Imre Kertesz PHOTO – REUTERS

STOCKHOLM – Hungarian novelist and Auschwitz survivor Imre Kertesz won the 2002 Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday. Kertesz, who is Jewish, won the prize „for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history“, the Swedish Academy said in its citation. As a Jew persecuted by the Nazis, and then a Hungarian writer living under that country‘s communist regime, Kertesz experienced directly some of the most acute suffering of the 20th century.

His works have been widely translated into German and he himself is a translator of some of the greatest thinkers in the German language — Wittgenstein, Freud and Nietzche. His first novel, Fateless (1975) — about a man taken to a concentration camp who conforms and survives — and Kaddish for a Child not Born (1990), have also been translated into English. Kaddish is the Jewish prayer for the dead, and in that novel, the third of a trilogy begun with Fateless, Kaddish is said by the protagonist for the child he refuses to beget in a world that allowed Auschwitz to exist. Born in Budapest in 1929, Kertesz was deported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland in 1944, and from there to the concentration camp of Buchenwald, from which he was liberated in 1945. He returned to Hungary and worked as a journalist from 1948, but was dismissed in 1951 when his paper adopted the communist party line. After that he supported himself as an independent writer and translator. He was able to make more public appearances after the communist regime ended in 1989. Kertesz is the first Hungarian to win the Nobel literature prize, though Hungarians have won science Nobel awards. His experiences as a teenager in the camps have marked his writing. „When I am thinking about a new novel, I always think of Auschwitz,“ Kertesz has said. Reuters