Kertész Sleuths Human Cruelty

The life story of Imre Kertész is so remarkable that, at times, it threatens to overshadow any story he could invent. Deported to Auschwitz at the age of 14, he survived both the Holocaust and the Hungarian Stalinist regime to become a Nobel Prize-winning novelist. He wrote the semi-autobiographical novel “Fatelessness” about his experiences in the concentration camps only to have it refused, in 1975, by one of two publishing houses in Hungary on the grounds that it was “anti-Semitic.” When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, it was considered his magnum opus

The past hovers ominously over all of Kertész’s novels, though “Detective Story,” appearing in English for the first time, may be the exception. Originally written two years after “Fatelessness,” “Detective Story” demonstrates an expansion in focus from its predecessor as it denounces the general inhumanity of totalitarian governments.

Set in an unidentified, fictional South American state, under a vague but ominously present dictatorship—which itself gets overthrown by an equally blurry political force—the novella revels in its vagueness, making its story a universal one of dehumanization. Framed as the memoir of torturer Antonio Rojas Martens, a member of the secret police now in prison, it tells the story of his involvement in the murder of Frederigo and Enrique Salinas.

As in his earlier work, Kertész exhibits an understanding of how a distorted and cruel logic arises out of the inhumane. In “Fatelessness,” the young protagonist Gyuri is nostalgic for the “clearer and simpler” life in the concentration camps. In “Detective Story,” the cold and matter-of-fact style in which Kertész relates the sequence of events that lead up to the Salinas’ execution chills the reader to the point where the twisted investigation procedure seems pervertedly logical. For Martens, the system makes inexorable sense. Though unappealing to him, his colleague’s reasoning is simply a part of it: “Anyone who wants something else is Jewish. Otherwise why would he want something else?” In today’s world, this statement would seem insane, but in the universe of Kertész’s novel, it is just a matter of perspective.

Only Kertész can take us through his characters’ tortuous thought-paths in such a manner: his characters grate against our hearts and reason, and yet, as much as we may wish to do so, we are unable to dismiss them as insane. Repeatedly denigrating himself as “the new boy” and just a “flat-foot,” Martens accepts his share of responsibility for the murders he helped commit as part of the secret police. He does not attempt to pass the blame off onto the inevitability of the system.

It is unclear to what extent the characters in the novella are conscious of the role they play in the proceedings. A vague sense of emergency lies at the very foundations of the totalitarian state: “We didn’t speak about it: there was nothing to say, but we just knew...We had an atrocity to prevent.” With this vague decree as their unwavering motto, Martens and his colleagues sense that the Salinas is guilty, before they even know what he’s guilty of.

Vagueness is a tool Kertész uses efficiently to protect his novel from the passing of time. Despite the major changes that the last half of our century has seen, his work is still as relevant and readable today as it was on its release 31 years ago. Applicable to a modern readership, it has not been bogged down by historical particulars.

And yet the ghosts of Auschwitz do haunt the novella through the obsession of Martens’ colleague with a torture instrument named the “Boger swing.” The inventor of this device, William Boger, was, in fact, an infamous Auschwitz guard known for instances of sadism. Like a secret mentioned in the first act of a tragedy, the Boger swing sits on the desk waiting patiently to go off.

But Kertész’s novella is constructed around a vacuum of action, creating such a vast amount of unreleased pressure that not only does the dictatorship implode because of it, but so does the idea of any finite distinction between the human and the inhuman. The only action leaves two innocent victims “sagging on their fetters like empty sacks” and the reader trying in vain to shake off chills.

—Staff writer Anna I. Polonyi can be reached at apolonyi@fas.harvard.edu