novel, memoirs about Auschwitz, and works with his second book. "I want to flee but something holds me back", he thinks. During a political crisis - the Hungarian uprising? - he is allowed to leave to country, but he decides to stay. In his search for the meaning of the Auschwitz in a larger historical and political context, Kertész joined the post-war Eastern European writers, who disguised their works about Stalinism as examinations of Nazism. In the early 1980s Kertész was still relatively unknown in his own country. His name was not mentioned in A History of Hungarian literature, edited by Tibor Klaniczay (1983) and Lóránt Czigány referred to him only casually in The Oxford History of Hungarian Literature (1984). Since the "quiet revolution" of 1989 Kertész started to gain international fame and his works were translated among others into French, Swedish, German and English. In the 1990s he published more works than in the previous decades. Kertész's literature awards before the Nobel prize include the Brandenburger Literaturpreis in 1995, the Leipziger Buchpreis zur Europäischen Verständigung in 1997, the WELT-Literaturpreis in 2000, Ehrenpreis der Robert-Bosch-Stiftung (2001), and Hans-Sahl-Preis (2002). Selected works:
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