Language:
French
Year of publication:
2014
Titel der Quelle:
Diasporiques
Angaben zur Quelle:
28 (2014) 36-43
Keywords:
Kertész, Imre, Criticism and interpretation
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature
;
Jewish authors 20th century
Abstract:
States that the issue of Jewish identity and the tension between Jewish and Hungarian identity runs through Kertész's work. Refusing any group identity, Kértesz views himself first and foremost as a writer. For Kertész, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, the question of Jewish identity is connected to a person's fate; his was defined by the Holocaust; his Jewishness has nothing to do with postwar Jewish life. His identity as a Hungarian was shaken by the Holocaust, and he was exasperated by the weak or critical local reception of his work, even after he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Kertész views himself as a cosmopolitan intellectual, a minority in society defined not by racial, ethnic, religious, or linguistic criteria, but which he has chosen as a form of spiritual existence based on negative experience. This negative experience came to him because of his Jewishness, which in turn familiarized him with the fundamental situation of man in our times. For Kertész, Auschwitz, "the biggest trauma for Western man since the Cross", must be confronted in order for a new European culture to be born.
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