The Auschwitz Disease
ROSENFELD, ALVIN H.
The Auschwitz Disease Liquidation By Imre Kertész Translated by Tim Wilkinson Knopf. 130 pp. $22.00. Reviewed by Alvin H. Rosenfeld Professor of English; director, Institute for Jewish...
...During much of this time he has devoted himself to exposing and explaining the sufferings imposed on the individual by totalitarian systems...
...Some sentences go on for almost a full page, and paragraphs run from a single line or two to almost 60 pages...
...he exclaims repeatedly, and with his passionate refusal he advances the only project that strikes him as reasonable in the absurd, punishingly harsh world he inhabits: his selfliquidation...
...What he discovers instead is devastating: In accordance with Bee's orders, the manuscript has been burned by the author's ex-wife...
...A sizable part of the narrative involves Kingbitter's efforts to probe and explain this line of thought...
...This is partly due to the notion among some of his countrymen that a Jew who writes so frequently and passionately about Auschwitz can't be a genuine "Hungarian...
...There is little storytelling of the conventional sort and almost no dialogue...
...he asks...
...In the early 1950s, he served in the Hungarian Army for two years prior to trying his hand at journalism...
...There is an "Auschwitz mode of existence," he concludes, that continues to claim victims decades after the Nazi death camps themselves were destroyed...
...What drives this determined negativity is the same specter of terror and inescapable death that drives Paul Celan's famous poem "Todesfuge," cited throughout by Kertész...
...A large corpus of writings by and about Holocaust survivors now exists...
...in other words, he is lost....' Bee's deep pessimism is rooted in several different sources, chief among them the unyielding pressure of his time in the Nazi death camp...
...In fact, the publication now of Liquidation (2003), in Tim Wilkinson's highly readable translation, gives us a trilogy of sorts on the subject...
...The relentless talk has an often hallucinatory effect...
...Who can judge what is possible or believable in a concentration camp...
...He rejects his wife's wishes for him to father her child...
...Every paragraph—there are 17 in all—begins with an impassioned "No...
...Indeed, an imposed marginality has shadowed the author for years, and the feelings of rejection, solitariness, pain, and vulnerability that accompany it are indelible aspects of his personal biography as well as recurring themes in his work...
...No one, he concludes, "even if you mustered the totality of your knowledge...
...It is no wonder, then, that Bee's personal philosophy crystallizes in utterly pessimistic terms—"Evil was the life principle"— and leads to his final act of self-destruction...
...As one of his friends remarks, "Bee himself lived Auschwitz here, in Budapest, not of course an Auschwitz comparable to Auschwitz itself, but a voluntarily accepted, domesticated Auschwitz, though one in which it was just as possible to perish as in the real one...
...At home, interestingly, Kertész' reception has been mixed...
...His father had already been pressed into a compulsory labor squad and was killed during a forced march...
...The author insists that the book, published in Hungary when he was 46 years old, is not autobiographical...
...The writer's death shakes his friends...
...For him there can be no return to some center of the Self, a solid and irrefutable self-certainty...
...In this brief but hugely troubling novel, as in much of his other work, Kertész brings to a point of summarizing clarity a truth that is as tenacious as it is terrifying: "No one can revoke Auschwitz...
...One in particular, Kingbitter, is driven to search for an explanation among Bee's papers, where he suspects he may turn up the manuscript of an unpublished novel that would provide the key to Bee's death...
...At the time only two of Kertész' novels, Fateless (1975) and Kaddishfor a Child Not Born (1990), had been issued in English (by Northwestern University Press...
...He who has been tortured remains tortured," wrote the Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry, who gave us some of the most incisive reflections we have on the Nazi camps and then went on to commit suicide...
...For many who were in those places, the peril lives on...
...Following his liberation from Buchenwald, young Kertész returned to Budapest...
...It, too, tells the story of B. (more often referred to here as Bee), a Hungarian-Jewish writer born in Auschwitz, who manages to survive the camp and settle in his family's native Budapest, only to later commit suicide...
...Over the past half-century, though, he has essentially been a freelance writer and literary translator...
...Kaddishfor an Unborn Child (as it has been retitled) is infinitely sad and tormenting...
...In the process, the English title of Kertész' first and still best known fiction work was altered to Fatelessness...
...Even though the narrator is a survivor, the past will not leave him alone...
...Kertész was born into an assimilated Jewish family in 1929 in Pest...
...A sample: "We are living in an age of disaster...
...Wilkinson has also done new translations of the other two novels, which are being issued as Vintage paperbacks...
...each of us is a carrier of the disaster...
...Kertész's riveting and disturbing portraits of men who are "not even capable of surviving survival" sadly but importantly bear out the melancholy truth of Améry's assertion...
...Under the racial laws in 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz and then sent to Buchenwald...
...Nevertheless, in conversations with her and some others, Kingbitter is able to reconstruct much about Bee's life and the dark thoughts that led to his death...
...So he talks and writes, despite his realizing that to write is "in essence nothing other than to dig, to keep on digging to the end, the grave that others have started to dig for me in the air...
...His maternal grandparents, and the parents of his first wife, were murdered by the Nazis...
...Auschwitz is irrevocable...
...Disaster man has no fate, no qualities, no character...
...Virtually all of Kertész' subsequent work may be seen as attempting to gather more knowledge and apply it to the experiences he confronted in the Nazi camps and continued to find traces of m repressive postwar Hungary...
...The narrator, referred to merely by the initial B., ruminates nonstop—on his tortured childhood, his unsuccessful writing career, his failed marriage, his refusal to father a child...
...Both of the other novels are compelling but not easy to read...
...Rarely, however, does one encounter in this literature books as harrowing as Fatelessness, Kaddishfor an Unborn Child and Liquidation—or, it should be added, as thoughtful and challenging...
...his paternal grandparents were relocated and, as a consequence, perished under the rule of Mâtyâs Râkosi's Communist government...
...His grim view of life and its continuing threats prompt him to liken his century to an "execution squad on permanent duty...
...Rather, from first page to last, the reader is in the grip of a compulsive monologue, ostensibly addressed to B.'s never-to-be-begotten progeny, although possibly also to his ex-wife...
...For sanity's sake, one would like to believe that what Kertész calls "the Auschwitz disease" is not incurable, but a long list of writers, several of whom took their own lives, indicates that effective antidotes are not readily at hand...
...director, Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts, Indiana University WHEN THE Nobel Prize Committee named Imre Kertész winner of its 2002 literature award, probably few Americans had ever heard of the Hungarian writer, let alone read his books...
...But in Western Europe—especially in Germany, where he lives part of the year and all of his books are available in translation—he has enjoyed a considerable readership...
...The narrator, an innocent and guileless youngster, tries to accommodate himself to a world whose strangeness he can hardly decipher...
...his postwar life is lived "under the mark of Auschwitz," which is "not quite living, and indisputably not quite a life...
...As its title indicates, Liquidation continues and deepens this theme...
...He has written a play, found among his papers, called Liquidation, full of gloomy reflections about life as "one enormous concentration camp" and revealing, not surprisingly, a preoccupation with suicide...
...Since it tells the story of a 14year-old Hungarian Jewish boy's incarceration in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, it clearly at least draws on personal experience...
Vol. 87 • November 2004 • No. 6
