The Unifying Aspects of Cultures

SECTION:

The Attitude toward "One's Own" and to the "Foreign" as a Unifying and Dividing Factor of Cultures

Sara Molnar (Budapest/Wien)
The paradoxon of the "foreign" and the autobiographical in the works of Imre Kertész

In my paper, "The paradoxon of the "foreign" and the autobiographical in the works of Imre Kertész", I would like to present the author's works (especially Fateless, which was awarded the Nobel-prize, Fiasko, and his new novel, Liquidation) in the context of the holocaust literature laying special stress on the Central European cultural and social aspects which are inseparable from the works of Kertész. He gives an aesthetical presentation of both the nazi totalitarianism and the communism. In my paper I'd like to deal with the paradoxon he writes in The Galley Diary: "The most biographical in my autobiography is that in Fateless there is nothing autobiographical". In one of his interviews Kertész says he was interested in the machine, the system of dictatorships and not in his own life-story. The distance from his own life-experience, the "foreign" could be explained as "poetic language", "structure", literary narrative which transforms the very specific central-eastern European experience into a universal understanding of the nature of power, authority and human defencelessness. Through this "foreign", unusual but very authentic narrative Kertész succeeded - as the Nobel-prize proves it - in making the experience of the holocaust and the socialism universally understandable.

THE UNIFYING ASPECTS OF CULTURES