The language of exile

To Imre Kertész, a holocaust survivor, the German tongue has indelible associations in a Europe still haunted by anti-Semitism. The language was once enriched by great Jewish writers such as Kafka and Celan and, though Kertész writes in Hungarian, his works are best known in German translation

Saturday October 19, 2002

The Guardian 

My subject is the freedom of self-definition, which entails the simple notion that each and every member of society has the right to be what he or she is. No one should become the object of derision or the victim of discrimination on account of his birth or the way he chooses to regard himself - even if such discrimination is condoned, openly or in secret, by the powers that be. At the same time, of course, no one should enjoy unfair advantages due to his origins, beliefs, thoughts, or simply because of who he is. Here in Europe, you presumably take these freedoms for granted; you enjoy them in your everyday life as basic human rights and may not see the need to talk about them.

But it is necessary to discuss the question, for even in western democracies, freedom of self-definition is not the satisfactorily resolved issue it may first appear to be. It is true that the concept of human rights, the most fundamental of which is the right to liberty and dignity, was first formulated by western civilisation. But the totalitarian state also has its origins here. For 20th-century dictatorships, it was natural to do away with individual rights, to confine people like sheep in giant folds, and to attach to them easily recognisable, garish labels - the all-too-obvious emblems of a privileged or stigmatised state. One usually thinks of the extreme ends of such defining enclosures. But there were dozens of others in between, representing various forms of discrimination.

We cannot overestimate the damage done by the institutionalisation and practical application of this system of collective labelling - how it distorted people's views, poisoned their relationships with one another, and perverted their own self-images.

The system of symbols devised by the Nazis was in a way the simplest and most transparent. Their aim was to exterminate certain people while encouraging others to breed as though they were brood mares. In communist dictatorships, the situation was more complicated. Here the officers doing the selection were always inside the enclosures, and they kept sending people from one pen to another. It sometimes happened that, in the middle of the selection process, the officer in charge was grabbed from the back and rudely thrust into one of the unpleasant pens, into which, until that moment, he had been busy shoving others.

I don't wish to get too involved in an analysis of dictatorial regimes, which turned discrimination and genocide into a general principle of their rule. Besides, I mentioned only the two most extreme forms of collective discrimination practised by 20th-century dictatorships and gave only European examples. We know there are many non-European forms. Even in Europe, there are milder, but nevertheless quite effective forms of collective discrimination that we might call civil discrimination.

 Governmental authority seems helpless against civil discrimination, and politicians labelled endearingly as populist exploit it with a kind of easygoing shamelessness. Then there is, especially in the eastern European post-communist states, the type of discrimination that is tacitly condoned, even promoted, though officially hotly denied by the authorities. Not long ago, an Indian writer, Urwashi Butalia, related her own experiences. We learned from her what happens to a population when politics drives a wedge between two peoples, in this case Indians and Pakistanis, that speak the same language and share the same culture - how their thinking, their very lives, may be turned upside down by religious fanaticism and irrational nationalism. Practically overnight, these people found themselves in two different camps and suddenly didn't know what to make of the hard fact of their own existence, their own clear identity, their hitherto undisturbed self-definition.

 We Europeans have often experienced such sudden, often brutal changes in the past century - more so in eastern or central Europe than in the western part of our continent. Such changes are usually accompanied by irreplaceable cultural losses. One-time cultural centres and university towns, where three or four languages were spoken, sank to the level of provincial backwaters in large empires and simply disappeared from the cultural map of Europe. Many will think of Czernowitz, where the poet Paul Celan hailed from, as "a city inhabited by people and books". It was the Germans themselves, as a consequence of their drive toward world domination, who destroyed German culture in multinational, multilingual areas whose populations ran to the millions - areas largely dominated by German cultural influence.

 They destroyed the German or Yiddish-speaking Jewish minorities there, which gave the German tongue such literary giants as Joseph Roth, Franz Kafka and Celan.

 Often living in other linguistic environments, these writers wrote in German, and did so because that was the language they spoke in their parents' home; and being Jewish and therefore rootless and cosmopolitan, as their enemies would have it, they thought in the dimensions of a major language. To write in German signified intellectual independence for these writers; it ensured their freedom of self-definition. Today these once partially German cultural zones (and I emphasise the word partially) - from, say, the Crimean peninsula through Bukovina to Galicia in the north - no longer enrich German culture, and the only ones responsible for this loss are the Germans themselves.

 Positing politics and culture as enemies rather than as mere opposites is a characteristically 20th-century phenomenon. It is by no means a natural development; politics divorced from culture creates unlimited despotism through sheer power and can wreak terrible havoc.

 This divorce may not destroy lives and property, but it always corrupts the human soul. The means of destruction is called ideology. The 20th century, a century noted for a disastrous loss of cultural values, turned what had been values into ideology.

 The most tragic aspect of this change was that the modern masses, which never had access to culture, received ideology in its stead. This development had many causes, one of which was surely the fact that these masses appeared at a time when European civilisation was undergoing one of its most, if not the most, profound spiritual crises. There were people who, with the help of subtle techniques developed by the machinery of political parties, undertook to control and use these masses. It may have been Thomas Mann who said that it is enough to call a large mass of people a Volk to get them to embrace just about anything. It didn't take totalitarian state power to do this; the authoritarian rule of a Franco, a Dolfuss, or a Nicholas Horthy could also turn religion, patriotism and culture into politics and turn politics itself into a tool of hatred.

 Hatred and lying - these were probably the two most important components of the political education received by people in the 20th century. We need only recall those "Two Minutes Hate" in George Orwell's 1984 .

 "Lying had never been as potent a history-making force as in the last 30 years," wrote Sándor Márai in 1972. This was especially true of the countries of eastern and central Europe, which after the first world war evinced overly sensitive nationalist feelings. A great central European power, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, collapsed, and its disintegration produced poisons that infected the new nation states that arose in its place. In the universities and colleges of a cruelly truncated Hungary, discriminatory laws were put into effect, and, in 1938, more sweeping anti-Jewish legislation was enacted. In 1944, they put a yellow star on me, which in a symbolic sense is still there; to this day I have not been able to remove it.

 I admit it must seem astonishing that more than 10 years after the elimination of the last European totalitarian states, more than 10 years after the introduction of representative democracy in this part of Europe, I should still say this. The truth is that it wasn't easy to face up to this fact, and it was even harder to try to come to terms with it. Such painful states of mind, it seems, automatically produce their own pathology without our being fully aware of it. For example, you get the feeling that the world around you is intangible, ghost-like, even though it's you yourself who has become unreal and spectral.

 Or the opposite happens: you perceive your own self as foreign, though all you've done is blend in with your alienating surroundings. My wife, who is American and therefore free of these east European maladies, has noticed that, when we are abroad, I undergo a complete personality change. In foreign countries, I feel at home while, at home, I act like a stranger.

 With foreigners, I converse freely, but, with my own countrymen, I am ill at ease. In the dictatorship called socialism, this was a natural state, and I more or less learned to live with it. Getting accustomed to racism in a democracy takes more time. But at least I am now getting to the bottom of a problem, which, I believe, is not only mine.

 In my daily life, I must constantly respond to disturbing stimuli that come my way from the world around me; they are like mild electric shocks that prickle the skin. Metaphorically speaking, I am forever scratching myself. We are all familiar with Montesquieu's famous dictum: "First I am a human being, and then a Frenchman." The racist - for anti-Semitism since Auschwitz is no longer just anti-Semitism - wants me to be first a Jew and then not to be a human being any more.

 At first, in our confusion, we grope for arguments with which to defend ourselves and find that we talk to and think about ourselves in a most primitive manner. No wonder: what we are up against is above all primitive. If we are shoved into an animal cage, we have to fight like animals. The debased thinking we protest against leads us to think about ourselves in lowly ways; after a while, it's not ourselves we're thinking about but somebody else. This process, in short, distorts our personality. The ultimate and most painful self-defence of such a distorted personality is also familiar: confronted with inhuman ideologues, the hapless victim is bent on proving his own humanity. There is something pathetic in these exertions, for the very thing ideologues want to rob him of is his humanity. But once he accepts racist categories, he becomes a Jew, and the more he tries to prove that he is human, the more pitiful and less human he becomes. In a racist environment, a Jew cannot be human, but he cannot be a Jew either. For "Jew" is an unambiguous designation only in the eyes of anti-Semites.

 A French writer, Edmond Jabès, once said the difficulties of Jewish existence are identical to those of a writer. Nobody has described my situation more clearly. Still, I see an important difference. My becoming a writer was the result of a conscious decision, but I was born a Jew. In order for my writer self and my Jewish self to come together and form a single attribute, I have to view my Jewishness the way I do the planned execution of a literary work: a task to be completed; a decision in favour of total existence or self-denial. If I choose a full life, everything at once turns to my advantage. In the end, the fact that I am a Jew is the result of a decision; having made it, not only will I not be plunged into a so-called identity crisis, but a sharper light will also be cast on my entire existence. Nevertheless, I must confront a few questions raised by the peculiar nature of my Jewishness.

 Two or three decades ago, I would have considered the question of who I am writing for an irrelevant pseudo-question. I am of course writing for myself, I would have said, and, basically, I still maintain that. But today I am more inclined to admit that other people, the world around me, interrelationships called society, also play a role in creating the entity called "myself". Thus, at least in part, I am a prisoner of my circumstances, and this no doubt has left its mark on everything I've produced.

 If I say I am a Jewish writer, I don't necessarily mean that I myself am Jewish. For what kind of a Jew is one who did not have a religious upbringing, speaks no Hebrew, is not very familiar with the basic texts of Jewish culture, and lives not in Israel but in Europe? What I can say about myself, however, is that I am a chronicler of an anachronistic condition, that of the assimilated Jew, the bearer and recorder of this condition, and a harbinger of its inevitable demise. In this respect, the Endlösung [final solution] has a crucial role: no one whose Jewish identity is based primarily, perhaps exclusively, on Auschwitz, can really be called a Jew.

 He is Isaac Deutscher's "non-Jewish Jew", the rootless European variety, who cannot develop a normal relationship with a Jewish condition that has been forced upon him. He has a role to play, perhaps an important one, in European culture (if there is still such a thing), but he can have no part whatsoever in post-Auschwitz Jewish history or in the Jewish revival (if there is, or will be, such a thing).

 The writer of the Holocaust is therefore in a difficult position. In an earlier essay entitled "A szám zött nyelv" (The exiled tongue), I tried to develop the idea that the Holocaust doesn't and cannot have its own language. The European survivor must describe his ordeal in one of the European languages, but this language is not his; neither is it the language of the country he has used to tell his story. "I write my books in a borrowed language which, quite naturally, will expel it, or tolerate it only on the edge of its consciousness," I wrote in that essay; I say "naturally" because the country whose language I use has developed myths during its centuries-long struggle for national survival, and these, being part of an unspoken national consensus, have affected its literature as well.

 I like to write in Hungarian because, this way, I am more acutely aware of the impossibility of writing. In a letter to Max Brod, in which he reflects on the situation of the Jewish writer, Kafka speaks of three impossibilities: it is impossible not to write, impossible not to write in German, and impossible to write any other way. Then he says, "We can almost add a fourth impossibility: it's impossible to write." Today he might add something else to the list: it is impossible to write about the Holocaust. We could continue enumerating the paradoxical impossibilities ad infinitum. We could say that it is impossible not to write about the Holocaust, impossible to write about it in German, and equally impossible to write about it any other way.

 Wherever he writes, in whichever language, the writer of the Holocaust is a spiritual fugitive, asking for spiritual asylum, invariably in a foreign tongue. If it's true that the only real philosophical question is that of suicide, then the writer of the Holocaust who chooses to continue living knows only one real problem, that of emigration, though it would be more proper to speak of exile. Exile from his true home, which never existed. For if it did exist, it would not be impossible to write about the Holocaust. Then the Holocaust would have a language, and the writer of the Holocaust could be integrated into an existing culture.

 But this can never be. Every language, nation, civilisation has a dominant Self, which perceives, controls and describes the world. This always active, collective Self is the essence with which any large community, nation, people or culture can, to varying degrees of success, identify. But where can the consciousness of the Holocaust find a home? Which language can claim to include the essence of the Holocaust, its dominant Self, its language? And if we raise this question, must not another one follow - whether it's conceivable that the Holocaust has its own exclusive language? And if the answer to that question is "Yes", wouldn't this language have to be so terrifying, so lugubrious, that it would destroy those who speak it?

 Perhaps it is only right that the Holocaust exile should accept his banishment, about which he can issue reports from time to time. This must be so especially in eastern and central Europe, where as a consequence of two world wars and the Holocaust in particular, an inter- and supranational language, German, disappeared, a language once spoken from the Bukovina to Cracow, from Prague to Fiume - a language in which writers who couldn't or wouldn't find a place in a national literature found their freedom of expression.

 These national literatures show little willingness to incorporate the chastening lesson of the Holocaust, while the experi ence itself, albeit in a very different way, is also part of their collective consciousness. But - apart from public figures who openly espouse racism - it would be harmful to blame anyone for this, and even more harmful to speak of anti-Semitism "absorbed with mother's milk". Received anti-Semitism is a burdensome legacy, but it is certainly not genetic; its causes are exclusively historical and psychological. These nations have suffered great injuries to their national dignity and have been struggling for years for their very existence as nations. In a characteristic but by no means original way, they have, alas, discovered in anti-Semitism a handy weapon in this struggle.

 Oscar Wilde, who, in the still innocent 19th century, was imprisoned for interpreting his freedom of self-definition too liberally, wrote in one of his essays, "'Know Thyself!' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world 'Be Thyself' shall be written."

 Our experiences, our very eyes, tell us daily that it is the "new world" that makes this more and more impossible. Still, we couldn't aim for more than what Nietzsche devotes an entire chapter to in his great book, Ecce Homo : to become what we are, to follow our destiny, and to draw from it the proper conclusions no matter how bitter these may be. It is possible that the road to the freedom of self-definition takes us nowhere. For a writer, for whom one language, the one he writes in, is always privileged, it is difficult to admit that, as far as he is concerned, one language is like another, and none of them really his.

 In reality, I belong to that Jewish literature which came into being in eastern and central Europe. This literature was never written in the language of the immediate national environment and was never part of a national literature. We can trace the development of this literature from Kafka to Celan and to their successors - all we have to do is peruse the various émigré literatures. For the most part, this literature deals with the extermination of European Jewry; its language may vary, but whatever the language, it can never be considered a native tongue. The language in which we speak lives as long as we speak it. Once we fall silent, the language is lost too - unless one of the larger languages takes pity on it and lifts it on to its lap, as it were, as in the pietà paintings.

 German is the language today that is most likely to do this. But German, too, is only a temporary asylum, a night shelter for the homeless. It is good to know this, good to make peace with this knowledge, and to belong among those who belong nowhere. It is good to be mortal.

  ©Imre Kertész Translated by Ivan Sanders. This is an edited extract from Imre Kertész's essay, "The Freedom of Self-Definition," which will appear in Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium, edited by Horace Engdahl, to be published by Scientific World Publishing, Singapore, in December 2002.