Auschwitz Is Still Not Over

By DAVID MOGOLOV

Liquidation
By Imre Kertész
Translated by Tim Wilkinson
144 pages. Knopf. $22.

When awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to Imre Kertész in 2002, the Swedish Academy praised his work as “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” After surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Kertesz spent 30 years in his native Hungary as a journalist and translator before publishing his first novel, Fateless. Those years introduced him to the paradoxes and ambiguities of life under Communism. Hungarians were meant to believe that “humans themselves… are nothing more than objects, and their life stories merely a series of disconnected historical accidents, which they may wonder at, but which they themselves have nothing to do with.” He committed himself to his writing, to setting down on paper reality as he saw it, in which people could be subjects rather than objects. But in that, Kertész found an obstacle:

Auschwitz, in a certain sense at least, suspended literature. One can only write a black novel about Auschwitz, or—you should excuse the expression—a cheap serial, which begins in Auschwitz and is still not over. By which I mean that nothing has happened since Auschwitz that could reverse or refute Auschwitz. In my writings the Holocaust could never be present in the past tense.

Nearly 60 years after leaving Buchenwald, Kertész knew of “no genuine work of art that does not reflect” the reality of the Holocaust, and he saw no possibility that one could.

At the time of the lecture, he was finishing his next novel, Liquidation. It should come as no surprise that the themes of the book mirror those of the Nobel Lecture. Whether Liquidation is a great book is debatable,but it is undeniably a rare novel in that it deserves, almost requires, an immediate re-reading. Some books reveal themselves like nesting dolls, an entire world and all of its nitty facts underlying each layer that becomes apparent. But such an orderliness would not work here. Kertész is an author who believes that reality and literature are both fractured, confusing things, so it is neither surprising nor disappointing that his nesting dolls are not the traditional egg shape: they are snake-shaped, and the innermost snake has the outermost’s tail in its mouth.

The outermost snake doll is interesting enough. A brilliant but obscure Hungarian writer, B., has killed himself, leaving behind a four-word suicide note, a mystery about his past, and—to his close friend, literary editor, and admirer—a small literary trove to shepherd into publication. That editor, referred to only by his surname, Kingbitter, believes that B. has written a novel and that this missing work is "the fulfillment, the apotheosis" of his mentor’s literary remains. His pursuit of the novel introduces us to those closest to B. and to B.’s history. B., we quickly learn, was born in Auschwitz (the police who investigate his death are most puzzled by the tattoo on his thigh, put there because as an infant his arm was not long enough for the identification number). Passed off as the child of a Slovakian political prisoner instead of a Jewish baby, he was moved into an orphanage at the end of the war. He has chosen, in his adulthood, to “live Auschwitz” always, to live as if “the world is a world of murderers.” Writes the author: “He had been born illegally, had remained alive for no reason, and nothing could justify his existence unless he were to ‘decipher the code name Auschwitz.’”

There is enough there for a compelling novel, surely. However, Kertész is determined to slow us down. His characters are dismal people. Early, before Kingbitter takes over the novel’s narration (the novel consists of Kingbitter’s narration, B.’s ex-wife’s narration, excerpts from a comic play of B.’s, and a third-person introduction and conclusion), we read that Kingbitter’s “story had reached an end, but he himself was still here, posing a problem for which he more and more put off finding a solution. He would have to carry on his story, which had proved impossible, or else start a new story, which had proved equally impossible.” It’s not his story. The story that has come to an end is B.’s, and without it, Kingbitter feels he serves no purpose. On a first read, this passage is merely dreary, and, given the time and place in which Kingbitter finds himself, understandable. He is in Budapest, in 1999, looking back on events that occurred in 1990. The new system’s promised wealth, health and happiness proved just as hopeless as Communism; Hungarians are as much objects as they were before.

But on a second reading, Kingbitter’s statement isn’t simply one of a man stripped of will. It’s a statement that is not even his own. It’s almost certainly the statement of B., writing of a Kingbitter who fits into B.’s conception of the world. Of his other friends, we read that “with B.’s disappearance” they “had all at once been left without stories.” Maybe this novel in our hands is the missing novel described by Kingbitter. Throughout a second reading of the book, B.’s fingerprints are everywhere; everybody in Liquidation could be a character of his imagination, whether or not in his “so-called reality” they exist. The characters use his language. When they negate his principles, they suffer: that is, whenever they do good, they ruin their comfortable, miserable lives. That is, to B., the lesson of Auschwitz: good behavior, altruistic behavior, even decent behavior is anomalous. Auschwitz was the proof of our nature, not the exception.

But then, maybe a third layer is at work beneath this one. B.’s own behavior calls into question his dedication to that principle. Would he cultivate a professional and personal relationship with a literary editor, providing him occasionally brilliant works, despite his desire for anonymity, in order to ensure that his legacy is a misunderstanding of his own principles? Not if he was going to create a fictional version of that same editor who accomplished his goals more directly, as we must assume the Kingbitter we’re introduced to is meant to do. This isn’t B.’s story, and it isn’t Kingbitter’s. You should have known this was coming when you read the novel’s epigraph, the conclusion to Beckett’s Molloy.  Kertész is by no means the first to splinter his story in such a way, but he’s wily enough to make it genuine and new.

Liquidation isn’t even a story in the strictest sense. It’s about stories, about their creation and their effects, and about what they could possibly do when overshadowed, as they all are, by Auschwitz. A work of fiction, striving for the status of art, must confront its own limited means if it’s acknowledged them. More than anything else, Liquidation is about these limitations. And so it is sometimes maddening. Threads are hanging out all over the place. What lasts beyond the reading isn’t an idea about literature, but a desire to get back into this particular piece of literature. That is a success, but it is an uncomfortable one. The seriousness of what Kertész puts before us demands explanation, as the best Holocaust literature always does. But the options he gives us are all unsatisfactory. This novel is a mess. And maybe that’s the only way he could get it done. If it weren’t messy, it would probably be hackneyed. And hackneyed Holocaust literature, “a cheap serial,” is far, far easier to do.

Discussion Question

Is Imre Kertész right that all real art must reflect the reality of the Holocaust? >>