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| Photo: MTI, EPA |
Kertész, a Holocaust survivor, asks rhetorically in the interview "Why does one live in a place which reminds him of his worst experiences?" He answers that Berlin, in fact, does not remind him of these experiences.
"My first novel found great appeal here, and I found myself in a culture where what I wrote about found a real echo; in Hungary, nobody is interested in that. There is a different culture in Central Eastern Europe, there the problem of the Holocaust is simply not to be found - or only in a cursory manner," Kertész explains.
"I think I have something to do in Germany, although I write in Hungarian," he adds.
In addition to a place where East and West co-exist in harmony, Kertész says Berlin is a city "with much life energy, and an intellectual city, where one can reflect in peace."
Kertész won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002 for "writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history".
Fatelessness, his best-known book, tells the story of a young boy in the concentration camps. The book is based on some of Kertész's own experiences.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI) / Frankfurter Rundschau
