Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész

Reviewed by Edith LaGraziana

On my literary tour of Europe I visit Hungary today and it almost goes without saying that I continue with a book connected to war and death. Hungary entered World War II in 1941 siding with Nazi Germany, but only in March 1944 German troupes occupied the country and began with the deportation of the Jewish population to concentration camps. In February 1945 Red Army forces liberated Hungary as can be read in Sándor Márai’s masterly novel Szabadulás (meaning “liberation”) set during the siege of Budapest which lamentably doesn’t seem to have been translated into English. The country remained under Soviet supremacy (and control) until 1989. All those hardships naturally influenced the further lives of people, among them the Nobel Prize laureate in literature 2002 Imre Kertész who made his balance in Kaddish for an Unborn Child.

Imre Kertész was born in Budapest, Hungary, in November 1929. For being of Jewish descent he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz at the age of fourteen and later moved on to Buchenwald. After his liberation from the concentration camp in 1945 he returned to Hungary, finished school and then worked for a newspaper, as an industrial worker and a ministerial officer until his obligatory two-year military service. From 1953 on Imre Kertész earned his living as an independent writer and translator of German-language authors and philosophers. The author’s first and probably most famous novel published in 1975 is Fatelessness (Sorstalanság; also translated as Fateless) which together with Fiasco (A kudarc: 1988), Kaddish for an Unborn Child (Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért: 1990; also translated as Kaddish for a Child Not Born), and Liquidation (Felszámolás: 2003) forms kind of a tetralogy with strong autobiographical echoes like all his fiction and essays. In 2002 Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Since 2001 the author lives mainly in Berlin, Germany.

The Kaddish is the Jewish prayer for the dead. The narrating protagonist writes his Kaddish for an Unborn Child or to be precise for a son or daughter who could have been, but never even was conceived because he always refused to bring children into a world in which the holocaust had been possible. At the beginning stands the innocent question of a philosopher making conversation during a walk through the park of a rest-home in the Hungarian highlands. He wants to know whether the ageing narrator has children. His answer is an as immediate and vehement “No!” as when his then wife, now (remarried) ex-wife, told him that she wanted a child. What follows is a bitter look back at his failed marriage, at his career as a writer compelled to do translations for a living, at his ordeal in the concentration camps, at his relations with the autocratic father and his time in a boarding school, thus at his entire existence. He also meditates on what relevance his Jewish heritage has in all this, especially for him who has no faith. He knows that in reality he has died long ago together with millions of others. Like many holocaust survivors he feels that he has no right to exist and that his purpose is to complete the task which the Nazi bloodhounds began in the concentration camps. So he is constantly “digging his grave in the air”. As a natural consequence he is unable to commit to anyone or anything with his entire self, be it his wife, his career, his dwelling – or a child.

Kaddish for an Unborn Child is a thin book offering dense content with many philosophical insights. It’s a first-person narrative addressed to the child whom the narrator never fathered and in a way it reminded me of a long letter. In fact, a thoughtful monologue interrupted only by some remembered dialogues fills the pages from beginning to end. In addition Imre Kertész didn’t structure his novel in any usual way. There are no chapters and only few paragraphs. Sentences are long and meandering. Form and style are entirely subordinated to the natural flow of the stream of consciousness which also forces a line break whenever the narrator hurls another firm “No!” at his wife and at the world. Also the inner order of the story isn’t chronological, but it works like our mind picking up ideas and thoughts on the spur of the moment. So in a certain way it’s a difficult read requiring sometimes to leaf back and to re-read passages to understand properly.

If you’re looking for a cheerful and entertaining read Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész definitely is the wrong choice. If you enjoy intelligent as well as intense writings and don’t mind a dark mood, it’s the perfect read. Highly recommended to everyone who wishes to understand the minds of holocaust survivors and their children.

Original post on Edith's Miscellany:
http://edith-lagraziana.blogspot.com/2013/11/kaddish-for-unborn-child-by-imre-kertesz.html

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Boll

The Lost Honour, unlike many Nobel prize winning books, is famous because (a) it was promptly made into a successful film in 1975 (Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder) and then a tele movie in English for people who can’t cope with viewing foreign film; and (b) it’s about a woman who’s life is ruined by the tabloid press, in this story called The News but apparently modelled on the actual German Bild-Zeitung.  It amuses me that people love to vilify the tabloid press, because its enduring success is a simple matter of the market: the tabloid press does what it does because lots of people buy their product, scurrilous as it is.  If the mass indignation about tabloid press excesses were genuine, there would be no market for the loathsome product.  If Diana’s death didn’t kill the tabloids, nothing will…

Anyway, as soon as I started reading The Lost Honour, I recognised it as an influence on Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist.  It has the same themes of panic about terrorism resulting in suspicion that turns out to be absurd; unreasonable and unethical police behaviour; and an intrusive press that causes grave trouble for an innocent person. But Böll’s style is more detached: events are reported and analysed calmly and logically as if no one should be surprised that things turned out this way.  It’s also the antithesis of the crime genre because Böll tells us who did what right at the very beginning, deconstructing events from every angle to make his point.  The free press can in some circumstances be just as dangerous for the individual as a censored one.

The story is set during Carnival, a tradition in many European countries where restraint is thrown to the winds for a short period of time and people go about in costumes or masks to hide their identity.  Katharina, a prudent, perhaps prudish young woman of little education but exemplary habits, uncharacteristically goes to a dance, and is rushed off her feet by one Ludwig Götten.  They go home to her place, where in the morning the police turn up because they have had Götten under surveillance because he’s a gangster.  But he’s shot through overnight, and Katharina is taken off for gruelling interviews that pry into her private life because the police don’t believe that this is a sudden, innocent liaison.  And before long The News has labelled her a gangster’s moll and all kinds of misery is set in train.  The lawyer for whom she works as a housemaid comes under suspicion, and his wife is labelled a Communist.  All kinds of foul accusations are made, and Katharina is under siege in the apartment she has slaved for years to buy.  A home now irreparably ‘stained and soiled’ by events.

We see where Katharina and her friends ‘make mistakes’: it makes no difference whether they comment or not, or say incriminating things or not, the tabloid press twists their words to reinforce the image that they intend their readers to construe.  We see where the police betray Katharina even when they know that they have no evidence; they justify leaking information about her to the press on the grounds of ‘enormous public interest’.  And thrust into being complicit in the sensationalism merely by reading about it, we begin to see that for Katharina there can never be redress: her honour, reputation and sense of security is lost forever.  Her situation is a nightmare from which there is no escape.  Katherina, pushed to her limits, agrees to an interview with the journalist who has destroyed her, and she takes her bloody revenge.

Ironies abound.  Katharina’s model behaviour in the prison is problematic for the authorities: integrity, combined with intelligent organising ability, is not desired anywhere, not even in prisons, and not even by the administration. (p. 95)  And when the police somewhat disingenuously try to redress Katharina’s concern about her reputation, showing her newspapers which respect her privacy and report events in a matter of fact way, she remains unconsoled. Her response is ‘Who reads those anyway?  Everyone I know reads the News!’ (p. 44)  Well, yes.  Yes, they mostly do, alas…
Nobody takes responsibility for the excesses of the free press, and the victim is expected to take some responsibility for becoming the object of their scurrilous attention :

At this point in her statement, Miss Woltersheim was informed that it was not the job of the police or the public prosecutor’s office ‘to pursue certain undoubtedly reprehensible forms of journalism by bringing criminal charges.’ Freedom of the press was not to be lightly tampered with, and she could rest assured that a private complaint would be handled with justice and a charge on grounds of illegal sources of information brought against a person or persons unknown.  It was Korten, the young public prosecutor, who in an impassioned plea for freedom of the press and the right to protect the identity of sources of information, stressed that a person who did not keep or did not fall into bad company could obviously never give the press cause for wild and potentially damaging reporting.  (p. 46)

The journalist, Tötges is the villain of the piece, even stopping so low as to inveigle his way into the hospital where Katharina’s hapless mother is dying of cancer, and blaming Katharina for her premature death.  But there are other villains too, especially the one who would rather see Katharina suffer than clarify ‘certain matters’ to the police because of the risk to his reputation.  The novella concludes with a veritable can of worms arising from this mess, with a catalogue of the social and financial disasters that accrue to everyone entangled in it.
There was one little allusion in this story that mystified me: on page 73, what does it mean when

elsewhere we speak of sources that ‘can never come together’, all we are thinking of is the song about the prince and the princess whose candle is blown out by the false nun – and someone fell into rather deep water and drowned.

Is this a popular song from the 1970s, or a German folk song or opera?