As part of the Conference on the Legacy of Holocaust Survivors recently held at Yad Vashem, Imre Kertesz spoke during a session entitled "THE LITERATURE OF SURVIVORS: A SEMINAL CONTRIBUTION TO HUMANITY"

Imre Kertesz: The Freedom of Self-Identification

Today I would like to take a close look at a problem that may not at all exist here, in the middle of Europe. I am going to talk about the freedom of self-identification, or to put in other words, about the freedom of every human being to be who they really are in the society they are a member of. I am going to talk about the freedom of everyone, no matter who they are or where they were born, to consider or identify themselves in the way that they want to without being despised or discriminated openly or secretly by official consent; and I also would like to talk about unfair advantage which nobody should gain over others only because of their origin, views, way of thinking or personality. But I know well that your everyday life is conducted by this freedom so you take it as an elementary human right of yours and may not understand at all why we have to talk about it now.

But I hope it still may not be totally unnecessary to consistently get to the bottom of the problem as we will see that the issue is not settled even in the great Western democracies. True, the idea of the human rights was born in Western civilization, and the idea obviously contains the notions of human dignity and the rights of personal freedom. But the idea of the totalitarian state is also rooted in Western Europe and it was a basic characteristic of the dictatorial systems in the 20^th century to set aside the individuals and pen them up in huge collective camps. On such  people were stuck harsh, easily identifiable labels and the emblems of stigma or privilege. I have only mentioned the two extreme examples amongst several shades of differentiation. We cannot even estimate how the systems of these collective terms, the practical use and application of these systems have distorted the views of our contemporaries, how the systems have poisoned their relationship with the other people and also with themselves.

It was the Nazi system of symbols that was the simplest and easiest to understand. The Nazis wanted to exterminate certain people, while others they wanted to breed like animals. The situation in the communist dictatorships was a bit more complicated. Here the selecting officers also stayed in the pens and unceasingly sent people from one pen to the other. What is more, during the greatest selection, the selecting officer was caught from behind and mercilessly pushed into one of the uncomfortable pens where he had pushed others only a little before.

I do not want to go deep into the analysis of these dictatorships which based their existence on discrimination and extermination of peoples. I only mentioned the two most extreme dictatorships of the 20^th century and I concentrated only on Europe. Though we know it very well that collective discrimination has non-European forms as well and it is also obvious that in Europe there exist some more moderate, tinged forms than those mentioned above. For example, there is an effectively operating but civilized discrimination which authorities can only powerlessly watch, while the so-called populist politicians abuse it with an easy impudence. And there also exists – mainly in the East-European post-communist states – a discrimination somewhat officially approved of or even supported which authorities obviously deny. But some days ago here, on the same platform a writer from India, Urwashi Butalia informed us about her experiences. She told us what a group of people can become if politics suddenly splits Indians and Pakistanis with the same mother tongue, with the same cultural background and same fate into two hostile groups. Religious fanaticism and crazy nationalism distorts their lives and views. From one day to the other these people found themselves in two different pens and suddenly they had no idea what to do with the previously solid fact that used to be themselves, with their clear identity and with their self-identification that had been untroubled before.

We, Europeans have often experienced such sudden, usually brutal changes – more in Middle- or Eastern-Europe, than in the Western half of the continent. These changes usually go together with irreparable cultural loss. Once prosperous cultural centers, university towns where people used to speak three or four languages suddenly decayed and became small provincial towns of a huge empire, and this way they simply disappeared from the cultural map of Europe. Maybe all of us are thinking of Czernowitz, Paul Celan`s town, “where books and people lived”. Here I cannot save my listeners from a remark: as a result of the German ideas of a world empire in the 20^th century it was the Germans themselves who exterminated German culture on the multinational territories inhabited with a mix population of mixed mother tongues that had earlier been under German cultural influence. They killed the German or Yiddish-speaking Jewish minority that had given so important artists to the German language as Joseph Roth, Franz Kafka or the above mentioned Paul Celan. These writers wrote in German in the middle of a differently speaking nation, as they had learnt German at home from their parents and also because, as being Jewish, they were rootless, cosmopolitan intellectuals - as their enemies usually described them – who wanted to live under the wider cultural dimensions of greater languages. Writing in German once meant intellectual freedom, the freedom of self-identification for these writers. Today, these partly – and I strongly want to stress I mean “partly” – German cultural zones which lie approximately between the Crimean-peninsula, Bukovina and Galicia do no longer enrich German culture, and the Germans are the only ones to be blamed for this situation. I say this with a certain sympathy and later I will explain why.

Certainly, it is also a characteristic feature of the 20^th century that politics and culture have not just become contrasting notions but also antagonistic ones. This is not an organic development, and the politics breaking loose of culture have gained absolute (and shameless) autocracy by the help of power, and have created havoc, if not directly in human lives and possessions, then in people`s souls. The means of destruction is called ideology. In the 20<sup>th</sup> century, the century of terrific depreciation everything that used to be valuable turned into ideology. The main trouble lies in the fact that modern masses which have never shared in culture now consume ideology as culture. This phenomenon may have several causes. One of which, must be the fact that these masses emerged in the period of one of the deepest crises – if not the deepest – of Western civilization; and here we will stop analyzing the connections of causes and consequences. Let us be satisfied with stating there were some people who helped by cunningly developed political party systems  undertook to first lead, and then use these masses for their own purposes. Maybe Thomas Mann said that it is enough for the masses to be called people and they can be persuaded to do everything. But there was no need for the totalitarian state to achieve this goal, an authoritarian system like that of Franco`s, Dollfuss` or Miklós Horthy`s also managed to degrade religion, patriotism, education and politics, until finally politics itself became a means of hatred.

Hatred and lies: these were the two most important elements of political education of the people in the 20^th century. Lets just think about the “half an hour of hatred” in Orwell`s novel 1984. “Lies have never been so strong in forming history as for the last thirty years” – Sándor Márai wrote in 1972. This idea is especially true for the Middle- and East-European countries that showed extremely strong national sensitivity after the I. World War. All of a sudden a Middle-European great power, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy ceased to exist; and the poisons of the decaying state corpse infected the replacing independent national states. In the cruelly dismembered Hungary numerus clausus was introduced already in 1920, then the so-called first Jewish law was enacted in 1938, and I had to wear the Yellow Star in 1944, which –symbolically saying - I have not been able to tear off myself since then. 

I admit it may sound astonishing that I have got to this strange conclusion more than ten years after the fall of the last European totalitarian regime – that is more than ten years after the introduction of democracy. True it was not at all easy for me to recognize this fact and it also took much energy to understand certain symptoms. An unpleasant situation like this seems to automatically create its syndromes even if we do not notice them at once. For example all of a sudden you feel the world around you is kind of ghostly though it is you who has become ghostly and unreal. Or perhaps you felt just the opposite of this : you sense yourself as a complete stranger although you have only identified your ego with the alienating outside world. My wife,  an American who does not know about these East-European troubles, has noticed that I always develop real change of personality when I am in a foreign country. Abroad I feel at home, at home I feel a stranger. I can freely talk with non-Hungarian speakers, while I am embarrassed at talking to my compatriots. During the dictatorship that was called socialism this was a natural feeling which I could manage rather well; but I have had  to be stronger in the face of democratic racism. But at least I have got to the bottom of a problem which – I think – is not only mine.

The thing  that I must reflect on is the endless unfamiliar impulses during my everyday existence.  These impulses of my outer world hit my skin as light electric shocks. To put it metaphorically I have to continually scratch myself. We all know Montesquieu`s famous saying: “In the first place I am a human being, I am a French only then”. The racists – as anti-Semitism after Auschwitz is no longer anti-Semitism only – want me to be a Jew in the first place, and then I could not be a human being at all. The condition is one of being embarrassed first that we are trying to find excuses to defend ourselves, and then we catch ourselves speaking and thinking at a very primitive language as the person we have to defend ourselves from is above all primitive. If we are thrown into a cage of beasts we have to fight as beasts. The vulgar way of thinking we are protesting against finally results in a vulgar way of thinking about ourselves and what is more, we start to think about ourselves as if we were somebody else; this process finally distorts our personality. We know very well the most awkward explanation a distorted personality like this usually finds when ultimately he starts to prove his own humanity against the inhuman ideologists. And there is some kind of a sad element inducing sympathy in this process as these people are just trying to deprive us of our human character. However, once we had accepted the racists` categories we have become Jews, and, as I have already said -  a Jew cannot be a human being. This way, the more we are trying to prove our human nature the more miserable we become and we are less and less human. A Jew cannot be human in racist surroundings but he also cannot be Jewish. The term “Jewish” is only unambiguous for the anti-Semites.

Edmond Jabes, a French writer says the difficulties of being Jewish are the same as that of being a writer. Nobody has ever formulated my situation so clearly for me. But I still can see an important difference here. I am a writer as a result of my free self-definition but I was born to a Jew. In order to fuse being a Jew and a writer together I had to think of me being Jewish the same way as I thought of the - possibly perfect - creation of a piece of art: as a task, as a decision between the completeness of existence or self-denial. If we choose the completeness of life, all of a sudden everything is to our advantage. The fact that I am a Jew finally becomes the result of my decision. It is not only that it can never drag me into a so-called crisis of identity but it helps me the opposite way. It exposes my existence to a stronger light. However, I still have to face some problems  raised by the uniqueness of my Jewishness.

Two or three decades ago I would have thought the question of who I wrote to was the falsest problem ever. Obviously to myself – would have been the answer and it has not changed much since then. But today I am more inclined to admit: other people and my surroundings, what  we call “society”, have also played an important part in creating the entity that is called “me”. Partly, at least, I am captive of my conditions and this fact must show its mark on my intellectual manifestations. If I say I am a Jewish writer I have not yet stated that I am Jewish myself. What kind of a Jew is someone who did not get a religious education, does not speak Hebrew, knows almost nothing about the basic sources of Jewish culture, and does not live in Israel but in Europe? I can say I am the writer of an anachronistic way of life, the way of life of the assimilated Jews, the manifestation and messenger of this way of life, the courier of the immanent disappearance of this way of living. In this respect Endlösung plays a decisive role: a person whose primary or exclusive Jewish identity is Auschwitz, in a certain sense cannot be considered to be Jewish. He is the “non-Jewish Jew” like Isaac Deutscher, the rootless European mutation of the type, who can no longer come to intimate terms with his forced Jewishness. This person has an important, maybe decisive, role in the European culture (if this phenomenon still exists) but he has nothing to do with the Jewish history after Auschwitz and also with the renewal of the Jewry. We can only say his Jewishness is conditional on the possibility that there is or there will ever be any kind of a Jewish renewal.

So the writer of the Holocaust is really in a difficult situation. I have already explained in an earlier essay of mine – The Language Exiled – that the Holocaust has no language and it cannot have it at all. The European survivor can talk about his passio in one of the European languages: but this language is not the language of his own or that of the nation whose language he borrows to tell about his experiences:

“I write my books in a host-language which immanently casts them out or at most tolerates them at the edge of its consciousness … I call this phenomenon obvious because this country has created its subject/Ego during centuries of fights for existence,  and this has left its mark on its literature as an implicit national consensus.”

I like writing in Hungarian because this way I can be more aware of the impossibility of writing. These are Kafka`s words, however, who analyzing the situation of a Jewish writer in a letter to Max Brod talked about three types of impossibility: the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German and the impossibility of writing not in German. Then he says: ”I could almost add a fourth impossibility, the impossibility of writing”. Today he could complete the list with the impossibility of writing about the Holocaust.

But the paradoxes of impossibilities could endlessly be enumerated. We can also say it is impossible not to write about the Holocaust, it is impossible to write about the Holocaust in German and also that it is impossible to write about the Holocaust in a language other than German. The writer of the Holocaust is an intellectual immigrant everywhere and in every language, who always seeks intellectual asylum in other languages. If it is true that there exists only one real philosophical problem, the problem of suicide then the writer of the Holocaust who has decided to outlast that period can only have one real problem, the problem of immigration. But he should rather talk about exile instead of immigration; exile from the only true homeland that has never existed. If it existed it would not be impossible to write about the Holocaust because then the Holocaust would have a language of its own and the writing of the Holocaust could be imbedded in an existing culture.

But there is no language like that. Each language, each people, each civilization has a dominant Ego that registers, rules and describes the world. This is the constantly active ego of a large community of people – a nation, people, culture – who can identify themselves with more or less success. But where can the Ego of the Holocaust find its homeland? Which language could state that it is the general subject of the Holocaust, the Ego of the Holocaust, the genuine language of the Holocaust? And if we ask this question, is it possible for us to forget about the next one, that is, if is it at all possible for the Holocaust to have its own and exclusive language? And if there was a language like this, should not it be so horrible, so sorrowful that it would finally kill those who speak it?”

Maybe it is right that the exile of the Holocaust is satisfied with this banishment which he sometimes gives information about. It is especially true in East- and Middle-Europe where the language mediating between and also above the nationalities died out mainly as a consequence of the Holocaust.  This language used to be spoken from Bukovina to Cracow, from Prague to Triest. This language  helped writers who did not want or could not integrate into the national literatures of the empire discover  freedom of expression. These national literatures showed little inclination to absorb the universal experience of the Holocaust, which obviously had also been part of their historical experiences – true, with a minus sign. It would be pernicious to accuse anybody except for the public representatives of racism of this situation – it is even more pernicious to talk about “anti-Semitism being imbibed from infancy”. Anti-Semitism transmitted from generation to generation is a grave heritage but it has exclusively historical, historico-psychologic causes and never a genetic one. These nations have been deeply hurt in their national self-respect; in reality they have been struggling for their mere existence for a long time and they have unfortunately found anti-Semitism a typical, not at all original means for their struggle.

Oscar Wilde who was imprisoned for his freedom or rather indecency of self-definition in the innocent 19^th century wrote in his De profundis: “Above the gate of the ancient world this sentence was written: >Get to know yourself!< Above the gate of the modern world this sentence will be written: >Be yourself!>” . We have seen, and also experienced  day by day,  the modern world, that itself  raised serious, astonishing difficulties. Still we cannot have another goal but the one that Nietzche devotes a complete chapter to in his great book, Ecce homo: that we must become what we are. We must fulfill our fate and we must draw the consequences deriving from our fate however bitter they can be. It may also happen that we get to nowhere on the way of freedom for self-identification. It is very difficult for a writer, who always considers the language he uses for writing a privileged one, to realize that one language is like the others because none of them is really his own. I actually belong to the East-European Jewish literature that has never been written in the language of the national surroundings and has never been part of the national literature. The circle of this literature can be drawn from Kafka to Celan and its continuation is obvious, we only have to thoroughly examine the international literary exiles. This literature mainly talks about the extermination of the European Jewry and so its language is accidental; no matter which language it is but it can never be a mother tongue. The language we use will only live on while we speak it. When we stop talking the language will be lost unless one of the great languages feels pity for it and, so to say, takes it on her lap like Pietá does it in paintings. Today the German language seems to be most adequate for this. But German can also be only a temporary shelter, a provisional hiding-place of the homeless. – It is really good to understand all this, it is really good to reconcile ourselves to this situation, it is also good to belong to those who do not belong to anywhere; it is good to be a mortal.