The Hungarian writer, Imre Kertesz, won the Nobel Prize for Literature yesterday. Kertesz (72), a Holocaust survivor, has drawn heavily on his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
His key work, Sorstalensag (Fateless), is a shocking account of life in a concentration camp told through the eyes of a 15-year-old Jewish narrator, Gyorgy Koves. The boy's naïvety adds to the horror as Kertesz tells of his and his father's deportation during the Nazi persecution without any idea of what might happen next.
At the time of publication, Kertesz came under fire from certain quarters who considered it a scandal that anyone could write of finding moments of happiness in a concentration camp. Yet in Kertesz's hands the story never trivialises nor renders harmless the ever-present menace.
Instead, it provides an insight into life in the camp as it unfolds, rather than with the benefit of hindsight, which makes it all the more immediate.
The Swedish Academy recognised this quality in its Nobel Prize citation, characterising his writing as upholding "the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history".
The academy said: "In his writing Imre Kertesz explores the possibility of continuing to live and think as an individual in an era in which the subjection of human beings to social forces has become increasingly complete."
For Kertesz Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence, outside the normal history of western Europe. "It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern existence," the academy concluded.
Yet Kertesz had great difficulty in getting the book published and he remains poorly served by translation into English, with only one other work, Kaddish for a Child Not Born, and Fiasko (sic) published in English-language versions, although he is immensely popular in Germany.
Born in Budapest to a Jewish family on November 9th, 1929, Kertesz was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and released from Buchenwald by the Americans in May 1945 as the second World War drew to a close.
Having suffered under the Nazis, Kertesz became a victim of communism in 1951 when he was dismissed from his job on the Budapest newspaper, Vilagossag. He had worked there for three years when it was declared the official organ of the Hungarian Communist Party.
After his national service, he became a full-time writer and translator, bringing the works and ideas of German writers and philosophers, from Nietzsche to Freud and Wittgenstein to Arthur Schnitzler and Joseph Roth, to the Hungarian people.
In 1975, the publication of Fateless, his first novel, was his literary breakthrough but was received coldly in his native land at first. While he denied it was autobiographical, he admitted: "Whenever I think of writing a novel, I always think about Auschwitz."
He has continued to write and publish works relating to that harrowing period of his life, including his war diaries. Since the political upheaval and the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, he has found it easier to appear in public, giving readings and lectures. - (AFP)