Dossier K: A Memoir by Imre Kertész Read Free Book Online Page B

from Freud, however, that there also exists a subconscious world.
    Allow me to return to concrete aspects. In the piece on “Budapest—An Unnecessary Confession,” which appeared in your essay volume
The Exiled Language
in 2001, you describe a scene in which you and your father hurried home. Let me quote the passage word for word: “A confused shouting could be heard from the boulevard. Father said we would not go home the usual way but with a bit of a detour. He guided me, almost running, along dark side-streets; I had no idea which way we were going. The clamour gradually subsided behind us. Father then explained that the German film
Jud Süss
was playing at a nearby cinema, and as they streamed out of the cinema the crowds would hunt for Jews among the passersby and stage a pogrom … I would havebeen about nine years old at the time, and I had never heard the word ‘pogrom’ before … But the essence of the word was revealed to me by [my father’s] trembling hand and his behaviour.” Since you have already mentioned Freud, that nightmarish scene surely carries some unspoken meaning, a reproach
 …
    That observation is not without merit. One’s origins are always a complex and mysterious affair in which one starts to show an interest already when a child. Every child plays with the idea of what if … if I wasn’t the person they say I am but, for instance …
    A prince
.
    Or pauper. Or both pauper and prince at once.
    Mark Twain’s book must have made a deep impression on you, as you also refer to it in
Fatelessness.
    If we were not analyzing me but you, then it would quickly become evident that you were ducking a question it may well be I have also never fully clarified for myself. You have singled out precisely that passage, which really does have all the essential features: a highly principled father’s downfall in the eyes of his terrified son, who, however, continues to be kept well away from the edge of the precipice rather than their looking down together and assessing its depth. The big question is whether my father for his part ever took a look over the precipice. I have no way of knowing whether he had aguilty conscience about handing on his increasingly ominous heritage, or in plain language, for bringing a Jewish child into this unfriendly world. That he never verbalized it for himself—of that I am quite sure, but that would not necessarily have saved him from twinges of guilty conscience, for which he may then have compensated precisely by the show of infallible principle. As a result, I was more, so to say, ordered into my Jewishness instead of won over by argument that that was how the thing had to be. The difference may be small, but it’s important. There wasn’t anything for me to
shoulder
of my own accord, so I was deprived of any sense of responsibility; the most I could do was show my dissatisfaction, mutter to myself, or dream about a less nauseating situation. In point of fact, I think that was the origin of the psychological conflicts that eventually culminated in the form of Jewish self-hatred, a type that was particularly well known among Eastern European Jews as they rose into the middle classes, with Otto Weininger, or indeed Ludwig Wittgenstein, as typical highly cultured representatives. They are good examples of the fact that philosophical flair in itself offers no protection against misconceptions; indeed, quite the contrary. This is a big issue, and one under whose weight many have cracked up or, quite the opposite, turned aggressive and developed major character flaws.
    You yourself, nevertheless, still managed to find another solution
.
    I don’t think so. This has no solution; the problemconstantly follows one around, like one’s own shadow. I at most gave in to the temptation to be frank, but for that—if I may be permitted to express myself in a rather extreme fashion—I needed Auschwitz. Could we not find something cheerier to talk about?
    That would call for a