Imre Kertész work diary “Homesickness for Death” – Culture

What do Proust’s Madeleine and a leather bracelet bought in Budapest in 1960 have in common? Nothing at first glance, but it’s not about the visual impression either. “And suddenly the memory was there,” says Proust, when the narrator’s childhood world is resurrected in the taste of a Madeleine. The phrase also fits the following description: “I bought a new strap for my watch because the old one was torn. The smell of the new strap hits my nostrils and triggers a strong memory, but I don’t know what. Eventually I realize that the chemical smell of the freshly prepared leather evokes the sharp taste of the chlorinated water in the Auschwitz camp.”

The passage can be found in the now published diary of the work on the “Novel of a Fateless One” by Imre Kertesz. It is titled “Homesick After Death”. With this formula, according to Kertész in June 1960, the feelings that moved him to write about Auschwitz could be summed up. The scene with the bracelet triggers such a longing. Again and again the diarist puts the tape to his nose and wonders why “this time of terrible misery seems so embellished to me and sometimes so strangely attractive”.

It is an irritation that years later will be transferred to the reader of the “novel of a fateless man”. The reflection that starts here already points to the disturbing last sentences of the book, which talk about the “luck of the concentration camps”: “Because even there, by the chimneys, there was something in the pause between the torments that was similar to happiness. Everyone always asks me about the evils, the ‘horrible things’, although for me that experience is the most memorable.”

Kertész was the first Hungarian author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002

Imre Kertész was fourteen when he was arrested in Budapest in 1944 and was deported to Auschwitz. What he experienced before his liberation in the Buchenwald concentration camp became the subject of a novel that tells of the world of the camp from the perspective of an astonished Jewish boy. Nobody had dared to present the monstrous as a matter of course, indeed as a general human experience. Kertész worked on this book for thirteen years, which received only a weak response when it was published in 1975. The response was all the greater twenty years later, when the German translation by Christina Viragh appeared. And that was only the preliminary stage to worldwide fame: in 2002, Kertész was the first Hungarian author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

If you pick up the “novel of a fateless man” half a century after it was written, you’ll be amazed at how fresh it is: the tone of the narrative is immediately catchy, form and style appear to be cast in one piece. There is no sign of the effort the author put into it.

In his autobiographical soliloquy “Dossier K.” Kertész says in 2006 that he had to reinvent Auschwitz in order to write about it. You can understand what that means when you read his work journal. It covers the years 1958 to 1962, which were decisive years for the writer Imre Kertész, although the “Galeerentagebuch” (1992) only dealt with them in five sentences. Decisive because it was during this time that the decision was made to put the story of his deportation on paper.

He could only write comedies. This was accompanied by tantrums

This decision was preceded by another, which in his eyes was tantamount to “treason”. To free his head and desk, he put aside the manuscript that had occupied him for five years. “I, the Executioner” was an attempt to empathize with a German Nazi perpetrator and to portray him as a “functional human being”: ready for anything, but devoid of any existential experience.

The failure is contrasted by a success from an unexpected source: Imre Kertész succeeds as a comedy author. When he decided to write his “own mythology” in March 1960, he had just finished working on a comedy entitled “Love Knocks On”. During these years he completed five such plays “like good girls do their homework”. A wage clerk that goes hand in hand with irritation and tantrums, but also with astonishment “that I’m able to work quickly”.

One of the first entries in the work journal shows how much he longs for this ability elsewhere: “The crux of every artist, for which he is looking for painfully beautiful words, has only one name: slowness.” But the hope he associates with the new project is not fulfilled. He would have preferred to write the story in two months, especially since it “suddenly matured and pushed to the surface, brooking no delay”. But nothing comes of it, even though the subject is “plastically clear” in front of his eyes.

Literature means transforming the raw material of life into something great

In fact: If you read the detailed explanations with which Kertész arms himself for his camp novel, you will be amazed at how far his ideas have already progressed and how precisely he considers compositional questions and individual motifs. Much has already been found or planned – even the narrator’s voice, for which he has “a kind of childlike purity” in mind.

The fact that not a single line has been written yet means nothing. As Lothar Müller notes in his well-founded epilogue, for Kertész the work on the novel involved “the constant evaporation of reflections and speculations, of self-denials and self-doubts from the pages of the diary”.

This also includes the question Kertész asked in “Dossier K.” names the basic problem: autobiography or novel? As resolutely as he answers them there in favor of fiction and refers to the sovereign world that is born in the author’s head and obeys the laws of literature, he weighs them up just as carefully here: What he writes is autobiographical, “nevertheless it may the material should not be roughly piled up”. He leaves no doubt that he prefers fiction. Nevertheless, he insists that only one’s own experience “can make a work really great”.

It is up to the eyewitness to remember what happened. But in order to be literature, the raw material of life needs to be transformed. Kertész may have failed with the “Henker” manuscript; the awareness of form and style that he acquired while working on it proves to be an indispensable tool for turning the story of his deportation into a novel that tells of the “attractive and life-threatening magic of the death camp”.

In an undertaking that he himself calls diabolical, it is only natural that the then thirty-year-old looked around for sources of information. He found what he was looking for in Albert Camus and his novel “Der Fremde”, whose perspective and style he tried to adapt for his own narrative material. A second important impetus comes from Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain”, in whose time- and world-removed cosmos he discovers an analogy to the reality of the camps. What is most surprising is the synthesis that comes to mind in view of the so differently accentuated fatalism of Meursault and Hans Castorp. It is, writes Kertész, his secret desire to merge “Mann’s life-affirmation, knowing death, and Camus’ life-affirmation, knowing life.”

Stimulating discoveries like this one can be made in the diary. True, there is only information about the first stage of work on the “Novel of a Destinyless One”. But the resistance that his author was already confronted with at this time gives an idea of ​​how rocky the road was to become until May 9, 1973, when he finished the book.

Imre Kertész later came back to the leather bracelet, which brought him a Proustian awakening in 1960. In his novel “Fiasco” (1988) it serves as a stimulant for the narrator to recall the images of Auschwitz: “When my memories faded, cowering sluggishly in the convolutions of my brain, I used it to lure them out of their hiding places.”