The talks, supported by the Hungarian Institute in Paris and France's House of Literature and Writers, was the closing event of the "European Writers Tour de France", a series organised as part of the European Cultural Season that took place when France held the six-month rotating European Union presidency. The series involved about 80 European writers who spoke mainly about the problem of translation.
Answering a question by the cultural journalist Sylvain Bourmeau, Kertész said there is no Holocaust literature for him, only literature, which is shaped by its own internal rules, just as is biography, philosophy or historical writing. Kertész said one cannot write a novel about the Holocaust. He did not write Fatelessness because he wanted to commit his own Holocaust experiences to paper, but because he just wanted to write a novel. It is important, however, Kertész added, when a novel is written, whether it was before Auschwitz, during or afterward, as this will decide the language of the work.
Kertész said he was not interested in the Holocaust when he wrote Fatelessness but in Auschwitz and the consequences of totalitarianism. He wanted to create a language that, to borrow a musical term, was atonal. This prose sends the message that there is no more communal culture and the system of values has been destroyed. Old worlds are used to name moral values, but these do no mean anything.
Stalinism played a big role in finding this post-Auschwitz literary language, Kertész said. Only after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution did he really understand totalitarianism, when people were forced to part from their old values.
Kertész stressed that the anti-Semitism was not a novelty in the 20th century, but concentration camps were.
At the end of the talk, Kertész was asked what Europe means today. He answered that one must answer this question from day to day. In his own works, Kertész wanted to show how much beauty there was even in the Europe of the 20th century.
"I wrote my novels during the most difficult years of dictatorship, and only now do I see how happy I was then. But I am happy now too. So much for European development," Kertész said.
Pahor, who was born in Trieste in 1913, when the city was part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, said the "camp feeling" started on a psychological level even before he was deported. With the collapse of the Monarchy, Trieste became part of Italy, where Pahor, as a Slovenian, became a minority. He joined Yugoslavian resistance figures in 1944, but was captured by the Nazis and set to a prison camp - as an adult, unlike Kertész, who experienced Auschwitz as a boy.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
