Fischer writes that Kertész arrived for the interview, in the café of the Gresham Palace in Budapest, "smiling as if he's just heard a good joke."
Kertész is a Holocaust survivor who drew on his experience to write his now famous novel Fatelessness. He lives in Berlin.
Asked whether it isn't ironic that he spends so much time in Berlin, Kertész replies: ""It's not ironic, because it was in Germany that I made an impact as a writer, where my book was understood and published. I felt I could say something. I could do something. And anyway it was here, not Germany, that I first experienced fascism."
"There was great interest in the Holocaust," says Kertész of his reception in Germany in the 1990s. "I didn't moralise and they understood something about the past with Hungarian help."
He recalls that it was difficult to publish Fatelessness in Hungary when he wrote it in the 1970s. "There were two publishers in socialist Hungary. One rejected it on the grounds that it was anti-Semitic. I still have the letter."
Kertész says the viewpoint of Fatelessness was brought about by the regime of János Kádár, who was put into power by the Soviet Union after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution was crushed.
"I lived through Auschwitz. I lived through the 1948 Communist takeover. It was a harsh dictatorship. Stalinist. I lived through it. Kádár's crushing of the 1956 revolution [and] the consequent consolidation created a type of man... it reshaped the population in an awful way. They assimilated to the 'soft' dictatorship."
Asked why he didn't leave the country then, Kertész said it was because of his notoriously difficult mother tongue.
"I was 27 and I wouldn't have stayed if I hadn't started to write. At 27 I couldn't learn how to write in another language. It was because of language that I didn't leave."
Asked about politics in the new, democratic Hungary, Kertész says the country is "morose". "Democracy is a word which has been completely devalued. I really don't know what it means.... Democracy, I'd say, is not a political system but a culture."
Fischer notes that the recent creation of the right-wing Hungarian Guard, that "likes dressing up in uniforms and marching around, has caused some consternation in Hungary," and asks Kertész if it is better that anti-Semitism is out in the open in Hungary.
"Anti-Semitism is very peculiar in Hungary. It's harmful, destructive, heartfelt but it's not active. We have the only rabbinical seminary in Central Europe, apart from Russia. It was here under Kádár. The largest Jewish community is here," Kertész responds.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI) / The Independent
