Zitate von Imre Kertész

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Imre Kertész

Geburtstag: 9. November 1929

Imre Kertész [ˈimrɛ ˈkɛrte:s] war ein ungarischer Schriftsteller jüdischer Abstammung. Er erhielt 2002 den Nobelpreis für Literatur.

Zitate Imre Kertész

„Er erklärte mir, der Faschismus habe doch auch viele Menschen aus dem Proletariat getäuscht und sie müßten aufgeklärt, wie er sagte: ‘umerzogen’ werden, denn es handle sich um ‘entwicklungsfähige Proletarier’, die auf den richtigen Weg gebracht werden müßten.“

— Imre Kertész
Dossier K: A Memoir

Über Menschen

„..., daß jenseits des Anekdotischen jede Geschichte und jedermanns Geschichte vom wesentlichen her gesehen gleichartig sei, und daß diese im wesentlichen gleichartigen Geschichten im wesentlichen tatsächlich alle Schreckensgeschichten seien, daß im wesentlichen alles Geschehen tatsächlich schrecklich sei und daß, im wesentlichen, auch die Geschichte schon seit langem nichts als höchstens eine Schreckensgeschichte sei.“

— Imre Kertész
The Union Jack

„Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate.“

— Imre Kertész

„Auschwitz, I told her, appears to me in the image of a father; yes, the two terms, Auschwitz, and father, resonate the same echoes in me, and if the observation is that God is an exalted father, then God, too is revealed to me in the image of Auschwitz.“

— Imre Kertész

„Anyone who wants something else is Jewish.“

— Imre Kertész
p. 13.

„I live and occasionally I look up at the glorious air or the clouds into which I keep digging my grave with my pen, diligently, like a forced laborer, whom they order every day to dig deeper with his spade…“

— Imre Kertész

„I have felt that some sort of awful shame is attached to my name and that I have somehow brought this shame along from somewhere I have never been, and that I have carried this sin as my sin even though I have never committed it; this sin pursues me all my life, which life is undoubtedly not my own even thought I live it, I suffer from it die of it.“

— Imre Kertész

„Survivors represent a separate species, just like an animal species.“

— Imre Kertész
Context: Survivors represent a separate species, just like an animal species. We are all survivors, that is what determines our perverse and degenerate mental world. Auschwitz.

„Once you have started, the only way back is to go forward.“

— Imre Kertész
Context: There was truth in Diaz’s logic, yes: our line of work is like that. Once you have started, the only way back is to go forward. p. 91.

„I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world.“

— Imre Kertész
Context: I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world. And I would still like to act! p. 37.

„Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone.“

— Imre Kertész
Context: But I believe in writing — nothing else; just writing. Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone. If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created that for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.

„What we usually mean by fate is what we least understand, that is to say, ourselves“

— Imre Kertész
Context: What we usually mean by fate is what we least understand, that is to say, ourselves, that subversive, unknown individual constantly plotting against us, whom, estranged and alienated but still bowing with disgust before his might, we call, for the of simplicity, fate.

„Only from our stories can we discover that our stories have come to an end“

— Imre Kertész
Context: Only from our stories can we discover that our stories have come to an end, otherwise we would go on living as if there were still something for us to continue (our stories, for example); that is, we would go on living in error.