Imre Kertész

Life and work

Kertész was born in Budapest, Hungary, on 9 November 1929, the son of Aranka Jakab and László Kertész, a middle-class Jewish couple. After the separation of his parents when he was around the age of five, Kertész attended boarding school, and, in 1940, he started secondary school, where he was put into a special class for Jewish students. During World War II, in 1944 at the age of 14, Kertész was deported with other Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and was later sent to Buchenwald. Upon his arrival at Auschwitz, Kertész claimed to be a 16-year-old worker, thus saving himself from the instant extermination that awaited a 14-year-old person. After the camp was liberated in 1945, Kertész returned to Budapest. He graduated from high school in 1948, and then went on to find work as a journalist and translator. In 1951, he lost his job at the journal Világosság (Clarity), when the publication adopted the Communist Party line. For a short term, he worked as a factory worker, and then in the press department of the Ministry of Heavy Industry. From 1953, he started freelance journalism and translated various works into Hungarian, including those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Elias Canetti.

His best-known work, Fatelessness (Sorstalanság), describes the experience of 15-year-old György (George) Köves in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Zeitz. Written between 1969 and 1973, the novel was initially rejected for publication by the Communist regime in Hungary, but was published in 1975. Some have interpreted the book as quasi-autobiographical, but Kertész disavowed a strong biographical connection. The book would go on to become part of many high school curriculums in Hungary. In 2005, a film based on the novel, for which he wrote the script, was made in Hungary. Although sharing the same title, some reviews noted that the film was more overtly autobiographical than the novel. It was released internationally at various dates in 2005 and 2006.

Following on from Fatelessness, Kertész's Fiasco (1988) and Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990) are, respectively, the second and third parts of his Holocaust trilogy. His writings translated into English include Kaddish for an Unborn Child (Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért) and Liquidation (Felszámolás), the latter set during the period of Hungary's evolution into a democracy from communist rule.

From the beginning, Kertész found little appreciation for his writing in Hungary, and he moved to Germany, where he received more active support from publishers and reviewers, along with more appreciative readers. After his move, he continued translating German works into Hungarian, notably The Birth of Tragedy, the plays of Dürrenmatt, Schnitzler, and Tankred Dorst, and various thoughts and aphorisms of Wittgenstein. Kertész also continued working at his craft, writing his fiction in Hungarian, but did not publish another novel until the late 1980s. From that point on, he submitted his work to publishers in Hungary. Grateful that he had found his most significant success as a writer and artist in Germany, Kertész left his abatement to the Academy of Arts in Berlin.