Sziklai, the comedy writer protagonist of Fiasco, went abroad …
My friend, Kállai, on the other hand, one of life’s flesh-and-blood heroes, stayed in Budapest. And he realized his dream by becoming a well-known playwright, one of whose plays had an uninterrupted run of four hundred performances in one of the city theatres. To keep the story short, he turned up at our Török Street flat one freezing afternoon in the winter of 1957–58, pushed aside the papers, sharpened pencils, and erasers that were spread out on my wonky table, and reminded me that a few years before I had told him about a four-hand comedy set in a single scene. Had I written it down? The hell I had written it down! Then I should do so, and be quick about it. I haven’t got the time; I’m writing a novel. The two are not mutually exclusive. What was the matter: Did I want to die of starvation? That’s a powerful reason, but I don’t know how to write a play. We’ll write it together. But what if I simply can’t get my head round doing it: for instance, just can’t hit upon a plot? We’ll just have to hit upon one together!
And did you?
We did. After that I was able to write the dialogues off my own bat.
But why was the piece so urgent?
A fair few actors were banned from making regular stage appearances after the 1956 Uprising. Some of them looked around for other occupations, whereas others banded together into casual “companies” and diligently went round the country, hiring local halls and performing some harmless play. A four-hander comedy that played in a single scene would fit into even a small café.
I see. And the cultural authorities didn’t raise any objections?
Quite the reverse. The by then gradually stabilizing Kádár regime had need of laughter, of light, apolitical entertainment, a Kakanian peacetime mood. Revolting, isn’t it?
That it is. So your pieces, with their “happy endings,” contributed to upholding the conformity that you radically disavowed via your literary works and your entire lifestyle.
That’s a well-organized dictatorship for you! The need to make a livelihood turned me into a collaborator.
“Life is either a demonstration or a collaboration,” you write in Liquidation.
That’s what I mean. One day I would demonstrate by writing my novel, the next day collaborate by writing bilge. That just underlines one thing I said earlier: the scale of values of the Kádár world spread to everyone and everything, just like an epidemic. No one was exempt or immune.
But seriously, did writing these skits cause you real soul-searching?
Not at all! I looked on it as a sort of prank by which I made a living.
So, you would turn up at the first nights then with all the scruples of a thief …
Exactly so.
How many of these plays did you write with your friend Kállai?
Four or five, I don’t rightly recall.
After which you switched to translating.
But that was only possible after Fatelessness had been published.
So there was something for which you had Fatelessness to thank … Did its rejection by the first publisher you approached surprise you?
In point of fact, yes, but then again, not. It was somehow all of a piece with the things that usually happened to me.
Did it never occur to you that the assessment of those “experts,” let’s call them that, might have been right in some measure?
Nothing of the sort entered my head for a moment. It was quite obvious that the letter from the publisher was baloney and the entire drift of the invective was to serve up a pretext for rejection of the manuscript.
So what did you do with the returned manuscript?
“For the time being” I put it in the filing cabinet.
You resigned yourself to the fact that the book was not going to be published?
I don’t remember it coming to that.
All the same, what did you think or feel?
Boundless disgust and self-reproach at having deserved the fate.
I read somewhere that James Joyce was able to boast of having received more than a hundred letters of rejection. For his Swann’s Way, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust was rejected by an editor by the name of André Gide at Gallimard …
Those are not truly comparable instances. Joyce and Proust had to deal with the incomprehension and intellectual slothfulness that are customary with publishers. Those sorts of barriers one can understand and overcome. I, on the other hand, was rejected by the competent police body of a totalitarian regime, a censorship office disguised as a publisher that was run by an ex-officer of the military secret police. In my case it had long ceased being a matter of my book as such; it was a matter of a direct challenge to the Authority, of which cognizance is cursorily taken, while the perpetrator is simply swept aside as a roadblock with a devastating flip of the odious authority’s hand.
This is not just the way you were made to see it by the “dictatorship schizophrenia” to which you have already referred?
I don’t think so.
Nevertheless, in the end another publishing house did take you on and publish the book.
Not just another but the only other publishing house. There were no others at that time, and anyway, that second publishing house could just as easily have rejected it as the first.
True.
There would have been no further options.
That’s also true. Let’s cast anchor in this extraordinary situation: one of the publishing houses has rejected your book but the other does not respond. What would have happened if the response from them were likewise negative? Would you have abandoned writing novels?
I don’t think the question would ever have arisen in that form. At worst, I wouldn’t have bothered searching any more for a publisher for my manuscript.
Let me go back to a remark you made just before about the possibility of your book being seen as a direct challenge to the Authority. Do you mean in regard to its “subject” as such, the Holocaust, or the way in which you handle it in Fatelessness?
The sheer impudence that the book denoted through its mere existence, its style, its independence; a sarcasm inherent in its language that strains permitted bounds and dismisses the craven submissiveness that all dictatorships ordain for recognition and art.
Going through that early “intermission” period in Galley Boat-Log, I come across an outline of another important recognition you reached: “I am bringing up ‘this subject,’ so I am told, too late, it is no longer of topical interest. ‘This subject’ should have been dealt with much earlier, at least ten years ago, etc. Yet these days I have again had to realize that the Auschwitz myth is the only thing which truly interests me … Whatever I think about, I am always thinking about Auschwitz. Even if I may seem to be talking about something quite different, I am still talking about Auschwitz. I am a medium for the spirit of Auschwitz, Auschwitz speaks through me. Everything else strikes me as inane by comparison … Auschwitz and everything bound up with it (but then what does not have something to do with it?) is the greatest trauma for the people of Europe since the Crucifixion …”36 Do you still see it the same way now, several decades later and after the change of regime in Hungary?
With appropriate changes, yes.
What’s changed?
Everything—the world, politics, you, me …
Let’s just see how much. Would you still mention Auschwitz and the Crucifixion in the same sentence today?
More than ever, because it is precisely in that context that Auschwitz’s baleful significance is revealed for those who have grown up in Europe’s ethical culture. One of the laws enshrined in the Ten Commandments of that culture is “Thou shall not kill.” So in other words if mass murder can become common practice, a day-to-day routine so to say, then one needs to decide the validity of the culture for which an illusory value system has taught every single one of us in Europe, from primary school onward, to be murderers and victims alike.
That’s a dreadful vision: million
of schoolchildren, satchels on their backs, trudging to school only to be reunited again as perpetrators and victims in the anterooms of the crematoria and by the ditches dug as mass graves … Is that what we have come to? Is that what this conversation is about?
It looks as though if we start to talk about culture and the European scale of values, we soon get round to the question of murder.
In one of your earlier essays you come to this conclusion: “The Holocaust, in essence, is not a historical event any more than, let’s say, the idea that the Lord handed over to Moses on Mount Sinai a tablet of stone carved full of letters is a historical event.”
Maybe I ought to have phrased it rather as “the Holocaust is not a purely historical event.” The very fact that it is a historical event carries its own extraordinary importance, of course, just as the fact that it cannot be degraded to a purely historical event.
“The question,” you write, “should run ‘Can the Holocaust create any value?’” And before going on to sketch out a clear outline of the question, you make it understood well in advance: “If we examine whether the Holocaust is one of the vital issues of European civilization, of European consciousness, we shall find that indeed it is, because that same civilization must reflect on its being the one within whose framework that was carried out, otherwise it will itself become a casualty civilization, a crippled primitive being that is carried helplessly toward extinction.” That was the essay about Jean Améry that you wrote in 1992 under the title “The Holocaust as Culture.”37
I would write exactly the same today.
Do you mean to say that the question has still not been settled?
No, not at all—quite the contrary. It would be political blindness if one were to fail to notice at every hand the positive signs of this determination that has been reached in the consensus between the states of Europe.
I still get the feeling that you are holding back on something.
Look, one might add the remark that although an Auschwitz was indeed possible, the only response to that unique crime, a catharsis, has not been possible. That has been made impossible by reality, our mundane reality, the way in which we live our lives—or in other words, which made Auschwitz possible in the first place.
A pretty stringent comment, I would say … what, in your view, needs to happen in order that …
I don’t know. I don’t think it’s me you should be asking.
In 2005, a Holocaust museum opened in Hungary, while in Berlin a controversial memorial to the Holocaust was unveiled. The sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was marked around the world … it goes without saying that you too were invited to these ceremonies.
Certainly, many of the memorial sites honoured me with invitations, but I had to turn them all down.
May I ask why?
Because I didn’t feel strong enough to go, and then I had a job holding back my aversion.
I would ask you to be a bit more precise in stating the reason, however harsh that may be.
I don’t know if I am capable of that. The only people who were not besmirched by the shame of the Holocaust were the dead. It is painful to carry the brand of surviving for some unaccountable reason. You remained here so you could spread the Auschwitz myth; you remained here as a sort of freak. You are invited to attend anniversaries; your irresolute face is video-recorded, your faltering voice, you hardly notice that you’ve become a kitsch supporting character in a fraudulent narrative, and you sell for peanuts your own story, which bit by bit you yourself understand least of all. But instead of mourning your lost story, you complain about your daily food ration. You rake in the breast-beating remorse of the jubilee speeches because you believe the mass is being said for you, and you are late in noticing that you have already played your part and there is no longer any need for you here.
All the same, a few years ago you did visit Auschwitz.
Yes, in 2000 the German Academy chose to hold its regular annual meeting in Cracow, and I couldn’t resist the occasion.
You wrote a memo there that you showed me when we started preparing for this conversation. Would you consider it an impertinence if I were to ask you to make that sheet public, as it contains nothing that it would be improper for others also to hear?
I’ve no objection.
It starts with the dateline: April 3rd, 2000. “With the German Academy to Cracow. Why did I travel on from there to Auschwitz-Birkenau? What was the dare to which I capitulated? What fed the vain sense of satisfaction that haunted me there? I went up into the control tower. The—how should I put this?—the style of the place both enthralled and appalled me. The desolate terrain, that mercilessly expedient landscape, said everything. I walked along the ramp, Magdi beside me. She was silent for the most part, both of us were, but still I was unable to shake off the feeling that I am walking along the ramp, M. beside me. It was a triumphal march, however I look at it. I had gravely offended the spirits of the dead. Was I sensible of this? Among the ruins of the crematorium an academic colleague, a somewhat conspicuously well-dressed German of around fifty, threw himself tearfully into my arms, and I held him as if I were able to bestow absolution on him. It was now that I truly recognized the grotesqueness of the place. I hastily got out, away, away, back to my home, into irredeemable survival from which I have no passage through to a past that is separated from me by barbed wire. Was I aware of this? Or had I simply forgotten? In any event the shame of this excursion will long haunt me …” By then Magdi had been your wife for four years, if I am not mistaken.
You are not mistaken. The wedding was in April 1996.
It roused a fair degree of interest in Budapest at the time. By then you were no longer an unknown author, while Magdi was heading an office for an American venture.
She represented the state of Illinois, setting up commercial and cultural links between Chicago and Budapest. She had returned “home” when Hungary was moving to a democratic system at the beginning of the Nineties, full of enthusiasm after having lived in Chicago for thirty-four years.
I recall a wonderful garden somewhere at the top of Rose Hill in Budapest.
That’s right. M. was renting an apartment there at the time.
There were loads of guests. I arrived just when the ceremony was about to start: a Unitarian priestess was putting on her black cassock. That incidentally was something many people wondered about: Why Unitarian?
Possibly not everyone was aware of the significance of the ceremony. Consummation still invariably evokes for us God’s name. Magdi had to move a long way from the country, and she returned from a long way away so that the two of us might meet, and she was not able to ascribe that to pure chance … as for me, one doesn’t have to be a believer to be receptive to the wonders of life …
But why did you choose a Unitarian ceremony specifically?
May I remind you of what that priest once said to me: “God has no religion.” And the Unitarians—in the person of the minister, Ilona Szentiványi—accepted the two of us: one a Roman Catholic, the other a Jew. We set off for Germany the next day: two weeks together in a hired car—that was the honeymoon. That was when the German translation of Fatelessness appeared.
Were you pleased about the … the …
Yes, it was hard for me, too, to hit upon my verbal relation to that undoubtedly absurd yet nonetheless amazing whatever …
Given that it’s literature we’re talking about in the final analysis, let us dare call it success.
OK, let’s do that.
In 2003, the historian Jan Philipp Reemtsma, head of the Institute for Social Research in Hamburg, asked you to give the opening speech for the reopening of an exhibition under the title of “The Crimes of the Wehrmacht.” In that lecture you spoke directly about the reluctant memory of the survivor. Let me quote you: “I have to admit that I too lived through some difficult days as I leafed through the exhibition catalogue. Had I forgotten, by any chance, that I myself was a participant in and survivor
of these horrors? Had I forgotten the scent of dew-drenched daybreaks when the volleys of gunfire would crack? Sunday evenings in the camp barrack block, when the presumptive crematorium fodder were still able to dream about festive cakes? If I had not exactly forgotten, once I had transmuted it into words it had all burned out and somehow come to rest within me. Only grudgingly do I surrender that peace of mind.” But then you have to surrender it after all when you come to the exhibition’s pictures: “Ecce homo—behold a man. Is that him? One day he is called away from beside his wife, his children, his elderly parents, and the very next day he is shooting women, children, the elderly into a ditch, and with evident relish at that. How is that possible? Obviously with the aid of hatred, the hatred which, along with falsehood, has become an indispensable necessity, I might go so far as to say the most important psychological nutriment for mankind in our time …” “I sense hatred as an energy,” you go on to say, “The energy is blind, but its source is exactly the same vitality from which creative forces take nourishment. Hatred, if it is well organized, creates a reality in the same way as even love might create a reality.”
That is a utopia, of course, but there are times when I almost take it seriously.
You said about Liquidation, your most recent novel, that you were casting a final glance at Auschwitz as the lengthening of time is gradually closing down the horizon for you. It’s true that never before have you painted quite such a godforsaken universe; equally, your world has not pulsed as much with a freedom that you can scent from almost each and every line like a light spring breeze.