Death of Imre Kertész, the man who was born twice – Télérama.fr

The writer Imre Kertész, a Hungarian Jewish survivor of Auschwitz and Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002 for “Fateless”, died Thursday, March 31 the age of 86. His work was marked by the experience of the camps, which was both trauma and a motor. See excerpts of the portrait “Télérama” he had consecrated in 2003.

Hungarian Jewish writer and survivor of the camps of the dead, Imre Kertész died this Thursday, March 31 at the age of 86 years as a result of Parkinson’s disease. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002 for his first novel, published in 1975 in the general indifference, Fateless . Télérama had devoted a large portrait in 2003, in which he returned including the genesis of the book that earned Nobel this: “I started five hundred times the beginning of Fateless between 1961 and 1973 to find a distance, a structure, a framework where words can have their life. “ As a result, a strong book, where the reader is immersed in the horror of Auschwitz through the eyes of a 15 year old. “I did not want to relegate the drive to a place of voyeur. My books do not leave him no emergency exit, he can not be content to watch the entertainment “, detailing it and about his writing process.

However, the evocation of those terrible moments was not only synonymous with pain and rage for Imre Kertész. They were mostly a founding act in its construction as man and writer. He had explained at length during his speech in Stockholm in the award of the Nobel: “As I was preparing this speech, I happened something very strange that, in a sense, m ‘ made my serenity. One day, I received by mail a large manila envelope. She had been sent to me by the director of the Buchenwald memorial, Volkhard Knigge sir. He joined his cordial congratulations another envelope, smaller, he specified the content, in case I did not have the strength to face it. Inside, there was a copy of the daily log of prisoners of 18 February 1945. In the column “Abgänge” is to say “losses”, I learned the death of the prisoner number seventy four thousand nine hundred twenty-one, Imre Kertész [...]

so I died once to continue to live. – and this is perhaps my true story. Since this is so, I dedicate my work born from the death of this child to the millions of dead and all those who still remember the deaths. [...]. I feel that thinking about the traumatic impact of Auschwitz, I touch the core issues of the vitality and human creativity; and thus thinking about Auschwitz, in a way perhaps paradoxical, I think rather in the future than the past. “