by Imre Kertész
That observation is not without merit. One’s origins are always a complex and mysterious affair in which one starts to show an interest already when a child. Every child plays with the idea of what if … if I wasn’t the person they say I am but, for instance …
A prince.
Or pauper. Or both pauper and prince at once.
Mark Twain’s book must have made a deep impression on you, as you also refer to it in Fatelessness.
If we were not analyzing me but you, then it would quickly become evident that you were ducking a question it may well be I have also never fully clarified for myself. You have singled out precisely that passage, which really does have all the essential features: a highly principled father’s downfall in the eyes of his terrified son, who, however, continues to be kept well away from the edge of the precipice rather than their looking down together and assessing its depth. The big question is whether my father for his part ever took a look over the precipice. I have no way of knowing whether he had a guilty conscience about handing on his increasingly ominous heritage, or in plain language, for bringing a Jewish child into this unfriendly world. That he never verbalized it for himself—of that I am quite sure, but that would not necessarily have saved him from twinges of guilty conscience, for which he may then have compensated precisely by the show of infallible principle. As a result, I was more, so to say, ordered into my Jewishness instead of won over by argument that that was how the thing had to be. The difference may be small, but it’s important. There wasn’t anything for me to shoulder of my own accord, so I was deprived of any sense of responsibility; the most I could do was show my dissatisfaction, mutter to myself, or dream about a less nauseating situation. In point of fact, I think that was the origin of the psychological conflicts that eventually culminated in the form of Jewish self-hatred, a type that was particularly well known among Eastern European Jews as they rose into the middle classes, with Otto Weininger, or indeed Ludwig Wittgenstein, as typical highly cultured representatives. They are good examples of the fact that philosophical flair in itself offers no protection against misconceptions; indeed, quite the contrary. This is a big issue, and one under whose weight many have cracked up or, quite the opposite, turned aggressive and developed major character flaws.
You yourself, nevertheless, still managed to find another solution.
I don’t think so. This has no solution; the problem constantly follows one around, like one’s own shadow. I at most gave in to the temptation to be frank, but for that—if I may be permitted to express myself in a rather extreme fashion—I needed Auschwitz. Could we not find something cheerier to talk about?
That would call for a cheerier C.V.
All in all, I’m on the side of cheeriness. My error is that I don’t elicit that feeling in others. But see here: I was able to win intellectual freedom fairly early on, and from the moment I decided to become a writer I was able to treat my cares as the raw material of my art. And even if that raw material looks fairly cheerless, the form is able to transform it and turn it into pleasure, because writing can only come from an abundance of energies, from pleasure; writing—and this is not my invention—is heightened life.
You only reached the pleasure, as you yourself pointed out, at the expense of suffering, and I can now see your relationship with your father more clearly: to put it simply, the relationship was not exactly one characterized by openness.
No, there were undoubtedly things that we kept quiet about in each other’s presence: my father about the kind of fate into which he had helped bring me, and I about the fact that I did not accept that fate. Neither of us knew about this; we just saw the result, and that was painful. My defiance extended to everything; a distance grew up inside me instead of solidarity. I have already said that I had no liking for myself in that destructive role; I would much rather have been a pliant but carefree little boy, a good pupil, with a clear conscience, honest, industrious, lovable, but whenever I tried to be that, I would be disgusted by myself. I learned how to lie early on, but I was incapable of self-denial. Now that I’m saying this, I’m seized by an unbounded love for my father: the poor soul, he was unable to grasp why he had such a hard time with me.
You seem to be trying to portray yourself as a devious, bad-tempered child.
Bad-tempered, never; I found it easy to make friends, I was game for any escapade, any laughs. And sneaky only to the extent that I felt constrained to it by my situation. Like I said, I was unaware of my own problem, about which I would now declare pompously that it was an internalization of the Jewish question in semi-fascist Hungary.
Did that “situation” also throw a shadow on your relations with your mother? Or were you able to speak more frankly with her?
My mother had no interest at all in the Jewish question apart from its—how should I put it?—its technical side, and then later on the threat to life. My mother was high-spirited, a true epicurean, and she didn’t let herself be bothered too much by a few anti-Semites. Religion as such, as meditation, faith, inwardness, piety, spirituality, and so on, was alien to her. In any event, because she was advised to do so by the people in her circle in the late Thirties, she converted to some other confession—the Reformed Church as best I recall, but that was a pure formality that subsequently, when it turned out that it would in no way give her any protection, she largely forgot all about. She had quite a hard job getting a divorce from my father, because in those days divorces came with a string of onerous legal stipulations. It was necessary to spell out, for instance, if the divorce was being granted on the grounds of the husband’s or the wife’s fault, and my father insisted on the condition that the divorce was being granted on account of my mother’s fault. That in turn meant that my mother had to renounce any rights over her son, and she had to agree to certain stipulations about “visitation,” which duly occurred. As a result, I was able to see my mother once a week, and during the holidays twice a week. After the divorce, she lived for a while in a boarding house in Pannónia Road in the Sixth (Terézváros) District, which I supposed was a terribly chic thing to do. Later on, at much the same time as my father took a second wife, she too remarried, a fairly comfortably well-off gentleman by the name of László Seres, who was known to me as Laci or Uncle Laci. He was a stocky, well-dressed, bald-pated fellow, an engaging upright citizen, who, to the best of my knowledge, was the one true love of my mother’s life. He was the managing director of some big company until he was forced into retirement by the Jewish laws. Needless to say, I was none too well disposed to him, though over the years that antipathy vanished bit by bit for the very simple reason that he never tried to win me over. On the whole, my mother and those around her handled the embarrassing position I was put in after the divorce a good deal more elegantly than did my father, who—Auntie Kate here or there—emerged the clear loser and did not spare me any of his ironic bitterness. For instance, every week Laci Seres would give me a shiny silver five-pengő piece. “Tell the fat-head you don’t need any money!” my father would urge. That says little for his big-heartedness, but it did at least bring me closer to Father—you remember Cato and the conquered one, don’t you?…
Would it be fair to say that for you there were two separate worlds that you somehow had to balance?
That’s exactly how it was. To make that even more definitive, my mother and her husband moved to Buda and leased a house at the foot of Rose Hill in the Second District. To live in a place in Buda counted as a very genteel thing in those days. Paradoxically, the prospect of war ushered in a building boom, with the empty plots on Convent (now Rómer Flóris) Street and Zivatar Street being built on one after the other. I liked the little modern apartment that my mother and Uncle Laci had on Zivatar Street. The stairway still smelled of new building materials, while the bright kitchen overlooked the outside dining tables of the Nardai Restaurant on Kút Street. Of an evening a discreet rattle of tableware and scraps of laughter and Gypsy music would drift up from the lantern-lit garden. De
cades later, when Mahler’s Ninth Symphony had a huge impact on my life, that passage in the first movement where, all of a sudden, a nostalgic motif—a Proustian snatch of melody—sounds on a single violin, each and every time I had to recollect the Gypsy music at the Nardai Restaurant. And you know, even today I am convinced that Mahler may have taken that mood away from one of his regular eating haunts during his period as musical director at the Royal Opera House in Budapest. Anyway, yes, you’re right, my father and mother did represent two different worlds in my life. On arriving at Mother’s place from distant Baross Street, I would usually have to take off my clothes and put on some more elegant outfit that was more to her taste. She would have me bathe in the gleaming bathroom, even washing my hair with foaming shampoo, and in a way that was all the more eloquent, for her saying nothing would give me to understand exactly what she thought of my father; and that, when it came down to it, was every bit as painful as having to swallow my father’s cutting remarks.
So, you were living a double life, and the two worlds were pretty divergent. Didn’t that push you into an identity crisis of any kind?
No, and all the less so in that I had no identity; I didn’t need one. What would I have done with one, anyway? I needed adaptability, not an identity. And anyway, that double life was far more entertaining than if I had had to get by purely on the monotony of Baross Street. At Zivatar Street, by contrast, it was the dominance of Laci Seres that made me feel ill at ease. He was an intelligent man, and the way I saw it he didn’t think too highly of me. I can well imagine, indeed readily appreciate, how discomfiting the child of Mother’s previous marriage must have been for him, turning up every week from a foreign world to spoil the afternoon. It was only the two of us, however, who were in the know about my superfluousness; Mother noticed nothing. It was a bit like a mute alliance between the two of us for the sake of my mother, and that at times led to almost mutual cordiality. It was a tolerable life. I had certain games that I played exclusively at my mother’s place, books that I only read when I was there.
How did you come to be at the Shell Oil refinery in the summer of 1944?
In what I might call a quite natural way. I presume you know a bit about the Levente movement.10 Anyway, at the start of the 1943–44 grammar school year—I was thirteen and in Year 3 then—that still appeared to be just some stupid phooey. Once a week we had to line up in the schoolyard under the supervision of Csorba, the gym teacher whom I mentioned earlier. On these occasions, the boys of stream B received what I may safely call an introductory course to Auschwitz. Not that it was called that, of course, and I dare say that even gym master Csorba was not fully aware of the reality, although he needed to do no more than think through where the logic of his activity was leading to. Allow me at this point to wheel out my favourite Kafka quotation, a sentence from The Trial: “Judgment does not come suddenly; the proceedings gradually merge into the judgment.” The system of terror in Germany was forceful, whereas in Hungary—even before the German occupation in early 1944—it was simply unpredictable. But the proceedings had already started and were steadily moving ahead along the designated route. For the Levente lesson, a B-stream pupil would slip on a yellow arm band that his mother (or auntie or the chambermaid) had sewed for him at home and learned that he was to be addressed as “Master Ancillary Trainee,” which he would then discuss in guffaws with his companions as the expression was incomprehensible and truly ridiculous. On these occasions gym teacher Csorba would strut around in some sort of officer’s cap: “Trainee Corps, fall in!” he would bawl. The Levente lessons had to be taken seriously because they were compulsory. In Hungary under the German occupation, however, after the schools were closed early for the summer vacation, every “Master” over fourteen who was liable to do Levente service had to possess an officially verified workplace. I had received from the borough council a communication to the effect that I could either pick such a workplace for myself or they would assign one. I elected for the latter and obtained the Shell Oil refinery, and the rest you know. I hope I’m not expected to go over again the story of how I was picked up by the police, the gendarmes, the brickyard …
That is the story of the year that we know about from Fatelessness.
Maybe we should pick up again on our chat regarding the distinction between fiction and an autobiographical novel …
I wouldn’t set my heart on it. There’s just one question that I would like to ask, but that one in any case. How should I put it, then? To what extent does György Köves resemble the person who you were? To continue that line of thought: to what extent were you, Imre Kertész, helped to survive, or to what extent was it made more difficult, by your sad childhood, that alienated way of life, lacking in all intimacy, on which some light has been thrown by our conversation so far?
A good question, and one it is worth contemplating, although I feel it is something I have always been thinking about. The question reminds me of one of Jean Améry’s essays, in which he broods on whether culture, or education, was of any assistance to intellectuals in Auschwitz. He comes to the conclusion that it wasn’t; indeed, educated people had a harder time of it in the death camps than did ordinary, uneducated people. Now that may well be true in practice, but—being in possession of that culture—if one thinks a bit more profoundly about Auschwitz, about the establishment and running of the death camp, then one has to concede the necessity of those institutions. Yes, indeed, if you consider one line taken by European history and analyze it with your post-facto knowledge of the way in which, for centuries now, mankind has been thinking and acting, the way in which he has been living, then the setting-up of the machinery for the extermination of European Jewry is no big surprise.
You mean Auschwitz is an inevitable and logical consequence of …
No, I don’t mean that: Where Auschwitz starts logic stops. What comes to the fore is a kind of compulsive thought process that is very similar to logic because it leads people, only not on the path of logic. Now, I look for that thread, that aberrant train of thought that coercively passes absurdity off as logic, because once one is in the trap of Auschwitz there is no choice. More than that, we get a rehearsal in the way of thinking by life itself, in which of course we take an active part.
Is that what you mean when in Fiasco (and also Kaddish) you write: “I was a modestly diligent, if not always impeccably proficient accomplice to the unspoken conspiracy against my life”?
Precisely. I don’t know when it first occurred to me that there had to be a terrible mistake, a diabolical irony, at work in the world order that you experience as part of normal ordinary life, and that terrible mistake is culture itself, the belief system, the language and the concepts that conceal from you that you have long been a well-oiled component of the machinery that has been set up for your own destruction. The secret of survival is collaboration, but to admit that is to bring such shame down on you that you prefer to repudiate rather than accept it. Let’s not discuss that right now, however, but the fact remains that when I grasped it, my whole way of looking at things changed. I was able to imagine the language, being, and even frame of thinking of the character in a novel as a fiction, but I was no longer able to become one with him; or rather what I mean to say is that while creating the character, I forgot myself, and for that reason I am unable to give an answer to your original question as to the extent to which the novel character resembles the former me. Plainly, it more closely resembles the person who wrote it than the one who experienced it, and from my own point of view it’s very lucky that that is the way it worked out.
Because in this way it released you from nightmarish memories?
Yes, that’s right. I was able to slip out of my own skin, as it were, and pull on another one without having to discard the previous one, or in other words, without betraying my experiences.
We shall be jumping a couple of decades ahead, but I feel that this is the place to remind you of an interview you gave in 2003 in which you asserted tha
t you had written Fatelessness about the Kádár regime, which provoked a huge debate. There were more than a few people who declared that you had betrayed the Holocaust.
And the debate was just as uninformed and half-baked as the unscrupulous employment of the word “Holocaust.” People don’t care to call what actually happened by its proper name—“The Destruction of Europe’s Jews,” as Raul Hilberg entitled his great work—but instead they have found a word whose true meaning they admittedly don’t understand, but they have established this ritual and, by now, ossified and immovable place for it among our notions and they defend it like watch dogs. They bark at anyone who approaches to adjust anything about it. I never called Fatelessness a Holocaust novel like others do, because what they call “the Holocaust” cannot be put into a novel. I wrote about a state, and although it’s true the novel attempts to shape the unspeakable ordeal of the death camps into a human experience, it was nevertheless concerned primarily with the ethical consequences of subsistence and survival. That was why I picked the title Fatelessness. The ordeal of the death camps becomes a human experience where I come across the universality of the ordeal, and that is fatelessness, that specific aspect of dictatorships, the expropriation, nationalization of one’s own fate, turning it into a mass fate, the stripping away of a human being’s most human essence. The novel came into being during the Sixties and early Seventies, and what novel does not bear the imprint of its age, its language, its frame of reference, and so on? How could people imagine that the Kádár era was not a dictatorship? It was, the very pick of dictatorships, yet after Auschwitz the virtuality of Auschwitz inheres in every dictatorship. It is only among the obsessions of Hungarian politics that recognizing and admitting this fact could be counted scandalous. In saying that I am not going as far as to assert that the Holocaust was like the Kádár regime; all I have said is that it was under the Kádár regime that I clearly understood my Auschwitz ordeals, and I would never have come to understand them if I had grown up in a democracy. And I have already said that a hundred times, comparing the strength of memory to Proust’s petites madeleines, the unexpected taste of which revived the past for him. For me the petite madeleine was the Kádár era, and it revived the tastes of Auschwitz.
