Searching the Victimizer's Mind

...Fatelessness, Kaddish for an Unborn Child and Liquidation, all now available in highly readable English translations, are part of this oeuvre...

...In Detective Story, a slender but compelling novel, Imre Kertész, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for literature, undertakes to correct this imbalance by imagining the inner life of one of the torturers...

...He says, in fact, “I understand nothing about what makes the mind tick, my own least of all,” and that he has “never given any thought to motives...

...We take away the offender’s mind shred his nerves, paralyze his brain, rifle through every pocket and even his innards...

...Here, in Martens’ own words, is a sample of what he does, all of it under the guise of protecting “the Homeland’s security”: “It’s nasty work, I can tell you, but it’s part of the job...

...Primo Levi quotes those words in The Drowned and the Saved, his own book about the “indecency of the irrevocable act,” and comes to a similar conclusion: “The injury cannot be healed: It extends through time, and the Furies, in whose existence we are forced to believe, not only rack the tormentor . . . but perpetuate the tormentor’s work by denying peace to the tormented...

...Without such cogs, though the machine would not operate at all, and it is the infernal workings of the machine— its inexorable and destructive logic— that interests Kertész most...

...director, Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts, Indiana University A CHAPTER titled “Torture” in At the Mind’s Limits, by the Holocaust survivor and author Jean Améry, makes painfully graphic his memory of being subjected to methodically ruthless violence during prison interrogations...

...Thanks to these two writers, and others like them who were traumatized by what Levi called the “memory of the offense,” we know a good deal about the effects of extreme abuse on the victims of totalitarian terror...

...Detective Story (originally published in Hungarian in 1977) not only shifts the narrative point of view from that of the victims of political barbarism to one of its perpetrators, but also moves the setting from the Nazi camps to an unnamed Latin American country...

...that of their victimizers barely exists...

...Otherwise why would he want something else...

...He also saw up close the people who keep the mechanisms of horror in motion, and has found the literary means to make them a bit more understandable...

...In Detective Story, as in his other finely wrought books, Kertész has fashioned this absurdity into a subtly refined and exceptionally revealing work of art...

...Anyone who wants something else is Jewish...

...Even to Martens such reasoning makes no sense, but it is an inherent part of the “logic” of the authoritarian system the agents of the Corps faithfully serve...

...When Martens points out that “there can’t be more than a few hundred or maybe a thousand in the whole country,” Rodriguez answers, “I couldn’t care less...

...With the first blow,” he remarks, “a part of our life ends and it can never again be revived...

...Kertész’ distinction is his providing a glimpse of what goes on inside a torturer’s head...

...Hauled in on suspicion of insurrection, Enrique was worked over viciously by Rodriguez, a particularly sadistic colleague of Martens, who thinks all purported enemies of the state are Jews...

...As The Novel Opens, Antonio Martens, its protagonist, sits in a prison cell writing his memoirs...

...Martens acts loyally within this apparatus—as others did within the SS, the KGB, the Stasi, and the security arms of authoritarian states everywhere, including the Hungary Kertész inhabited upon his return from Auschwitz...

...To read him is to learn what happens to the individual—in this case, the tormentor as well as the tormented—when unchecked power is put in the service of dictatorial politics and ends up corrupting the essence of humanity itself...

...He is awaiting execution for crimes he committed as a member of the “Corps,” a special security unit empowered by the previous government to put down any signs of resistance or insurgency...

...He concludes, “anyone who has been tortured remains tortured...

...that we are able to do with him what we want...

...Imre Kertész had the personal misfortune of living under some of the worst regimes in recent history, but his harsh experiences gave him insights into how dictatorships function...

...We slam him into a chair, draw the curtains, light a lamp—in short, we go by the book...

...Though Martens knows, for instance, that “whatever we did, we were only ever going to get it wrong,” he keeps doing it anyway, for “once you get started, the only way back is to carry on straight ahead...

...Such thinking is absurd, not to mention self-destructive, but it reflects a mentality that sustains the political and social dynamics of totalitarian systems everywhere...

...In these respects, Martens resembles the surprisingly banal figure that Hannah Arendt made of Adolf Eichmann, and he seems little more than “a lowly cog in a big machine...

...Detective Story is too spare a book to explore Martens’ mind in minute detail...

...The testimony of the victims is copious...

...A low-level actor in the brutally repressive regime, Martens is implicated in the torture and death of Federigo Salinas and his son Enrique, the wealthy proprietors of a nationwide chain of department stores...

...Because the agents of such systematized cruelty have been loathe to reflect on their despicable acts, however, much less is known about them...

...The physical savagery itself is mercifully backgrounded in Detective Story, but no reader alert to the historical circumstances that give rise to it can fail to hear the alarm bells sounded in this short novel...

...Having himself been incarcerated in Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a youngster, the author has devoted almost his entire literary career to portraying the plight of the individual forced to contend with the compromises and cruelties of living under authoritarian rule, which he knew intimately in both its Nazi and Stalinist forms...

...Martens muses: “A huge mechanized apparatus, with records, informers, and all those flatfeet, was looking for something to do: We were set up for organizing, for taking action, not for solving crossword puzzles...

...Améry Won Distinction as a writer by describing torture from the standpoint of one who suffered it...

...To understand the nature of this logic (the term is cited multiple times throughout the book), and thereby perhaps to “make sense of his fate,” is Martens’ sole purpose in his final days and gives the novel its reflective character...

...He has to feel that he is utterly alone, whereas there are a lot of us...