BUDAPEST, March 31 (APP/AFP): Imre Kertesz, the Hungarian writer who
has died aged 86, was a nervous mess as he took the call from the Nobel Committee in 2002 telling him he had won the most prestigious prize in literature.
Yet this was a man who survived not only Nazi camps as a teenager but
also the dark and brutal few years of Stalinist dictatorship immediately after World War II.
In this he was not alone, but few could craft their unspeakable
experiences into words on the page in the way this tormented and deeply pensive survivor of two dictatorships could.
“I wrote about the Holocaust because it was a unique experience, I
had to live through such a defining experience of the 20th century, and I survived it. But I wrote novels, not Holocaust literature,” Kertesz told German newspaper Die Zeit in 2009.
He was, he said, particularly interested in “what happens to language
and people among totalitarian dictatorships”.