Imre Kertész (1929–2016)
Author of Fatelessness
About the Author
Imre Kertész was born in Budapest, Hungary on November 9, 1929. He was only 14 years old when he was deported with 7,000 other Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in 1944. He survived that camp and later was transferred to the Buchenwald camp from where he was liberated in show more 1945. After returning to his native Budapest, he worked as a journalist and translator. He translated the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Elias Canetti into Hungarian. He wrote several novels that drew largely from his experience as a teenage prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. His novels included Fateless, Fiasco, Kaddish for a Child Not Born, Someone Else, The K File, Europe's Depressing Heritage, and Liquidation. He also wrote the screenplay for the film version of Fateless in 2005. While his work was ignored by both the communist authorities and the public in Hungary where awareness of the Holocaust remained negligible, his work was recognized in other parts of the world. He received awards including the Brandenburg Literature Prize in 1995, The Book Prize for European Understanding, the Darmstadt Academy Prize in 1997, the World Literature Prize in 2000, and the Nobel Prize for Literature for fiction in 2002. He died after a long illness on March 31, 2016 at the age of 86. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Works by Imre Kertész
Un instante de silencio en el paredón: El holocausto como cultura (Spanish Edition) (1998) 36 copies, 1 review
De verbannen taal 7 copies
The Union Jack 5 copies
Il secolo infelice 4 copies
Ja, inny : kronika przemiany 3 copies
Heimweh nach dem Tod: Arbeitstagebuch zur Entstehung des «Romans eines Schicksallosen» (2022) 3 copies
Union Jack, The 3 copies
De verbannen taal 3 copies
Die englische Flagge 3 copies
Sinn und Form 1/2019: Siebzig Jahre Beiträge zur Literatur (Sinn und Form / Beiträge zur Literatur) (2019) 3 copies
De verbannen taal 2 copies
Fiasko 2 copies
The Union Jack 2 copies
Die englische Flagge. 2 copies
A száműzött nyelv 2 copies
La Bandera Inglesa 2 copies
Die englische Flagge 2 copies
Die englische Flagge Erzählungen 2 copies
The Union Jack 2 copies
Den engelska flaggan 2 copies
Protokoll Erzählung 1 copy
ROMANI I NJË TË PAFATI 1 copy
Jezik u progonstvu 1 copy
Bezsʺdbovnost roman 1 copy
Den engelska flaggan 1 copy
Den engelska flaggan 1 copy
Engleska zastava 1 copy
Union Jack, The 1 copy
A száműzött nyelv 1 copy
A száműzött nyelv 1 copy
Peter Esterhazy 1 copy
Досие К. 1 copy
Az angol lobogó 1 copy
Il vessillo britannico 1 copy
Ja, inny : kronika przemiany 1 copy
De verbannen taal 1 copy
De verbannen taal 1 copy
A száműzött nyelv 1 copy
The Union Jack 1 copy
Az angol lobogó 1 copy
The Union Jack 1 copy
Essere senza destino 1 copy
Lét és írás 1 copy
Heuréka 1 copy
慘敗 (Cǎnbài) 1 copy
פיאסקו (Psku) 1 copy
Không Số Phận 1 copy
Geschichte und Geschichten 1 copy
2009 1 copy
De verbannen taal 1 copy
A száműzött nyelv 1 copy
Angielska flaga 1 copy
De Verbannen Taal 1 copy
Il vessillo britannico 1 copy
La bandera inglesa 1 copy
Le drapeau anglais 1 copy
Az angol lobogó elbeszélések 1 copy
Az angol lobogó 1 copy
Il vessillo britannico 1 copy
Vyhnaný jazyk 1 copy
Az angol lobogó elbeszélések 1 copy
Le drapeau anglais (Babel) 1 copy
Verbannen taal 1 copy
Die englische Flagge 1 copy
La Bandera Inglesa 1 copy
La bandera inglesa 1 copy
Engleska zastava 1 copy
Kieli maanpaossa 1 copy
Язык в изгнании 1 copy
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Kertész, Imre
- Legal name
- Kertész Imre (Hungarian name order)
- Birthdate
- 1929-11-09
- Date of death
- 2016-03-31
- Gender
- male
- Occupations
- writer
journalist
translator
novelist
essayist
public speaker - Awards and honors
- Nobel Prize for Literature (2002)
Order of Saint Stephen
Goethe Medal (2004)
Brandenburger Literaturpreis (1995)
Leipziger Buchpreis (1997)
Herder Preis (2000) (show all 7)
Pour le Mérite (2001) - Short biography
- Imre Kertész was born to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. After his parents László Kertész and Aranka Jakab separated when he was about five years old, he attended a boarding school. In 1944, after Nazi Germany invaded his homeland during World War II, he was deported at age 14 with other Hungarian Jews to the death camp at Auschwitz, and was later sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. He survived to be liberated by U.S. troops in 1945 and returned to Budapest. He resumed his education and graduated from high school in 1948. Kertész became a journalist and worked for the periodical Világosság (Clarity) but was dismissed in 1951 after it adopted the Communist party line. After a short time as a factory worker, he was employed by the press department of the Ministry of Heavy Industry. He then became a freelance writer and translator of German-language authors into Hungarian, including works by Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Elias Canetti. His most influential novel, Sorstalanság (Fatelessness), written between 1960 and 1973, the first of his Holocaust trilogy, was based on his experiences in the camps. Initially it was rejected by the Communist censors in Hungary, but was finally published in 1975. In was adapted into a film in 2005. Subsequent volumes in the trilogy were A kudarc (The Failure, 1988) and Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért (Kaddish for an Unborn Child, 1990). Having found little appreciation for his writing in Hungary, he divided his time between Budapest and Berlin, where he also was able to make public appearances. He won numerous literary prizes before being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002.
- Nationality
- Hungary
- Birthplace
- Budapest, Hungary
- Places of residence
- Budapest, Hungary
Berlin, Germany - Place of death
- Budapest, Hungary
- Map Location
- Hungary
Members
Reviews
Review of Fatelessness
The Crux of it: I am Here
1942 - a French orderly gives out sugar cubes to French children every day in the Buchenwald concentration camp hospital. The main character György a Hungarian teenager, notices that the French speakers get two, while he only ever gets one. To György this behavior illustrates the advantage of learning a second.language.
This is typical György who is sent first to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald where he endures the horrors of the camps as we show more know them. He analyses events by rationalizing them in a matter of fact way, sans morality or resentment, his only emotion coming midway in the book when he starts to experience “irritability” and even then, never moral outrage.
The story is autobiographical and was written years after Kertész‘s imprisonment, when he was on the cusp of forgetting. Hence the many details of inmates’ facial structures and camp hierarchy uniforms. He’s putting it alll out there, in plain and simple terms; making it hard for the modern reader to understand the eerie detachment.
The story is told in chronological order, with the young boy unaware of what lies ahead as he passes from one horror to the next. Each event is told using backshadowing, with György taking and justifying each horror step by step without the knowledge of the modern reader. This of course is how the inmates experienced the ordeal, and reading it in this way has the efffect of making the experience more real. We are centered in György‘s life. But we can never fully accept the detachment shown in the justifications, the peak and most horrific being when Köves seems to “understand” the crematoria of Auschwitz,
I became used to György’s way of using reason to justify what happens to him without ethical considerations. But the question remains why? Is it that it’s a story told by a teenager? Or that the writer lacks Faith and is, being a non-practicing Jew, an outcast amongst outcasts? Or is it for effect? Or has the concept of morality been beaten out of him?
I prefer to think it’s an older person’s way of trying to remember what has of necessity been repressed. The writer is trying to remember, step by step, the events of his imprisonment, along with how he managed to cope with those events,as a young male thrust into the horror of the Holocaust without any adult experience or faith to guide him. Thus as with the sugar cube episode recounted in a matter-of-fact way, without rancor or moral overtone, I started to see into Kertész’s memory. show less
The Crux of it: I am Here
1942 - a French orderly gives out sugar cubes to French children every day in the Buchenwald concentration camp hospital. The main character György a Hungarian teenager, notices that the French speakers get two, while he only ever gets one. To György this behavior illustrates the advantage of learning a second.language.
This is typical György who is sent first to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald where he endures the horrors of the camps as we show more know them. He analyses events by rationalizing them in a matter of fact way, sans morality or resentment, his only emotion coming midway in the book when he starts to experience “irritability” and even then, never moral outrage.
The story is autobiographical and was written years after Kertész‘s imprisonment, when he was on the cusp of forgetting. Hence the many details of inmates’ facial structures and camp hierarchy uniforms. He’s putting it alll out there, in plain and simple terms; making it hard for the modern reader to understand the eerie detachment.
The story is told in chronological order, with the young boy unaware of what lies ahead as he passes from one horror to the next. Each event is told using backshadowing, with György taking and justifying each horror step by step without the knowledge of the modern reader. This of course is how the inmates experienced the ordeal, and reading it in this way has the efffect of making the experience more real. We are centered in György‘s life. But we can never fully accept the detachment shown in the justifications, the peak and most horrific being when Köves seems to “understand” the crematoria of Auschwitz,
I became used to György’s way of using reason to justify what happens to him without ethical considerations. But the question remains why? Is it that it’s a story told by a teenager? Or that the writer lacks Faith and is, being a non-practicing Jew, an outcast amongst outcasts? Or is it for effect? Or has the concept of morality been beaten out of him?
I prefer to think it’s an older person’s way of trying to remember what has of necessity been repressed. The writer is trying to remember, step by step, the events of his imprisonment, along with how he managed to cope with those events,as a young male thrust into the horror of the Holocaust without any adult experience or faith to guide him. Thus as with the sugar cube episode recounted in a matter-of-fact way, without rancor or moral overtone, I started to see into Kertész’s memory. show less
Imre Kertész, of course, spent his teenage years in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and had more reason than most writers to know about the psychology of totalitarianism. In this novella he turns the tables and puts himself inside the head of a secret police officer in an imaginary Latin American dictatorship, who has become fascinated by the case of Enrique Salinas, the idealistic, dilettante student son of a wealthy businessman. Enrique is trying to find a way into opposition to the regime, show more while the police are trying to find useful evidence against him, and it's anybody's guess who will get there first. In the end, sadly, it doesn't seem to matter: there is a devastating logic that drives the process of Enrique's and the policeman's mutual destruction, seemingly independent of what anyone actually does.
Short, brutal and unanswerable in its dark analysis of how absolute power inevitably goes wrong. show less
Short, brutal and unanswerable in its dark analysis of how absolute power inevitably goes wrong. show less
46. Fatelessness by Imre Kertész
translation: from Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson, 2004
OPD: 1975
format: 262-page Kindle ebook (side note: I started with a paperback I bought in SF in Nov 2022, but it turned out to be a bad copy.)
acquired: November 2022, then again August 15 read: Aug 13-22 time reading: 8:39, 2.0 mpp
rating: 5
genre/style: modern classics? theme: TBR
locations: Hungary & several concentration camps
about the author: Jewish Hungarian author and journalist from Budapest, a Holocaust show more survivor, and the 2002 Nobel Prize winner. (1929-2016)
I find Holocaust books tough to respond to, and tough to review, and this classic is no different. It's very powerful. It's semi-autobiographical in that it's the story of a 14-year-old Hungarian boy, Jewish only by lineage, who experiences and survives concentration camps, something the author experienced, and also it's all told in first person.
What sets this apart is the perspective. We never meet György Köves's parents, or anyone he's deeply connected to. He is emotionally distant. Unexperienced, but passionlessly curious, with an open logical mind. So, when finds himself and Auschwitz, he's not emotionally horrified so much as practical and scared in that way. He observes logically, within his understanding, even justifying various actions of guards in terms of what makes sense to him. There are bodies going up in smoke within his line of sight, bodies of people he just got off the train with, who have already been gassed, and he's focused on how people with valuables respond to requests by guards to give these up voluntarily, or by the way a newly shaven rabbi washes himself in showers (showerers that look the same as the gas chambers).
When he eventually returns home, and is questioned by what turns out to be a news or magazine writer, he answers questions saying, "naturally" this or that traumatic event. He is angry, but he is shaped by this experience, and embraces that impact on him, which is strange, especially in light of how grown up and mature he sounds at the end of the book.
What was weird for me, as a reader, is that I was never horrified while my mind was within the tone of the text. I was invested in György, like in the way I might be invested in a pretty good unprofessional challenger in America Ninja Warrior. I wanted him to succeed, to overcome. This kept me reading, and drew me back between chances to read. I was engaged. But I would need to pull myself out of the book, look around, so to speak, to grasp the context. That was very strange to me.
This is an important work. In my mind, it's up there with [Night], [If This is a Man], and [Maus], as a pillar towards understanding the Holocaust in a literary or artistic context. So highly recommended to those with this kind of interest. Personally I was drawn to this from other ClubRead comments and review (like from Labfs39, years ago), and also because part of being Jewish is to be drawn to this cultural heritage.
2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/351556#8216664 show less
translation: from Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson, 2004
OPD: 1975
format: 262-page Kindle ebook (side note: I started with a paperback I bought in SF in Nov 2022, but it turned out to be a bad copy.)
acquired: November 2022, then again August 15 read: Aug 13-22 time reading: 8:39, 2.0 mpp
rating: 5
genre/style: modern classics? theme: TBR
locations: Hungary & several concentration camps
about the author: Jewish Hungarian author and journalist from Budapest, a Holocaust show more survivor, and the 2002 Nobel Prize winner. (1929-2016)
I find Holocaust books tough to respond to, and tough to review, and this classic is no different. It's very powerful. It's semi-autobiographical in that it's the story of a 14-year-old Hungarian boy, Jewish only by lineage, who experiences and survives concentration camps, something the author experienced, and also it's all told in first person.
What sets this apart is the perspective. We never meet György Köves's parents, or anyone he's deeply connected to. He is emotionally distant. Unexperienced, but passionlessly curious, with an open logical mind. So, when finds himself and Auschwitz, he's not emotionally horrified so much as practical and scared in that way. He observes logically, within his understanding, even justifying various actions of guards in terms of what makes sense to him. There are bodies going up in smoke within his line of sight, bodies of people he just got off the train with, who have already been gassed, and he's focused on how people with valuables respond to requests by guards to give these up voluntarily, or by the way a newly shaven rabbi washes himself in showers (showerers that look the same as the gas chambers).
"At the very beginning, I still considered myself to be what I might call a sort of guest in captivity--very pardonably and, when it comes down to it, in full accordance with the propensity to delusion that we all share and which is thus, I suppose, ultimately part of human nature"
When he eventually returns home, and is questioned by what turns out to be a news or magazine writer, he answers questions saying, "naturally" this or that traumatic event. He is angry, but he is shaped by this experience, and embraces that impact on him, which is strange, especially in light of how grown up and mature he sounds at the end of the book.
What was weird for me, as a reader, is that I was never horrified while my mind was within the tone of the text. I was invested in György, like in the way I might be invested in a pretty good unprofessional challenger in America Ninja Warrior. I wanted him to succeed, to overcome. This kept me reading, and drew me back between chances to read. I was engaged. But I would need to pull myself out of the book, look around, so to speak, to grasp the context. That was very strange to me.
This is an important work. In my mind, it's up there with [Night], [If This is a Man], and [Maus], as a pillar towards understanding the Holocaust in a literary or artistic context. So highly recommended to those with this kind of interest. Personally I was drawn to this from other ClubRead comments and review (like from Labfs39, years ago), and also because part of being Jewish is to be drawn to this cultural heritage.
2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/351556#8216664 show less
This is a short but profound, sometimes disturbing but always thought-provoking meditation on what is reality, what is life and the purpose of it when Auschwitz exists, what is a society of individuals under a communist, totalitarian system, what is the meaning or usefulness of literature and reading, how do humans interact with each other, what is the human spirit, how can one construct a world or a society when “…Good can be done in a life in which Evil is the life principle, but only show more at the cost of the doer’s sacrificing his life.” This is not an easy book; it demands close attention and thought; I was almost finished it but went back to the beginning because I had been interrupted in reading it over a couple of weeks and felt that I needed to absorb it in a continuous reading so as to appreciate what Kertesz is expounding and exploring. If one measure of good writing is a book that challenges you, demands your intellectual engagement, and leaves you thinking of it well afterwards, then this book succeeds.
The story is fairly simple. B (or Bee, is the only designation given him) is a writer/translator who commits suicide and a friend, a literary editor completely disillusioned with the communist system becomes obsessed with finding B’s final novel which he has never seen or even heard of, but which he is convinced exists and which he hopes will explain the meaning of B’s death. The novel moves back and forth in time, back and forth in narrator (sometimes first person and third person almost in the same paragraph) and back and forth in structure as it starts out as a play, that reflects real life events, within a novel that explores the background to those events. I think the choice of “B” as opposed to any other letter in the alphabet is not fortuitous: as one protagonist notes, the question is not Hamlet’s: To be or not to be, but rather, Whether I am or I am not. And I think the movement back and forth in time and structure and person reflects Kertesz’s view that life is haphazard, that happenstance and circumstance largely dictate its structure: “Single locality, four characters…What brings them together? A shared past, and their links with B. The fortuitousness of both factors. The past is a random collectivity of fates tossed together onto a heap with a pitchfork.”
While he does not belabor them, because in a sense any comparative is monstrous, for Kertesz there are parallels between Auschwitz and the communist regime in Hungary. There are, in both instances, a senselessness, an aimlessness, a complete disconnect of cause and effect in an Alice-in-Wonderland state of “reality”. This description applies equally to the two worlds:
“We are living in an age of disaster; each of us is a carrier of the disaster, so there is a need for a particular art of living for us to survive. Disaster man has no fate, no qualities, no character. His horrific social milieu…tugs on him with the tractive force of a colossal whirlpool, until he gives up his resistance and chaos bursts in on him like a boiling-hot geyser, after which chaos becomes home to him. For him there can be no return to some center of the Self, a solid and irrefutable self-certainty; in other words, he is lost, in the most authentic sense of the word.”
Is there an objective reality in which one can perceive one’s place and role? That is something that Kertesz posits in almost the opening lines: “…reality had become a problematic concept for Kingbitter, but, more serious still, a problematic state.” Later, Kingbitter muses, “…only now do I see how difficult it must be for my clients, so-called (or perchance genuine) writers, to wrestle with unvarnished matter, objective reality, the entire phenomenological world , in order to reach the essence that glimmers behind it---that is, if any such thing exists, of course. In most cases, one sets off from the premise that it does exist, because one is unable to reconcile oneself to the inessentiality of one’s life…” Reality is, “totally incomprehensible and unknowable as it is, through being shielded from us by our imagination…”. But what is a reality, what is the past when both are constructed from the imaginations, even within the ambit of a single life, of hundreds if not thousands of people and interactions, all of which shape, determine and continually reconstruct the past and hence the present and even the future?
B’s life is doubly damned. The survivor’s guilt that he lives with is compounded hugely by the fact that he was born in Auschwitz….the spark of a new life brought forth in the cauldron of a circle of hell beyond even the imagination of Dante. Small wonder that for B, “…people have lost their flair for greatness [in all forms of art] and only their flair for murder has persisted, though undoubtedly they have refined the latter, their flair for murder, to an art, almost to the point of greatness…”. This is true and must stand as the greatest, most horrific legacy of the 20th century.
What is the role of writing in such a world? It provides the only framework within which one might try to make sense of life because it at least forces some thought and structure onto whatever is reality: “If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created it for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.”
This has become a rather lengthy review of a relatively short book, but it is a book replete with challenging thoughts and concepts. Highly recommended. show less
The story is fairly simple. B (or Bee, is the only designation given him) is a writer/translator who commits suicide and a friend, a literary editor completely disillusioned with the communist system becomes obsessed with finding B’s final novel which he has never seen or even heard of, but which he is convinced exists and which he hopes will explain the meaning of B’s death. The novel moves back and forth in time, back and forth in narrator (sometimes first person and third person almost in the same paragraph) and back and forth in structure as it starts out as a play, that reflects real life events, within a novel that explores the background to those events. I think the choice of “B” as opposed to any other letter in the alphabet is not fortuitous: as one protagonist notes, the question is not Hamlet’s: To be or not to be, but rather, Whether I am or I am not. And I think the movement back and forth in time and structure and person reflects Kertesz’s view that life is haphazard, that happenstance and circumstance largely dictate its structure: “Single locality, four characters…What brings them together? A shared past, and their links with B. The fortuitousness of both factors. The past is a random collectivity of fates tossed together onto a heap with a pitchfork.”
While he does not belabor them, because in a sense any comparative is monstrous, for Kertesz there are parallels between Auschwitz and the communist regime in Hungary. There are, in both instances, a senselessness, an aimlessness, a complete disconnect of cause and effect in an Alice-in-Wonderland state of “reality”. This description applies equally to the two worlds:
“We are living in an age of disaster; each of us is a carrier of the disaster, so there is a need for a particular art of living for us to survive. Disaster man has no fate, no qualities, no character. His horrific social milieu…tugs on him with the tractive force of a colossal whirlpool, until he gives up his resistance and chaos bursts in on him like a boiling-hot geyser, after which chaos becomes home to him. For him there can be no return to some center of the Self, a solid and irrefutable self-certainty; in other words, he is lost, in the most authentic sense of the word.”
Is there an objective reality in which one can perceive one’s place and role? That is something that Kertesz posits in almost the opening lines: “…reality had become a problematic concept for Kingbitter, but, more serious still, a problematic state.” Later, Kingbitter muses, “…only now do I see how difficult it must be for my clients, so-called (or perchance genuine) writers, to wrestle with unvarnished matter, objective reality, the entire phenomenological world , in order to reach the essence that glimmers behind it---that is, if any such thing exists, of course. In most cases, one sets off from the premise that it does exist, because one is unable to reconcile oneself to the inessentiality of one’s life…” Reality is, “totally incomprehensible and unknowable as it is, through being shielded from us by our imagination…”. But what is a reality, what is the past when both are constructed from the imaginations, even within the ambit of a single life, of hundreds if not thousands of people and interactions, all of which shape, determine and continually reconstruct the past and hence the present and even the future?
B’s life is doubly damned. The survivor’s guilt that he lives with is compounded hugely by the fact that he was born in Auschwitz….the spark of a new life brought forth in the cauldron of a circle of hell beyond even the imagination of Dante. Small wonder that for B, “…people have lost their flair for greatness [in all forms of art] and only their flair for murder has persisted, though undoubtedly they have refined the latter, their flair for murder, to an art, almost to the point of greatness…”. This is true and must stand as the greatest, most horrific legacy of the 20th century.
What is the role of writing in such a world? It provides the only framework within which one might try to make sense of life because it at least forces some thought and structure onto whatever is reality: “If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created it for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.”
This has become a rather lengthy review of a relatively short book, but it is a book replete with challenging thoughts and concepts. Highly recommended. show less
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