by Albino Neutrino
Theodore Adorno claimed that “There can be no lyric poetry after Auschwitz”. This might be interpreted to mean that the awful fact of the Nazi holocaust somehow nullifies any further attempt to create a poetic communication – and that would go double for any kind of poetic communication that concerns the holocaust itself.

Imre Kertesz, himself an Auschwitz survivor rebels against Adorno’s assertion by writing about his own poetic response to the grim tragedy of the camps.

Kertesz has a unique ability to bring out the horror of the holocaust by using the notion of repression. His works on the subject are mediated through this idea – filtered through it’s workings – whether they be those of childhood inexperience in “Faithlessness” or those of a semi-fictional adult survivor trying to block out the memory of what happened to him. (in Kaddish).

By not tackling the subject in a direct and factual manner (as, for example, Primo Levi does), Kertesz brings out the sense of it’s human impact directly in the mind of the reader. This method relies, precisely, on poetry to achieve it’s communication. Poetic prose, therefore, in Kertesz’s hands, becomes the medium for opening up a new and subjective response to the holocaust in the minds of his readers. Poetry, therefore, is the therapeutic idiom that enables the beginning of a proper catharsis to the experience, and a proper commemoration of all it’s victims.

The poetic language of the book piles on negations, contradictions, repetition and questions to show the workings of a mind at war with itself. Take, for example, the opening sentence – a refusal followed by a confused rush of erratic semi-justifications, as if the refusal itself wants to be refused:

“NO, I said immediately and forthwith, without hesitation and spontaneously, so to say, for it is quite obvious that our instincts actually work against our instincts, so that, so to say, our anti-instincts act instead of, or even as, our instincts.”

Kaddish for a child not born is ostensibly an account given by a writer and translator of his response to a seemingly innocent question he is asked about whether he has any children. The question unlocks a wellspring of ideas about continuity and the question of affirming life in the mind of this writer. He realises quickly that these issues are directly related to the holocaust – both his own experience of it and the fact that it happened at all. To modify Adorno’s maxim: “How can we have children after Auschwitz?”. For Kertesz, it is the child, not the poem, that is the ultimate affirmation of life and the ultimate symbol of continuity – and yet this is also a life in which the holocaust has happened and could happen again – so what kind of continuity does it deserve?

The question of the unborn child therefore stands as the key that opens up the writer’s mind to confronting his own experience of the camps. It is not, of course, an easy task. Confronting repressed thoughts is never easy.

“I wasn’t thinking of anything even though I should have. Because secretly there was some mole-work going on, digging and undermining, something I should have been aware of and of course I didn’t know about. I only believed it to be something other than what it was. What was it? I don’t know…”

The child also stands as a symbol and (dis)continuation of Kertesz’ earlier work “Faithlessness” which is a first person account by a fifteen year old boy of his experience in the camps. If the biographical slant of the works is accepted, then the ‘unborn’ fictional child which the brings the fictional adult to question his repressions is in fact the adult himself as a child – the continuity between the two long since broken:

“The question is you or more precisely I … my existence in the context of your potentiality … I, as murderer, if we take the question’s logic to a reductio ad absurdum.”

The central section of the book follows up on the notion of continuity by looking back across the narrator’s life after the war and his attempts to find meaning in himself during this time. The three main potential sources of meaning here are his ex-wife, his own body and philosophy.

The figure of his ex-wife is used by the writer only in the context of the internal struggle of his own narrative, the logic of this context revealing an almost entirely solipsistic attitude that leaves the reader in no doubt as to why the wife is now an ex. The account is studded with a few quotations from her attempts to help the writer with his struggles, but these communications are doomed to fail as soon as they enter the depths of his inner narrative. Love itself, of course, is seen as a threat in this atmosphere – just another alternative prison. As with the rest of the book, it is the unspoken that gestures towards the reader.

Some philosophers are mentioned by their initial only. The “H” who is a “larger than life-sized visionary, philosopher, court jester, headwaiter of all select delicacies to all Fuhrers Chancellors, and other sundry titled usurpers.” is that old Prussian nationalist, and advocate of the historical dialectic, Hegel. Kant, Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer also get a look in.

Given the aforementioned solipsism, it is no surprise to find that the narrator’s relationship to his own body is strictly Cartesian. René Descartes famously used his uncertainty about all things to arrive at the only possible certainty in this predicament: “I think therefore I am”. The mind thus becomes the inhabiter of a contingent body. Kertesz follows a similar route – the uncertainty introduced here not only by his experience of the camps but by the very contingency of even that nightmare. He becomes radically uncertain of everything after the camp is liberated and he sees a German soldier washing a sink for him. For all it’s terrors, in Kertesz’s view, at least the experience of the camp might have been considered final – and yet it was not even that.

The Cartesian mind/body duality is seen by Kertesz as both a comfort and a terror. It is the comfort of the mind and the terror of physicality that permeates modernity:

“My body … sustains me and will, ultimately kill me … this recognition was not my awareness but rather awareness concerning me … an awareness present always and everywhere”

The end of the book returns to the idea of continuity, and in particular continuity through children given the fact of Auschwitz and now cast in the context of modernity as a philosophical idea, verses the individual freedom gained through the act of writing. In his final recorded conversation with his wife, the narrator portrays his innate mistrust of all institutions of modernity, and links this to the coldness with which his father treated him as a child. These thoughts are crystallised in the following passage:

“Auschwitz, I told my her, appears to me in the image of the father; yes, the two terms, Auschwitz and father, resonate the same echoes in me, I told my wife”.

Auschwitz and the father therefore appear to the narrator as twin representations of political modernity – a kind of brutal and necessary nurturing, yet contingent and uncertain for all that. The act of writing is therefore a struggle for freedom – a therapy – against the blanket of repression represented by these things.

Which force wins out is, of course, left uncertain in an ambiguous ending that suggests, in an intimate and delicate prayer, a yearning to be subsumed and/or consumed in memory forever. It seems that, in the end, the struggle is the thing – winning or losing are too distant end ephemeral an idea to consider.