The Holocaust as Culture by Imre Kertész (review)

Kertész was born in 1929, into a Jewish family in Budapest. At the age of fifteen, he was deported to Auschwitz; from there, he was taken to Buchenwald and then Zeitz. Liberated in 1945, he returned to Hungary, where, after a few years, he became a journalist and a translator of German literature and philosophy. As a writer on and eyewitness of the Holocaust, however, he was not accepted by the Hungarian establishment, since his conception of the event did not satisfy the ideological demands of Communist censorship. He wrote his semi-autobiographical novel Fatelessness between 1969 and 1973, but the book was not published until 1975. Even then, it inspired no reviews, no official response. Nonetheless, this contemptuous reception did not stop Kertész from writing. Some of his novels and essays eventually found their way into other languages. Having moved to Germany and become increasingly appreciated worldwide, Kertész received the Nobel Prize in 2002.

This small book, The Holocaust as Culture, is divided into three independent parts. In the translator Thomas Cooper’s brilliant introduction, he notes that Kertész is unconvinced by representations of Holocaust experience, partly because “traumas of the Holocaust elude representation, partly because representation transforms memory into artifact and substitutes form for experience.” In effect, Kertész looks upon Auschwitz as “a moment of complete rupture in European culture, a moment after which the narrative models of the past are no longer available.” Cooper regards this approach as different from that of most writers on the Shoah and emphasizes Kertész’s freedom from any “rigid ideological mould” and, as a consequence, his capacity for transmitting “a lived individual experience.” In the book’s second part, an account of several discussions between the novelist and translator, Kertész makes the claim that the Hungarian Communist system of Mátyás Rákosi and János Kádár was comparable to the Nazi system that preceded them. Not that the treatment of people under these two systems had been the same, but each was capable of carrying out its horrific plans because they were supported by the majority of the population. It is the complicity of a people, he argues, that renders tyrannies possible.

The book’s third and final text was delivered as a lecture in 1992 as part of the Jean Améry Symposium at the University of Vienna. In it Kertész argues that, “if the living [personal] memory of the events survives, then [the memory of the Holocaust] will survive”; the memory survives, in other words, “not because of the official orations but, rather, through the lives of those who bore evidence.” In Hungary, of course, the memory and evidence have been repressed and distorted for decades by the political leadership. In Western civilization, however, where personal memory of Auschwitz has survived, “we must now live with the burden and the consequences of what happened.” Indeed, “what happened” casts “a new light on all our ideas about ethics and morality.” The Holocaust, Kertész concludes, by now underlies, undermines, and defines Western culture, and he stresses that we must face up to this knowledge again and again. Consciousness of the Holocaust is valuable essentially because, through the “immeasurable sufferings” it entailed, the event may have led us “to immeasurable knowledge” and thereby to “immeasurable moral reserves.”