Fatelessness

Book: Fatelessness by Imre Kertész
Translated from: Hungarian
Rating: 9/10 grips you by the heart and squeezes
Awards: Nobel Prize for Literature, 2002

This extraordinary book, written by a man who experienced Buchenwald Concentration Camp first hand at 14 years of age, illuminates why so many Jews accepted their fate so passively. He describes getting caught up in a round-up of men and boys and as you see it through his eyes you can appreciate the awfulness but understand why he might never imagine just where it was leading. As in Les Bienveillantes, I again saw inside the bureaucratic machine that sweeps the oppressor along as relentlessly as the oppressed. It seems to me that, rather than simple evil, there is an innate indifference in people to the suffering of others when there is a profit to be made or a risk to be avoided. The oppressed are zealous about alleviating their own suffering at the cost of their fellow oppressed.

The book is remarkable for its detached almost journalistic tone which allocates blame but without bitterness. For instance, having made his way through the Auschwitz induction routine, he marvels at the creative way the people have been deceived into unquestioningly following along and imagines the meeting where German officers constructed the deception:

After all, people would have had to meet to discuss this, put their heads together so to say … One of them comes up with the gas, another immediately follows with the bathhouse, a third with the soap, then a fourth adds the flower beds, and so on. Some of the ideas may have provoked more prolonged discussion and amendment, whereas others would have been immediately hailed with delight.

The whole business is so detached and impersonal, not unlike the present day taking of a decision to say, relocate a factory to Asia and cast a lot of people out of their jobs. The executives are so pleased at their own cleverness and (almost) oblivious to the human cost. I’ve observed management in my workplace take important decisions about peoples lives, carelessly and indeed ignorant of their prejudices. The Holocaust may have been facilitated by the same universal mentality.

A portion of the book, describing the period in the infirmary which was probably responsible for his survival, is very strange. It remined me of the Twilight Zone and I had the eerie feeling of seeing his world in black and white only. Again you see that the oppressed is ready to turn oppressor at the drop of a hat to save his skin. I wonder did the author wait so many years to write his story because the fundamental message is so disturbing. This is an uncomfortable book because you read it with a growing fear that you are no stronger than them and could easily have participated in the persecution.

Through a Lenz, darkly

Book: Heritage by Siegfried Lenz
Translated from: German
Rating: 10/10 … flawless

Very few authors have had this effect on me. I first discovered Lenz’ extraordinary work in An Exemplary Life, in the 1970s, borrowed from the local library. I set out to read all I could find of his and managed to chalk up a few (The German Lesson and Heritage) both from the library. All are exceptional and I developed the literary tic (?) of checking the bookshelves for his name whenever I entered a bookstore, but with little success over the years except for The Lightship and (in French) Training Ground. It seems that Siegfried Lenz, an icon of post-War German literature, went out of print in English! So after 25 years of vainly checking shelves, I finally had the idea of seeking him out second-hand and with some success – slow, but better late than never!

Actually, it’s nice to read a book that passed through others’ hands. My copy of Heritage seems to have started its journey on the passenger ship SS Uganda and I’m sad to see from this Wikipedia entry that this ship went to war in the Falklands, ignoring the lessons it carried in the ship’s library. Because all of Lenz’ oeuvre is about morality, informed probably by his personal experiences of war.

Heritage tells the story of a museum founder in the city of Lucknow (probably Lenz’ home town Lyck on the German-Polish border pre-WWII and now the Polish city of Ełk). The book is entirely narrated from his hospital bed as he recovers from the burns received when he destroyed his museum and tells his story to give context to his action. We are treated to a potted history of Lyck from the earliest times and through two world wars as the territory swung back and forth between rulers including Teutonic Knights, the Prussians, the Russians, the Poles and the Germans. For instance, we learn of the post-WWI elections when the townspeople voted 8339 to 8 to remain German and the total annihilation/dispersion of the populace in 1945. The narrator explores the importance of heritage and homeland but eventually destroys his museum when he sees how such noble sentiments can be appropriated and corrupted.

Don’t be alarmed by the high-flung ideals addressed by the book. As in all his works, they are wrapped in a story by a master of story-telling told at a pace that never wanes and yet captures the human spirit, simultaneously horrible and uplifting.