 |
|
Imre Kertész |
The talk drew several hundred people to a venue where many had to stand to hear Kertész speak.
The French literary critic Manuel Carcassone said in his opening remarks that Kertész had been a survivor for his whole life, first surviving the Holocaust, then communism. Still, his work is not first and foremost an account of this survival, he added.
Kertész said he did not start writing Fatelessness - a book based on the author's own experiences in the concentration camps that is perhaps his best known work - as a personal account, rather he wanted to make art out of "raw reality".
When the book was first published in Hungary in 1975, his friends told him it was too bad he had written about his experiences in Auschwitz so late, as it had happened so long ago that the topic did not interest anybody any longer. But Kertész was convinced that this was not so. Rather the Holocaust was a trauma of European civilization, and it would take at least three generations for this trauma to be processed.
Kertész thought culture, and within this, the novel, was the only medium, which could preserve the Holocaust, allowing Europe to process the trauma in the future.
Auschwitz is a good topic for a novel, because writing about atrocities in a naturalist style will take one nowhere, rather the author has to renew it entirely in order to make a work of art. Kertész acknowledged with "a bit of cynicism" that he could be glad he survived the greatest atrocity of the 20th century as it allowed him to create a new world in his art.
Asked whether he felt "survivor's guilt" after losing friends in the camps, Kertész answered with a definitive "no". The feelings of guilt come from the question of collaboration, from being forced to participate in the killing machine in order to survive, he added.
Speaking of his own Jewish heritage, Kertész said that, with his deportation, he was thrust into a society in which he was earlier not a member. In a similar way, most of the Jews in Budapest in the 1940s were not religious, and they tried to assimilate with Hungarian society. They did not know the danger that threatened them, he added.
"They branded the Jews with such things that they themselves were unfamiliar with," Kertész said.
Kertész said he had not left Hungary in 1956 because the Hungarian language was such a definitive part of his life, adding that he could never write in another language.
Kertész visited the Hungarian stand at the fair, where the country has an independent presence for the first time in many years.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
