Parallel Lives

Günther Grass and Imre Kertész in Conversation with György Dalos

 

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Günther Grass: I think our biographies, at least as far as our younger years are concerned, could hardly have been more different. I was a member of the Hitler Youth from the age of ten, and up until the end of the war I grew up totally in that ideology. What I mean is I believed in it. I even ended up becoming a soldier. I was wounded in Berlin, and went from military hospital into captivity as an American PoW. When I was then confronted with the crimes for which the Germans were responsible, I was unwilling to give those facts any credence at first. I could not imagine how such inhumanities could have been committed by Germans. Accepting that great guilt was a long and drawn-out process. In point of fact, it is a process that continues to the present, because down to the present day we have still not found a valid answer to the question of how all this could have happened in a civilised country. That has also determined my work as a writer. When later on, much later on, writing came to the forefront of my artistic development-bear in mind, I initially wanted to be a sculptor and graphic artist, but-I came to realise after a while that artistic inclinations alone were not enough. I came to realise that certain topics relating to Germany's past are laid down for me and my generation, they cannot be ducked, but that too was a slow and protracted process. To begin with I tried to find myself through poetry, but it was also a political development. The pure chance of falling into American and not Russian hands as a PoW played a large part in that. When I was released from captivity, I also had to change my political world view. I recollect that at the age of eighteen I worked in a mine, a potash mine, 950 metres underground, because that qualified me for a heavy-labour ration card, we were better fed. Back in those days there were frequent power cuts, and during a power cut it was impossible to carry on working. The other workers, who were all older than me, would start arguing. There would be essentially three groups quarreling with one another. One lot were the Communists, the second were the petty Nazis, and the third group were more or less Social Democrats. I very quickly noticed that in these arguments the Communists and petty Nazis would gang up on the Social Democrats. That was an early impression of the first order and also an object lesson on the fall of the Weimar Republic. That's all I would want to say to start with. My evolution, then, was very extreme-the opposite to yours [addressing Imre Kertész]. Literature did bring us together later on, though.

György Dalos: In 1945, still a child, Imre Kertész returned home from a concentration camp to find a Hungary that was progressing toward something. Unlike Gyuri Köves, the protagonist of the novel Fatelessness, it appears he believed and trusted in something. What, more precisely, could have been the nature of that hope for Imre Kertész in 1945-46?

Imre Kertész: I would start earlier than that, because I too fell into American captivity, albeit in quotes. At the time Mr Grass became an American prisoner of war, I was being liberated by the Americans in Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. As to what that hope was-amazingly it was socialism, though it was not all that significant as far as I was concerned: what interested me, let us say, was life. So after the concentration camp you could say I threw myself into life, in a living Budapest, which at that time, between 1945 and 1948, was a very interesting place. That was what was called the "coalition era", when it still looked as though Hungary might turn itself into a democracy. But the more far-sighted-because of course you have pessimists and optimists, and of the two the pessimists are the better informed-anyway, the pessimists started to leave the country, and they were quite amazed that anyone at all was left behind, because they could see that Stalin was going to lay hands on the country and they knew what that would mean. So, as I said, hope meant socialism for me, and at the age of sixteen I joined the Communist Party. I already had cause to regret that by 1949, but by then there was no way of backing out. As is recorded in several of my autobiographical writings, I started working at a newspaper, but I was kicked out fairly soon, and that was for the following reason. I was supposed to write an article that featured Comrade Rákosi, and there were three obligatory epithets that had to be bestowed on Comrade Rákosi: the great leader of our people, Stalin's best Hungarian disciple, or whatever, and a third. The secretary who typed up the articles in the office was sitting at her typewriter, and I was only able to dictate two of the epithets and got stuck on the third.
The third simply wouldn't come to mind, and I knew that was it for me. And indeed that's what happened. Short and simple: I was kicked off the paper.

Gy.D. It's perfectly easy to see that someone would return to this country and want something better, and would see the future as lying with socialism. That is understandable, even joining the Party, but then what happened, of course, was that a democracy became a people's democracy, and the difference between the two, as the wits had it, is that between a jacket and a straitjacket. So, when that straitjacket came into being, how was it possible to make jokes, live, get about? What sort of thoughts did you have about where your career was taking you? Did you want a career?

I.K. No, I didn't want a career. That's exactly the point. I didn't have a clue what was happening to me, unlike Mr Grass, who had a clear direction marked out as he wanted to be an artist. I didn't, except for wanting to be a journalist to start with, but then around the end of 1948 and the beginning of 1949 I came to see that I couldn't be a journalist-and, indeed, they kicked me off the paper.
I worked in a factory, and I wrote pieces for radio: that was the fashionable thing back then-light entertainment programmes. It was actually around 1954-55 that I began to become aware of what had happened and was happening to me. It was actually the Rákosi dictatorship that wakened me to what had happened to me in Auschwitz, which up to that point I had spoken about in the breezy manner of an old front-line veteran, more or less shrugging it off as light-hearted anecdotes.
I didn't try to repress the subject internally, I simply didn't grasp what had actually happened, and then after the 1956 Revolution, when I saw how political manipulators treated people, how they handled the mass of the population, that rounded off my experiences; the materials that were to define my novels in the future. So, the body of experience was ready; it just needed to be expressed.

Gy.D. Günther Grass's path did not lead him straight to literature either, since the start of his career called for another form of manual dexterity, first as a stone-mason, then as a graphic artist, if I'm not mistaken. Those hands were still making other things, and it was only later, quite late on, in 1955, that you made yourself known to "Gruppe 47", then the most prestigious of West Germany's literary circles, and your literary career got under way. For those of us living behind the Iron Curtain Wolfgang Borchert's play The Man Outside was the first piece of postwar German literature that we got to read, and very little was known about "Gruppe 47" in Hungary. What sort of influence did it have, given that it was they who were the first to read your manuscripts?

G.G. u I have to say right at the start that my generation was pretty dumb on being released from the dictatorship of National Socialism. For me the early post-war years were a major period of discovery, of catching up. That was when I first saw the pictures of Chagall and Picasso, the German expressionists, everything that had previously been banned, and the impact of those experiences was nothing short of sensational. The same went for literature as well. The works of the great American writers, Faulkner and Hemingway, were published as broadsheets by Rowohlt, on newsprint. That was my first reading matter, and it was formative. On the other hand, going into the fifties, a kind of society began to emerge that was prone to suppress things. The country was destroyed, and it wasn't merely the buildings in ruins that were visible, people carried their own damages on view as well. They didn't want to hear anything more about the past. Then again, there were so many who claimed to have been working in the resistance that one had to wonder how Hitler managed to win power if the resistance had been that strong. It was a deeply mendacious and suppressed society. That was the restorationist Adenauer era, when National Socialism was demonised. The whole thing was presented as if dark earth spirits in SS uniforms had set upon the German people and seduced them. Looking at it from my point of view, I had to dispute that, because I knew it had all taken place in broad daylight. There may have been a favourable contributory factor, in that I had grown up in Danzig. After the Great War, Danzig had been made a free state, so National Socialism came to it later than in the rest of the Reich. Danzig was only annexed to the Reich in 1939. And one was able to observe, even as a child one could observe, how the thing spread, how it all happened in broad daylight, how enthusiasm in the Hitler Youth was boundless. In other words, there wasn't any question of earth spirits or clandestine operations. That too contributed to the aim that my novels, from The Tin Drum on, should portray-from the point of view of the social stratum I was familiar with, the petty bourgeoisie-the changes that had taken place, gradually at first but then with alarming speed, throughout the whole of society. These were decisive factors. As far as manuscripts go, by that time I was already writing poetry all the time. One day my first wife and my older sister, who happened to be visiting, had the idea of responding to an advertisement that South German Radio had placed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung announcing a poetry competition. With my agreement, they stuffed seven or eight of my poems in an envelope and entered them for this competition. I won third prize. When I got back to Berlin with the prize-it was 300 marks, which for me was a lot of money in those days, enough to buy a warm overcoat-there was a telegramme waiting for me: Gruppe 47 meeting in Berlin at Wannsee. Come with manuscript! So I went, read my poems to them, and within a short time I had a publisher.

Gy.D. Who won first prize?

G.G. The first prize in the competition went to an Austrian poet, Christine Busta; the person who got the second prize went on to become an art historian.

Gy.D. Propaganda in Hungary presented the Adenauer era and the fifties very much in black and white terms, like everything else. Our image of Germany was that there were "reactionaries" and then there was the KPD, the Communist Party of Germany. The fact that there were Social Democrats only leaked out quite a bit later. I'm therefore interested to know from Imre Kertész how, after you had got back home, Germany-by now split in two-continued to live in you?

I.K. West Germany lived on in me as the country of the economic miracle, East Germany as something that must be very similar to our own country, where what we had in practice was oppression. As far as I was concerned, the Stalinist years were years of impotence and idleness, total aimlessness. The only reason they were not spent in total depression was that I had a circle of friends, and it was actually possible to poke a huge amount of fun at the inanities that went on.

Gy.D. That was the world of music-halls?

I.K. Yes, a world of music-halls and jokes, a world of night cafés where people could sit around for hours, where people didn't dare go home because they were afraid of being internally exiled. Understand? The cafés and coffee bars had a distinctive atmosphere, one in which I lived, where we ought to have been afraid but refused to be. I was always saying that after Auschwitz nothing more could happen, could it? What was left to intimidate me? Having lived through that, what is there left to be afraid of? I tried to evoke a little of that atmosphere, that strange atmosphere which is so hard to conceive of nowadays, in my novel The Failure. That was the time when nobody had their own home, nobody had any money, night after night there were long and profound conversations, jokes were cracked, and nobody knew what tomorrow might bring.

Gy.D. That was when Günther Grass, on the other hand, lost half his country. What was the GDR like, seen through West German eyes, during the fifties and subsequently?

G.G. To start with, I studied at the Düsseldorf College of Art, then in 1953 I went to the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, West Berlin that is to say. At that time it was still possible to cross over into East Berlin without any restriction. The Wall had not yet been built. In our sculpture studio there were even some artists who lived in East Berlin and studied at the West Berlin Academy. Then in 1956, after my training in Karl Hartung's master class had ended, I went off with my wife to Paris, which is where I wrote The Tin Drum. Back then, in 1956, the Hungarian Revolution was a highly formative experience for me as an outside observer. But right then France was embroiled in Indo-China, and the fighting in Algeria had begun. Politically, it was an exciting time. On top of that, there was the Suez crisis, at the same time as the uprising in Hungary. The West could not come up with anything better than to unleash a new war. Hungary was left in the lurch. Those were formative experiences for me. Along with other foreigners, I was in Paris to attend to work and the arts. I wrote my novel, and by the time I returned to Germany the CDU had won an absolute majority in the 1957 general election. The restoration was at its high point. Anyway, when I had got back and the book was published it was a success on the one hand, but on the other hand it provoked a lot of protests and legal actions for pornography and blasphemy. The book came out when the restoration was in full swing, in a very narrow-minded lower-middle-class world. That wasn't actually of much concern to me, because as soon as The Tin Drum had appeared I had got cracking on the next book. The business of writing was an obsession, and one thing that maybe had a bearing on that, indeed definitely had a bearing on that, was that the loss of my native city had been total. It was quite obvious to me that I had lost it forever.

Gy.D. Danzig?

G.G. Yes. And it was only possible to recreate what had perished by literary means. In 1958 I made my first trip to Poland in order to research the background for what I wrote about the defence of the Polish Post Office. That was the first time I had gone back to my native city, the centre of which still clearly bore the marks of its complete destruction, although they had made a start on rebuilding it in the original style. I met town-dwellers there who, just like me, were from refugee families, from Vilnius and Grodno, and had initially felt they were strangers in the city. In Warsaw, being a German, I had been treated very warily, at arm's length, but in Gdansk people were curious about where I was from. I was from Gdansk. They immediately understood how I must feel in a city where the population had meanwhile been completely exchanged; they understood that I too was searching for my self. That too was a decisive experience, when I grasped that the infernal Hitler-Stalin pact had displaced the whole of Poland westward. It had been exactly the same there as in Germany, with refugees, the expelled who had lost their homeland. That loss, that total loss, placed such a definitive stamp on my subsequent writing that it turned me into a virtual obsessive. Using literary means, I had to evoke what had been lost. I wanted to evoke everything with the greatest possible precision and yet also still leave room for my imagination.

Gy.D. We had some knowledge here too of the controversy that surrounded The Tin Drum. I recollect very precisely that when the first week of West German films was put on in Hungary in 1980 the cinemas were only allowed to sell tickets for half the available seats. The East German embassy made sure that the cinema should not be full when The Tin Drum was being shown. And I know, Günther Grass, that you were also very much under critical fire in Poland at that time, and for very much the same reasons as in Adenauer's Germany. Anyone who was a Social Democrat during the 1960s fell right in the middle of the crossfire of the two camps, didn't he?

G.G. Certainly the way I saw social democracy. During the 1968 student protests I published a volume of political writings for which I wrote a preface with the title "A Revisionist's Foreword." That was a profanity I deliberately pinned to myself as a badge of honour, because I think that anyone who concerns himself with politics, in a Social Democratic sense, can only do so as a revisionist. We have already spoken about how certain books had a powerful influence on me. One of those was a book by the Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz, and it's not his poetry I'm thinking of now but the book that came out in the fifties under the title The Captive Mind, in which he describes the evolution of the various factions of Polish writers and intellectuals: right-wing fanatics, left-wing fanatics, Catholic religious fanatics. How they kept changing their positions, how they lost plain common sense through ideological thinking, how they swapped sides, whether out of opportunism or even conviction, and there became even more fanatical. That book made a profound impact on my thinking. On top of that, it was around the same time that I read an essay by Camus on the myth of Sisyphus. It made a lot of sense to me. Camus re-interpreted this hero of antiquity as someone who keeps on cursing the gods and all he asks of them is that they let him keep his rock. He believes in his rock; he knows that the rock won't stay put on top of the hill. I concluded from this that it makes no sense to plump for either pessimism or optimism because the rock isn't going to stay on the top anyway. And that's the way it should be. It's only ideologies that seek to present a world in which the rock stays put on the top, one in which a set goal is attainable. Fundamentally, that is also the position I hold as a Social Democrat. There is no such thing as a definitive historical narrative with which to delude people and in which a definitive goal can be laid down, even though that is what feeds all ideologies. And one other thing that was certainly conducive to my seeing the world in this light, I asked myself, as indeed many others of my generation asked themselves, how the collapse of the Weimar Republic had been possible. Beside the well known factors that led up to that, I think the main reason was that, given its rickety foundations, there were too few democrats to defend the Weimar Republic. That was the primary lesson for me. Thus, insofar as I have been politically active over decades, I did that not in my capacity as a writer but as a citizen, a citoyen of my country who happens to be a writer by profession. That was the point: a commitment fulfilled as a bourgeois engagé. As you yourselves must surely also sense here, in Hungary, democracy is not a constant, it must be defended every day anew. Democracy can just as easily be a hollowed out empty husk, a mere formality in which the machinery still functions, but basic democratic rights are asserted less and less. These are the consequences I drew.

Gy.D. Whilst Günther Grass was fighting what was, in fact, a fairly solitary battle for the renewal of the German spirit and political culture, the young Imre Kertész-in the thick of music-hall, theatre and fears of internment-picked up one of Thomas Mann's novellas, Mario and the Magician. What were you able to read in that?

I.K. Actually, it was not Mario and the Magician that I picked up but another of his long stories, The Blood of the Walsungs, which interested me because at that time I was a huge Wagner fan, and The Blood of the Walsungs was the first piece of writing to strike as something that had been written by a real writer, and that was such a jolt that I remained under its spell for months. Given that György Lukács was also partial to Thomas Mann, as a result, Thomas Mann's works had gradually started to appear again in Hungary. That was about the only truly good thing Lukács ever accomplished, because it enabled me to get to know the short novels, like Death in Venice and Mario and the Magician, but above all the essays. This would have been around 1954-55, which was a period when the sort of literature that was generally available in Hungary was Azheyev's A White Sail in the Distance, Far from Moscow, and stuff like that. Whilst Mr Grass was striving towards political engagement, I was striving to extricate myself from the omnipresent politics of the ubiquitous dictatorship. I aimed to run before the wind but off to the margins, and I managed to do that. Through the light-entertainment pieces that I wrote, I put myself in a position where I didn't have to take on a steady job, and I was able to make a living from that while I made a start on putting Fatelessness together.

Gy.D. Did you read those Thomas Mann novellas in Hungarian?

I.K. Those I did, yes, and another thing that is also relevant here is that around the same time, during the 1957 Book Week, I came upon a little, yellow-jacketed book. A little book with the title The Outsider, by Albert Camus. It is interesting that Camus also set Mr Grass off on his career, and it was really The Outsider that was decisive for me. I kept on reading and rereading it until I virtually knew the text off by heart, and it made me extraordinarily curious about Camus' other works, such as the essay on Sisyphus, which were unobtainable in Hungary then.

Gy.D. What about Milosz, for example?

I.K. He was only published here in Hungary after the change in regime. I read him with considerable interest but he was less of a shock, except perhaps in how unjustly he treated Borowski, wouldn't you say?

Gy.D. All these impacts were made on you via the Hungarian, so where did the German language come in, and why German in particular?

I.K. When I was young, German was a compulsory language. During my primary school years I went to an establishment where we learned German and English by the Montessori method. In the gimnázium German was compulsory, so I acquired some of the basics then, and after that all sorts of literature became German literature, since I don't read French, but the French authors to whom I was able to gain access during the sixties-I read them in German translation, courtesy of the Rowohlt paperbacks, in the same way as Mr Grass. That was the imprint that The Myth of Sisyphus and the rest appeared under and which I was able to get hold of here in Hungary because one of the foreign-language bookshops sold those kinds of books, so I was able to read French literature in German.

Gy.D. In that same foreign-language bookshop, incidentally, it was also possible in 1969 to buy Günther Grass's Über das Selbstverständliche, which as far as I was concerned was the first critique of the '68 students from that previously mentioned 'revisionist' standpoint. We know, Mr Grass, that during the sixties you became quite closely involved in politics. You played an active role in the SDP's electoral campaigns and were a friend of the charismatic Willy Brandt. In Hungary that sort of intense political engagement has been the rule. Wasn't it an exotic, as it were premodern phenomenon in Germany?

G.G. During the fifties, writers, the famous ones, and of course I wasn't one of those at the time, would content themselves with signing the occasional protest against this or that. Mostly, of course, they had good reason to do so, but then that was all there was to it. In my case, when I came back to Berlin from Paris in 1960, things were different. A year later the Wall was built in Berlin, and the
mayor of Berlin at that time was Willy Brandt, and this was when he was first put up as a Social Democrat candidate and ran for a seat in the Bundestag. In the same year, in September 1961, Konrad Adenauer gave an infamous speech in Regensburg in which he stigmatised Brandt for having left Germany under the Nazis and for being born out of wedlock to boot, which in those days still carried weight with some people. The general public looked on this as some sort of matter of honour. It was really this that induced me to do more than just sign protest letters. Later on, I got to know Brandt through Egon Bahr, his press secretary, and I helped him to write speeches and campaign addresses. One of his habits, for instance, was not saying "I" in places where that was appropriate, instead he used elaborate circumlocutions, such as "the one speaking to you here" and that kind of thing. I just wrote in "I" each time. Bahr said, look here, you'll have done very well if you get only thirty per cent of your changes through. That indeed is how it turned out. I travelled with Brandt on the campaign trail, and so was able to hear for myself the effect obtained by the speeches, which I too had worked on, and I decided that four years later I would organise a campaign tour with students in which everything would be done in line with my own way of working. That sort of thing is hugely draining, of course, and also carries certain risks, because the language of politics is a hand-me-down vernacular. One has to be able to draw clear distinctions between what you can get away with in a literary style and what people need to be told straight, politically speaking, without any fudging or glossing, without resorting to ugly terms such as "amending legislation" or "legal claim" that keep on creeping into politics. That was one part of it. On the other hand, I also learnt a great deal. I travelled to regions and met people whom I could have never reached through literature, came into contact with for me quite new strata of society. So in that sense I never regretted putting in the efforts. And I have to tell you that the way Brandt was capable of listening to writers and other intellectuals, paying attention to them, that was a first in German politics. He was very good at listening to people, and then assimilating some of those ideas after his own fashion. That was heartening. Equally, I also learned certain things from him: what I knew about poetry, for example, was that there can be no compromising in a poem, but I learnt from him that in politics one can only survive by being capable of compromising. Two polar opposites that are hard to reconcile. That was one of them. The other thing was that while this man was a hard-boiled pragmatist, at the same time he also had the courage to look beyond the end of his nose-and moreover at a time when Germany was totally ossified.
Brandt developed new ways of handling things, such as the policy of taking small steps and the policy for people in the GDR that brought an easing of the travel restrictions on them. He took the first steps that were to lead to the Helsinki conference and thereby was instrumental in the eventual implosion of the whole Soviet block. When he was no longer chancellor, and it still impresses me to this day, back in the seventies-at a time when East-West tensions were still high-he was commissioned by the United Nations to write the North-South Report, and he said that this was going to be the big problem of the future. But he didn't just describe the Third World's poverty, he also showed new ways ahead. He said that what was needed was a new world economic order in which Third World countries could negotiate on an equal footing with rich nations, that we needed an internal policy for the world. When I compare that with the present and see how impotent we are in responding to terrorism, and how we think, or the world's only superpower, the United States of America, thinks that terrorism can be countered by military means, then I can't help but recall Willy Brandt. Without the kind of effort the Americans were capable of after the war, without a Marshall Plan for the Third World, terrorism will never be contained. It will just grow and grow. And these, in my view, are political pointers that are of interest not only from a political point of view, since they have opened up the horizon for me in literary terms as well-in the sense that I haven't just kept staring at the fixed point of Danzig.

Gy.D. This Danzig, or Gdansk, this primal experience to which the trilogy kept returning, this world of Kashubs, Poles and Germans-this diversity is possibly what resonated most deeply for Hungarians. Nevertheless, I would like at this point to turn to Imre Kertész, who even if his political inclinations had been stronger than the literary ones would have had little opportunity to become involved in electoral campaigns, given that this was a one-party state. Something did change, admittedly, in that the never-formulated yet still much-parroted slogan of "Anyone who is not against us is with us" did come along, and so too did that era of stifling conviviality in which although many things were permitted, many other things were still forbidden. This is the period when Imre Kertész the reader turned into Imre Kertész the writer, the 1970s, when I first got to know you.

I.K. The seventies were preceded by the sixties. Around the time when Mr Grass was beavering away on political commitment, I was beavering away on why a writer should not commit himself politically. That's very characteristic, and indeed it is obviously tied up with the one-party system versus a democracy. Those are two completely different dimensions, and for me to be able to work, to be independent, I had to sever all political ties. I'm not really sure, it may well be that I am not political by nature, but that's the position and, to skip forward in time, what I am living through nowadays is what Mr Grass said earlier, that a democracy is a thing in which the lesson has to be recited each and every day, so to say. To put it another way, the consensus has to be reaffirmed every day. That is hard work and also highly beneficial, but back in those days I had no need of any consensus, I loathed consensus. If memory serves me right, I would sit with you in the writers' retreat at Szigliget and we would have great fun at the expense of the consensus. It was very important for me that there should be no political ties to the society in which I was living, and I had no taste for that regime, you put it very well, that stifling conviviality, the conformity, the weekend cottage, the Trabant, the holidays and those sorts of things.
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György Dalos
is a Hungarian novelist and poet. Harassed and not allowed to publish he left Hungary in 1987 and now lives in Berlin. Between 1995-99 he was Head of the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Berlin. Of his novels, all of them translated into German, The Circumcision (1991) and The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin (2002) have appeared in English.