YEARNING FOR DEATH

A stroke of luck: young Imre Kertész’s journal gives insight into the creation of one of the most important novels of the 20th century.

At the age of thirty, after years of work on his first novel Fateless, the confessions of a Nazi criminal, Imre Kertész decides to carry out a “sober self-analysis”. This results in his first diary, written between 1958 and 1962 – 44 closely written pages. And while he continues to earn his livelihood writing musical comedies for the stage in Budapest, he notes down his thoughts, what he has read and written in minute detail in the diary: from the decision to write the story of his own deportation rather than the Nazi criminal’s confessions – so “my own mythology” – to the completion of the first chapters. He also refers to his constant examination of the works of Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann and Camus, from whom he adopted the techniques he needed to write his unique coming of age novel.
Fateless was originally going to be called The Muselmann (a slang term among Jewish prisoners in German concentration camps for those resigned to their impending death). It took Kertész a further ten years to complete, only to then see it rejected in socialist Hungary, before it went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature thirty years later.
The most impressive pages of the journal describe the state of a Muselmann, the “destructive sweet self-abandonment” that Kertèsz himself experienced in the Buchenwald concentration camp shortly before it was liberated: “Man can never be as close to himself and to God as the Muselmann is just before his death.”