“From the first­mo­ment, when it had not yet become known to the wider world but, rather,unfolded day by day in the hid­den recess­es of name­less, obscure places and wasthe secret of the accom­plices, vic­tims and hench­men, from that first moment the­Holo­caust brought with it a hor­ri­ble dread — a dread that it might be forgotten.This dread was greater than the hor­rors, than the indi­vid­ual lives and deaths,than the avid demand for jus­tice.”

The Holo­caust as Cul­ture is the Eng­lish trans­la­tion of a 1992 lec­ture deliv­ered by Imre Kertész, a Hun­gar­i­an writer and Holo­caust sur­vivor who was award­ed the 2002 Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture ​“for writ­ing that upholds the frag­ile expe­ri­ence of the indi­vid­ual against the bar­bar­ic arbi­trari­ness of his­to­ry.” This 2012 pub­li­ca­tion is deliv­ered in three parts: an essay on Kertész and his writ­ten works by the trans­la­tor, Thomas Coop­er; an inter­view between Coop­er and Kertész; and final­ly, ​“The Holo­caust as Cul­ture” itself.

The intro­duc­to­ry chap­ter is both insight­ful and illu­mi­nat­ing; under­stand­ing that read­ers in gen­er­al are not as famil­iar with Kertész as they are with oth­er Holo­caust mem­oirists, Coop­er deft­ly expos­es the core of his subject’s phi­los­o­phy and body of writ­ten work in twen­ty-six short pages, inter­spers­ing excerpt with sum­ma­ry, biog­ra­phy, and analy­sis so that even those who have nev­er heard of Kertész before encoun­ter­ing this slen­der vol­ume feel well-versed enough in his lit­er­a­ture to grasp the full con­text of the two sub­se­quent sec­tions — but still deprived enough to imme­di­ate­ly seek out the orig­i­nals (Jew­ish Book Coun­cil has reviewed The Path­seek­er and Fias­co; Fate­less and Kad­dish for an Unborn Child touch a bit clos­er to the Holo­caust) — while those who have can still engage with the trans­la­tor’s read­ing of the texts.

On the whole, The Holo­caust as Cul­ture is an art­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion between writer and trans­la­tor. They joint­ly maneu­ver the para­dox of Kertész’s lit­er­ary sta­tus: that his promi­nence is enabled and even defined by the lack of recog­ni­tion afford­ed him — his ​“irrel­e­vance,” as they call it. (Had he received more notice as he was writ­ing dur­ing the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, his works would have gone entire­ly unpub­lished, cen­sored by the reign­ing Sovi­et gov­ern­ment for refus­ing to write its pro­pa­gan­da into his nar­ra­tive; so long as Kertész and his mem­oirs remained in cul­tur­al obscu­ri­ty, he could write and even dis­trib­ute what he wished.) Yet even as they rejoice in this irrel­e­vance, both con­trib­u­tors suc­cess­ful­ly insert Kertész into the canon of Holo­caust lit­er­a­ture and thought; not just by direct ref­er­ences, but by the selec­tion of con­tent and turn of phrase do Coop­er and Kertész call to mind the mus­ings of the most promi­nent voic­es of Holo­caust rep­re­sen­ta­tion. The ideas cen­tral to The Holo­caust as Cul­ture—that all Euro­pean his­to­ry, cul­ture, and ethics have been irrev­o­ca­bly affect­ed by the Holo­caust, itself an aber­ra­tion of his­to­ry that rede­fined mod­ern ethics and defied all cul­tur­al media — are so elo­quent­ly craft­ed that they remain res­o­nant even now, 20 years since the essay’s orig­i­nal pre­sen­ta­tion. And it is pre­cise­ly this endur­ing rel­e­vance about which Kertész writes.

“But does this con­di­tion not seem a rem­i­nis­cent of the gen­er­al and cos­mic con­di­tion of humankind as we have come to know it through the inter­pre­ta­tion of mod­ern phi­los­o­phy and anthro­pol­o­gy? […] The sur­vivor is mere­ly the trag­ic bear­er of the human con­di­tion of the era, one who has expe­ri­enced and endured Auschwitz, the apogee of that con­di­tion, its pres­ence loom­ing over the hori­zon behind us like the hor­rif­ic vision of a deranged mind; and though increas­ing­ly dis­tant, its out­line, far from dwin­dling, seems clear­er, stronger. It is quite appar­ent today that sur­vival is not the per­son­al prob­lem of those who remained. The long, dark shad­ow of the Holo­caust spreads over the whole of civ­i­liza­tion which must now live with the bur­den and con­se­quences of what hap­pened.”