by Imre Kertész
So, you were already then interested in music?
It looks like it. I can’t recall how I became a regular attender at concerts at the Academy of Music. The fact is I would turn up two or three times a week to see a well-known usher in the main hall.
“That exceedingly testy old man at the Music Academy, known to every student or student type, who, due to some eye defect, wore a perennial look of distrust …”
I can see you are leafing through The Union Jack. Carry on, do.
“… but for a forint or two pressed into his palm, [he] would let any student or student type into the auditorium, testily ordering them to stand by the wall and then, as soon as the conductor appeared at the stage door leading to the podium, would direct them in a harsh voice to any unoccupied free seats. It would be fruitless for me to muse now over why, how, and on what impulse I came to like music … it is a fact, therefore, that even then, as little more than a child, I would have been unable to tolerate that life, my life, without music.” Is that true?
It is. Later on, when I found myself in situations that made all reality, even my own existence, highly questionable in my own eyes, it was enough for me to softly whistle, let’s say, the second subject of the first movement of the Jupiter Symphony for life to be restored to me.
You said that was “later on.” When exactly?
When by mistake I set off as a newspaper reporter.
Let’s stay for the moment with Mr. Kondor’s approval of the young music-lover. We are in the interlude between two dictatorships and you happen to be enjoying the brief interval, or to be posh: intermission.
Not bad.
You’re involved in school, in the Communist Party, you go to the Music Academy in the evenings, then sit around in dives by night …
Put like that, it sounds great, and on the whole so it was. Except it leaves out the most important bit, the feeling that most of all dominated my life: uneasiness.
So things weren’t entirely all right, after all?
Who said they were? The air rarefied around me; a string of friends, classmates at school, left the country. I felt myself becoming a growing burden to my mother. I hadn’t the slightest idea about what I should do by way of setting about my so-called future. For the time being, I still had to take the school-leaving certificate; I used to get up during the night, shut myself into the bathroom, and by the light of the bulb write a universal drama that bore a striking resemblance to the Divine Comedy; in my play a man strays from the right path just as in the latter … in a nutshell I think that’s what it was about: just as in real life at the time, I lost my way. I had no role models to go by; at grammar school there slowly emerged a sort of elite who spoke in what, to me, was a foreign language. Those boys read Galsworthy and The Thibaut Family. With their supercilious intellects, they kept abreast with the mysteries of integral and differential calculus, of which I understood nothing. I acquired the hefty book by Martin du Gard and was bitterly disappointed to have to admit that I found it monumentally boring. What took my fancy, by contrast, were American thrillers, lighthearted Hungarian fiction, like the tales of Jenő Rejtő, Dezső Kosztolányi’s “Kornél Esti” short stories, the novellas of Sándor Hunyadi, and Remarque, but if I brought Arch of Triumph into a conversation, which I may have read as many as five times, it was to encounter pitying smiles. All in all, I was set to fail the more difficult subjects like math; in the eyes of the elite whom I esteemed so highly I counted as an uncultured clod; sometimes I would find my mother’s gaze looking me up and down uneasily and with impatient expectation. I was an exile, yet full of vivid and groundless hopes all the same.
Of what kind?
I don’t know—nameless ones. It was as if I had heard the encouragement of a distant promise.
Would that have been the Weltvertrauen, the trust in the world, that you mentioned earlier as sustaining you in the concentration camp?
An intriguing question. At all events I lived without any plans, taking each day as it came, but I don’t think it is worth dwelling too long on that critical period in my life.
I’m sorry, but crises are always interesting. You yourself just mentioned that you had no role models to go by. Didn’t you miss your father, for instance?
The only answer I can give is the brutal one: no, I didn’t.
But don’t you think that your association with the Communist Party attests to the lack of some kind of father figure?
No, I don’t. Right around then I had no connection at all with them. I would pay my Party dues every month; that was the extent of it. In fact, I was assailed by the most severe doubts about Marxism on the basis of a doltishly cocksure book by George Bernard Shaw (I don’t recollect its title). I have to start from the fact that among the books belonging to my mother—or Laci Seres, to be precise—I came across a slim, handsome volume with the title of The Symposium, written by this ancient Greek author called Plato. I took it to heart for literally days on end. After that came GBS, who solved all of Marxism’s problems with a flick of his fly-swatter, simply knocked them on the head, every single one with the same angry swipe. Can one discard everything on which man has been cogitating for five thousand years just like that, I questioned with my eighteen-year-old intellect? That seemed exceedingly unlikely. And then the books on Party tactics by Engels and by Lenin in particular—One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (The Crisis in Our Party), or is it the other way round?—proved mind-numbingly tedious. The Symposium was highly refined poetry by comparison.
In other words, you did everything in your power to saw off the branch on which you were perched.
Not everything; that only ensued later on. For the time being all I did was make my life more uncomfortable, but that is at least something.
A step ahead?
If I had known which way was backward or forward!
You said just before that you became a newspaper reporter by mistake.
Everything I did was by mistake; all in all, I lived in complete error. Anyway, journalism at least looked interesting.
How did it enter your head to become a journalist?
Look, as I’ve already said, during the nights I was writing this blank-verse play. Admittedly, I abandoned it fairly quickly, but somehow I had been touched by the process of writing itself. It was around then that Zoltán Jékely’s novel based loosely on the life of the poet Endre Ady—The Black Sail may have been its title12—came into my hands. In this a poet seriously—and quite literally, one might say—seeks death in love, and suddenly there emerges from the perfumed murkiness of a bordello a girl, the bewitching carrier of poisoned kisses, Hetaera Esmeralda, as Leverkühn, the main protagonist of a later piece of reading matter, calls the fate insidiously lurking in his blood.13 As you may be able to tell, I was an incurable romantic whom the world of existing socialism had at one and the same time clutched to its breast. What chance would I have had to get to know myself?
All the same, journalism is rather far removed from romanticism, isn’t it?
If you are familiar with it and that’s what you do, that’s no doubt true, but for me it was the way of life that attracted me, and here too it was through a book: Ernő Szép’s novel Adam’s Apple. A journalist crops up in that who plays the role of the raissoneur; wise and resigned, he knows what he knows, he sits in coffee-houses, watching the world bustle by in front of the window table, and every now and again he writes a newspaper article—well, that was exactly how I wanted to live.
I’m not sure your interpretation of the novel is totally accurate …
It doesn’t matter: that’s how I saw it. Writing as a way of life for me was linked with fatal love, on the one hand, and total idleness, on the other.
Your career in journalism started, as far as I know, with a daily newspaper by the name of Világosság [“Illumination”].
Yes, it did, and I would find it dreadfully boring if we had to go into the details here.
Fortunately for us you wrote it all down in your nove
lla The Union Jack: “I was—or ought to have been—pursuing a formulation of life as a journalist,” you write. “Granted that for a journalist to demand a formulation of life was a falsehood in its very essence; but then, anyone who lies is ipso facto thinking about the truth, and I would only have been able to lie about life if I had been acquainted, at least in part, with its truth, yet I was not acquainted, either in whole or in part, with the truth, this truth, the truth of this life, the life that I too was living.” In other words, you were unable either to lie or to tell the truth.
That’s it precisely. I had hit rock bottom. I saw the lies just gushing from the lips of honest people, but I was incapable of doing that, either; to have been able to do so I would have had to withdraw from my existence. Not that that would have been entirely new to me, because in the concentration camp I lived in my dream world; I learned how to be there yet not present. One can do that in any dictatorship.
You said before that journalism at least looked interesting …
It did to start with. That was in the summer of 1948. The country was still ruled by a coalition government, and each of the parties was printing one or two dailies. The various titles would hit the streets from the morning until the late afternoon hours; of course television of any kind did not exist. I was able to breathe the real smell of fresh printer’s ink, I would dictate the day’s “scoop” over a phone line before we went to press; I was acquainted with a few celebrated chief editors—the last of the Budapest journalists. I lived a pretty exciting life for those few short months. Together with my boss, the editor of the paper’s “City Hall” column, we would turn up every morning at City Hall and do the rounds of all the councillors’ offices, sniffing around for the latest news. I had a regular accreditation to the City Hall reporters’ club. The doyen of the club was an elderly journalist, Varjas was his name, who worked for the Kis Újság [“Small News”], the paper of the Smallholders’ Party. In early 1949, the journalists made bets as to whether or not Cardinal Mindszenty would be arrested. I remember word for word what Varjas said: “If they dare arrest Mindszenty, then I say anything can happen here.” I met him in the street several months later, and he was in a terrible state. He had forgotten to put in his false teeth that morning; the greying hair that poked out from under a battered deerstalker was matted. His newspaper had been closed down and he had been kicked out. He shook my hand gratefully: “Other people no longer recognize me,” he complained.
In The Union Jack you recount an even more appalling encounter. I’m thinking of the passenger of a black limousine.
Forget it! That was horrible.
“Before too long I was to be stumbling around in rust-tinted dust beneath the interminable labyrinth of pipes of a murderous factory barrack-complex,” you write.
Yes, I was very lucky. In those days dismissal notices were not one of the customary forms of the prevailing relationship between state enterprises and state employees; or at least in the case of intellectuals they generally had other ways of going about it. Firms would preferably fabricate some kind of political conflict, which would often end with the intellectuals being arrested. By contrast, I was handed a regular notice to quit the Szikra Publishing Co.: they would have no further need of my services after January 1st, 1951.
What circumstances did you have to thank for that luck?
My insignificance most likely. Nevertheless, if I was to avoid being liable to prosecution for the criminal offence of “work-shyness constituting a public threat,” I had to get a new job within three months. I became a factory worker; there wasn’t really any other option.
What was the factory called?
MÁVAG, the Hungarian State Iron and Steel Works.
Ugly name.
No uglier than the factory itself.
All the same, your text seems to glorify the ugliness.
Glorify it? I don’t get what you’re driving at.
I’ll carry on the quotation, if you don’t mind: “… bleak dawns smelling of iron castings would await, hazed daytimes when the dull cognitions of the mind would swell and burst like heavy bubbles on the tin-grey surface of a steaming, swirling mass of molten metal.”
What’s your problem with that?
The fact that I gladly read it; more than that, I take a real delight in it. Meanwhile The Union Jack deals with reality and the aporia of the formulation of reality.
It doesn’t deal just with that, but I can begin to see what you’re driving at. I won’t duck the issue. Like it or not, art always regards life as a celebration.
A carnival, or a memorial service?
A celebration.
But in your case it is precisely the difference that subsists between loathsome material and festal glorification that is so striking.
That’s a problem for a moralist, not a writer. Anyone who considers a poet to be a voyeur of horrors and, in a shrill falsetto, forbids him to write poetry after Auschwitz. Is that it?
I am inclined to the view that if one talks about art and dictatorship, one can’t avoid Adorno’s precept.
“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But why are we speaking about this in connection with The Union Jack, which doesn’t even mention Auschwitz?
Our discussion is not just about The Union Jack but about your life, which you are continually reformulating. Why? “What experience is for—that’s another question, I reflected later … Who sees through us? Living, I reflected, is done as a favour to God,” you write.
Writes the narrator of The Union Jack, whom you shouldn’t confuse with me, who is putting the words in his mouth. But what has that to do with Adorno?
Just that you insert an otherwordly, metaphysical element between Adorno’s sentence and your own sentences, or in plain language, you speak about God where Adorno only sees ignominy.
You know, these are very ticklish matters …
OK, but then let me put it more simply: what is your response to Adorno’s famous—or maybe infamous—dictum?
Look here, I learned a lot from Adorno’s writings about music, when those were being published in Hungary, but that was all: I never read anything else by him.
You’re not answering my question. What is your opinion of Adorno’s renowned dictum “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”?
Well, if I may give a straight answer, I consider that statement to be a moral stink bomb that needlessly pollutes air that is already rank enough as things are.
That’s undeniably a straight answer. Would you care to justify it?
I can’t imagine how as keen an intellect as Adorno could suppose that art would renounce portraying the greatest trauma of the twentieth century. It’s true, though, that the industrialized murder of millions cannot serve as the basis for aesthetic pleasure, as it were, but surely that doesn’t mean one ought to regard the poetry of, say, Paul Celan or Miklós Radnóti as barbaric? That’s a sick joke, there are no other words for it. And as far as aesthetic “pleasure” goes, did Adorno expect these great poets to write bad poetry? The more you think about that unfortunate pronouncement, the more senseless it becomes. But what I see as truly harmful is the tendency that it reflects: a preposterously misconceived elitism that incidentally runs riot in other forms as well. What I am referring to is the assertion of an exclusive right to suffering, the appropriation, as it were, of the Holocaust. Oddly enough, that tendency concurs with the attitude of the advocates of the “Schlußstrich”—the “finishing touch” stance—the people who would reject having anything to do with the Auschwitz domain of experience and would limit it to a narrow group of people; the people who, with the demise of those who survived the death camps, consider the experience itself as being a dead memory, remote history.
As a Judeo-German conflict that may be regarded as “done and dusted” with the payment of reparations and the erecting of memorials?
In other words, as a purely political issue, although that is not the point. It’s precisely what differentiates the Hol
ocaust (let’s stay with that generally accepted label) from all other genocides. I see only one serious problem that needs to be settled, which is whether the twentieth-century experience of concentration camps is a matter of universal or marginal relevance.
We know that you think it is universal, but are you aware that in so doing you are—how should I put it?—stepping out of one cultural area and entering another?
Could you be a bit clearer what you mean?
Universality is a concept from Catholicism.
Oh, I see. A priest once said to me that God has no religion.
You say in Someone Else that there is no way of getting to grips with Auschwitz unless we take God as our starting point. Let me quote back to you: “If Auschwitz was to no avail, then God has failed; and if God has been made to fail, then we shall never understand Auschwitz.”
