Liquidation Imre Kertesz

LIQUIDATION
Imre Kertesz

A critical paper by
Arthur Stupay
By pure chance, the task of evaluating the life and work of Imre Kertesz has been assigned to two financial analysts, albeit, two who can be accused by their professional colleagues of actually reading novels. Reading novels by economists and stock market analysts is as rare as novelists excelling as hedge fund managers.
The two occupations and imperatives are simply incompatible. Novelists deal with emotion and dreams. Freud and Jung are the reference points, with Sartre and existentialism thrown in. Analysts cannot cope with the intangible, with mental processes. If a qualitative argument is made for a strategy or an investment, the proposer is told to lie down until the feeling passes.
Anyway, you have imposed us on you and so in part you bear the responsibility for the results.
I would like to divide my analysis of the novel into three parts:

• A brief summary and analysis of Liquidation
• A situation report or tour d’horizon, on where it fits in the current literary scene
• Moral lessons from the novel for our time  

Liquidation is a novel in the form of a play, where the protagonists are both central figures in the novel and as well as the play. The narrative reverts back and forth from the novel to the play. This is a clever device and has been used in recent years by Philip Roth, whose main character is Philip Roth and the reader is uncertain about whether a scene deals with the author or the character. In Liquidation, Kertesz, the author, may also be the main character, Kingbitter.
Liquidation, published in 2004, is now part of a tetralogy, which includes Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Fiasco, and Fateless or Fatelessness. It is a curiosity that this latter book is sometimes titled Fatelessness, rather than Fateless. At least the author’s name is spelled the same way.
Kaddish deals with a character named Bee, who as a middle-aged writer refuses to have a child, because as he says, “what happened to me, my childhood, must never happen to another child.” Fiasco (not available in English) deals with a writer who is despondent over the rejection of his first novel, Fatelessness.
It is fortunate that the literary powers or dictators in the club assigned us Liquidation rather than Kaddish, since Kaddish is James Joyce tripled, with pages without a period and thoughts that run on and on and on, ending in some point that appears profound compared to the intelligible earlier part. There is one paragraph that extends to one quarter of the book.
Kertesz also acknowledges a debt to Beckett and his novel Molloy, writing “It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.”  In this book, Molloy and his alter ego Moran are in search of meaning for their lives. They do not know who they are and what they are doing alive. This type of modernism of indirection and abstraction was clearly an influence on Kertesz. It was also written in short declarative sentences, completely unlike Kertesz’s Kaddish.

Resume of Liquidation

Liquidation is a story about the calamity of the Holocaust, without the awful details. It deals with writers and intellectuals pondering the death of a friend and author, B. or Bee who was born in Auschwitz in December 1944. B. had an unfathomable end and an unthinkable beginning.
The author introduces the main character, Kingbitter in the first sentence, “Let us call our man, the hero of this story, Kingbitter…even his father was already called that; his grandfather too.” This is sparse and measured language, to the point, without a wasted phrase. Kertesz says, “The setting is in the late year of the passing millennium, in the early spring of let us say 1999.” For Kingbitter, according to the author, Kertesz, reality had become a problematic concept, “and more serious still, a problematic state.” Thus, it was not an intellectual dilemma but a psychic problem. Events or objects for him had at best a so-called reality.
The name Kingbitter should be informative or suggestive, but it isn’t. Kertesz asks, (quoting a French philosopher), “How can one be a Persian” or a literary editor, or a Kingbitter. What we are told by Kertesz is that the family comes from Switzerland, dealt in cattle and settled like Kertesz’s family in Transylvania. We learn that Kingbitter’s grandfather changed the name from Kesselbach to Kingbitter, during the First World War, after losing his son; he chose Kingbitter because he lived in bitterness. His father moved the family to Budapest during the Second World War and occupied a looted and vacated home of a Jewish family. His father says, “The reason that are able to live here…is because, luckily, the original owners were exterminated. Otherwise, we would have nowhere to live. …That’s Hungarian luck for you.” Kingbitter says of his experience, “I consider that the world as it represented itself to me had no logic whatsoever.”
He stands by the window in Budapest and looks out on the ordinary scene, cars, people, and peeling houses, afflicted with a type of leprosy. Kingbitter focuses on the homeless, the down-and-outs with whom he identifies.  He tried to make head or tail of this obsession with the homeless and felt that if he could it would help him understand his life. For him, it was not “to be or not to be”, but “Am I or am I not?”
He then turns from these reflections and state of mind to a pile of typescripts on his table, including a manuscript of a play entitled, Liquidation, a comedy in three acts, with the author setting it in Budapest in 1990. The author describes the setting, “Budapest, 1990, in a dingy publication office. with three people.” The three people are Kurti, his wife, Sarah, and Dr Oblath, the philosopher, all waiting for Kingbitter. The story begins as Kingbitter reads a play that includes him as a major character.
Kingbitter then laughs loudly as he reads about the Kingbitter and his colleagues in the play. This is a wonderful literary technique of having two settings, one in the real-unreal world of life, determined by God, chance or destiny, and one in the play itself, written by a human. The playwright is “B.” or “Bee”; both B. and Oblath appear in Kaddish, and as similar characters in Liquidation. B. we find out has committed suicide more or less at the same time the play was being played out in reality/unreality.
Kertesz provides wonderful riffs and asides on the human condition in a Communist state, such as: “Giving state support to literature is the state’s sneaky way for the state liquidation of the literature;” or “The resistance ceased and they suddenly found themselves in a void that, in their initial dazed state, they imagined as freedom;” This is Kurti’s line in the play after learning from Kingbitter (in the play version) that the publishing house that they all worked for will be liquidated after forty years of losses. My instincts as an economist/analyst support the conclusion that after 40 years it cannot justify itself. For Kingbitter, the play becomes reality and if destroyed, its death would doom him.
The story then discloses the following shattering facts, “the untellable story” that B. or Bee was born to a woman who wanted a child just as she was sent to Auschwitz or Osweicim in Polish. He was born in Berkenau in December 1944, part of the Auschwitz Camp. He had a tattoo on his thigh rather than his arm because at birth his arm was too small to be branded. Kingbitter speculates on how the mother was not “selected” out, despite being four months pregnant. From the bits of interview with B., Kingbitter believes that B.’s mother may have been helped by a blokova, or senior inmate, who was a Polish female prisoner. The pregnant Jewish mother gets into the camp’s hospital, probably under an assumed deceased Slovak prisoner’s name, gives birth. At birth, the child is taken away, never to know the identity of his mother and father. Kertesz writes, “One can never help being born.”
The play within the novel has Kurti declaim, “This is kitsch.” He can’t believe that the Kapos would “lay down their clubs and whips, and, moved to the core, … lift the wailing infant on high, with tears welling up in the eyes of the SS guard.” It can’t have happened that way, Kurti says, “Kitsch is kitsch.”
As B. gets to know Kingbitter, he brings a manuscript to him. In it, B. first expounded his fundamental view that Evil was the life principle… “The story relates that Good can be done in a life in which Evil is the life principle, but only a the cost of the doer’s sacrificing his life.” Eventually B.’s story, as Kingbitter concludes, is ”the most important work that has passed through my hands in years.” It was eventually published in an insignificant journal published semi-annually.
Kingbitter can be an irrepressible figure at times, first championing B. and then condemning a work of a party official. He refuses to support the latter publication saying, “The work’s language is atrocious, the structure banal, the story of no interest.” Eventually, the authorities arrest him, threaten him, offer a deal to become an informer. After ten days he is released, under international pressure to release dissidents, at which time his wife and child leave him. In due course, he loses his apartment and job. He says, “I myself passed on to another subgroup of humanity, the sort that cannot be trusted…I crossed over from marriage into truth.”
Despite the setbacks, he is given a minor job as an editor of ‘Foreign Classics’ where he could do no more damage to anyone. This enables him to meet B. again, when B. brings in a translation of a French novel. Kingbitter confides his personal story. B. cautions him, “ …you shouldn’t allow yourself to know who you are…each of us is a carrier of disaster, so that there is no need for a particular art of living for us to survive.”
The story moves rapidly from Kingbitter’s belief that B. must have written a novel. Sometime later, Sarah called him from B.’s apartment with news that he is dead. Kingbitter rushes over to retrieve B.’s manuscripts including the novel. While he finds a stack of material, he does not find the assumed novel. Sarah is angry at B. for bequeathing his death to her but says B. was Jewish.  We don’t know what it means to be Jewish. Later, she gives Kingbitter B.’s farewell note. In the long note, B. says, “the sole product of my life is that I have been able to gain acquaintance with the sense of strangeness that separates me from life. I was already dead while I was living.”
Kingbitter contacts Judit, B.’s former wife, who divorced him five years earlier, about the novel. In a series of scenes that follow their meeting, it turns out that Kingbitter had an affair with her and that Judit herself was a Jew whose family life was destroyed by Auschwitz. She says, “My mother died of some disease brought back from Auschwitz; my father was a survivor, a mute, lonely, unapproachable man.” She adds, “B. brought back everything, my Jewish secret, my oppressive childhood, spent in the shadow of such worlds.” She added, “I hated being Jewish, and hated denying it even more.”

Judit admits to her husband, Adam, of five years, that she was married before and had an affair with her first husband’s friend. The portion of Kertesz’s novel dealing with the destruction of B.’s novel is poignant, especially B.’s farewell letter. The novel then reverts to the play within the novel. Adam, her husband, says she knows nothing about Auschwitz. She says, “It’s not the same thing. I’m Jewish.” Adam retorts, “That in itself means nothing. Everyone is Jewish.” For me, the meaning of the encounter is that everyone was and is threatened by death and annihilation and all of humanity is vulnerable to Auschwitz: not the camp, but the condition. 
B. provides an alternative ending of the play in free verse. Adam says about telling his and Judit’s children about Auschwitz, “Let it not be a Jew they learn it from. I shall tell them in good time. Let them not learn dread.” She responds in free verse, quoting B. “It’s shameful to live he screamed tugging his hair. Shameful to live. Shameful to live.”
The destruction by Judit of B.’s novel was motivated by her belief that the victims were story-less people, and that their stories would lose significance after publication. Everyday events consume our lives and we don’t have time or energy to confront Auschwitz. Also, life and memory are tenuous, and the monstrous events would fade from view, especially in the light of a new tragedy. As Oblath, the amiable booby, put it “one is unable to reconcile oneself to the inessentiality of one’s life.”

Holocaust Literature

In Holocaust Studies, there seem to be two divergent accounts of the tragedy by survivors. One is that the memory of the time in the extermination camps negates hope and the redemption afterwards. In many ways, this is the view propounded in Liquidation. There is only Auschwitz, death, nothingness. How can one believe in relationships, normal emotions, kindness, empathy and human feeling after experiencing the death chambers and enormity and brutality of the slaughter of innocents? All this death and destruction was based on an outrageous racial theory, whereby certain races, nationalities, groups have to be exterminated because they are alleged to contaminate humanity.
Also, the survivors have to deal with the fact that the world was indifferent to the slaughter. The American forces in Europe refused to bomb the death factories, on the ground that planes and bombs were needed to destroy factories. Of course, they were used to obliterate Dresden and other German cities as retribution, but not Auschwitz or the two dozen other camps.
Also, survivors, their families and historians are amazed at the absence of moral outrage at the death of civilians. Maybe the Soviets sought revenge after the brutality of Nazi Germany in Poland and Russia. Where were the Pope, the Protestant Churches, the traditions of western culture?
In survivor accounts of the Holocaust, there are no brave stories, no nobility, no sanctity of life, no God, no civilized humanity. As one writer put, “there was betrayal, disgrace, a shameful silence and impotence.” I think that this was the condition that Kertesz experienced directly and what he emphasized in his books.
The other trend in Holocaust literature is work that emphasizes survival in order to bear witness. Also, some literature purports to show that a few victims were saved by brave Poles, Hungarians and others, despite the mortal risks. Even in this type of account, the emphasis is not on heroics, but on blind luck, narrow passages or time periods measured in minutes for people to avoid a horrible death. In fact, this was not only the experience of six million Jews, annihilated basically over a two year period, from late 1941 to early 1944. The mindless slaughter also involved the death of three million Poles and tens of millions Russians and Eastern Europeans. Even today, there outrage is muted and sanitized.
Kertesz in his Nobel speech talks about this. I quote, “When we write about Auschwitz, we must know that Auschwitz  in a certain sense suspended literature. …I mean that nothing has happened since Auschwitz that could reverse or refute Auschwitz. In my writings, the Holocaust could never be present in the past tense.” Later, he adds, “It is not easy to be an exception. But if we were destined to be exceptions, we must make our peace with the absurd chance, which reigns over our lives with the whim of a death squad, exposing us to inhuman powers and monstrous tyrannies.” Furthermore, “If the Holocaust has by now created a culture, as it undeniably has, its aim must be that an irredeemable reality give rise by way of the spirit to restoration – a catharsis. This desire has inspired me in all my creative endeavors.”

Paradoxically, B.’s suicide was not uncommon for Holocaust survivors. Primo Levi and many other survivors could not deal with normality, as we find it. The overwhelming horror could be not shelved, put aside, mediated, replaced by humanizing experiences. Only a survivor could write with such power, irony, savvy about the unthinkable. Kertesz says in his Nobel lecture, “The nausea and depression to which I awoke each morning led me at once into the world I intended to describe. …If I look back and honestly size up the situation, I must conclude that in the West, in a free society, I probably would not have been able to write the novel known by readers as Fateless, the novel singled out by the Swedish Academy for the highest literary honor.”  Finally, he writes in his Nobel address. “In short I died once, so I could live. Perhaps that is my real story. If it is, I dedicate this work born of a child’s death, to the millions who died and to those who still remember them.”

Moral Lessons From the Novel

Is there redemption after Auschwitz? Is there hope for stability and peace and humanity? Can moral imperatives protect us from the ever-present realities of genocide and mass slaughter? Is military power the only antidote to mindless nihilism? Is there a God?
The novel, Liquidation, and our literary traditions enable us to vent our emotions, to reconcile. It also enables us express emotions that have been repressed for decades, which is a prelude to healing. We can weep over the loss and find peace in the catharsis, leading to a new synthesis. Perhaps culture is the only way left. But the novel reminds us not to forget or to sanitize the past.
The moral lesson of the novel may be captured in a exchange between Adam and Judit. She says, “I screamed (to B.), calm down …Love me I pleaded. Adam replied, “You mean, love?” Judit: “That is our only chance.” Adam: “Love!” Judit: “Love!”