THOMAS COOPER: From time to time, actually not infrequently, one comes across comparisons. Auschwitz and the Holocaust are used as a kind of measuring stick to assess the horrors of some other tragedy or outrage of history. Parallels have been drawn between the deportation and massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, but, more recently, in descriptions of events of the wars in Bosnia. How do you respond to this use of Auschwitz as a sort of quintessence of evil?

IMRE KERTÉSZ: I don’t think these comparisons are justified, nor are they useful. When you make comparisons like this, you remove the events from their context. How does this further our understanding? But I still think Auschwitz is unique in history. The construction of gas chambers, a whole complex machinery of extermination. Of course there were appalling massacres before, but deporting and slaughtering a civilian population, a population whose labour was an asset to the German army, it’s unique in history, even in Jewish history, which was full of pogroms. But as Raul Hilberg noted, everything that happened to European Jews in the twentieth century, all the persecution, the yellow star and the ghettos, the seizure of property, there was historical precedent for it all, it had all happened in some form before, only Auschwitz was the exception.

In Dossier K., you cite Giorgio Agamben, his contention that the word Holocaust arises from the unconscious demand to justify a death that is sine causa. Could Fateless be read as a similar rejection of this demand? I’m thinking of the narrator’s hesitance to use any abstractions to describe his experiences in the camps, his refusal to describe the camps as hell because, as he says, he has no idea what hell is like.

Look, in the end these are just words, Holocaust, Shoah, I use them because it’s become unavoidable. But words are just a matter of consensus. Everyone says Auschwitz for Holocaust or Holocaust for Auschwitz. You know the historian, Hilberg, he’s passed away now, but his book was simply entitled The Destruction of the Europeans Jews. Maybe this is what we should say, maybe every time we speak about the Holocaust we should just say ‘the destruction of the European Jews.’ Maybe we could get rid of the Spielberg interpretations of the Holocaust, the ‘we survived’ interpretations, ‘we should be happy, the Jewish people survived, we have many dead, but in the end the Jewish people survived.’ I don’t even know exactly what this ‘Jewish people’ is to be honest, but perhaps we shouldn’t raise that question, it’s a complicated one.

If you’ll forgive me for bringing up the question anyway, does it make sense, in your case, to speak of Judaism without mention of Auschwitz?

In my case, no. My Jewishness is shaped by the Holocaust. I don’t speak Hebrew, I did not have a religious education or upbringing, I am not familiar with Jewish philosophy, I do not know the Cabala. I would use Isaac Deutscher’s term to describe myself. I am a non-Jewish Jew. I am not religious, I never was. Religion has never meant anything to me. Or rather I once heard someone put it perfectly, ‘God has no religion.’ He was a Calvinist pastor, speaking as part of a normal service, I can’t remember exactly when I heard it, but this is my view. But the thought of Israel is still very tender, fragile to me, and I express my solidarity with Israel whenever I have the opportunity. But it is not my home or homeland.

You commented once that the word Holocaust refers to those who perished, in other words those who were burned, and forgets those who survived.

Yes, survival was the exception, a flaw in the Nazi machinery, as Jean Améry wrote. The survivor is the accident, or the mistake, the thing that needs explanation. Survival seems unimaginable, but actually it is the camps that should seem unimaginable. You know this was one of the strange things about my memories of Buchenwald. In the middle of this camp there was a hospital where they tended to the sick, where doctors gave care to the sick. How was this possible? And then you realize the question is, how was the camp possible?

Améry wrote on his fear that with the passing of the last generation of survivors, the memory of the Holocaust would pass as well. Do you share this fear?

I spoke on Améry when I was asked to hold a presentation at the University of Vienna in 1992. That was when I wrote the essay entitled ‘Holocaust as Culture’. Essentially I just meant to set forth my view that if the memory of the Holocaust is to remain, it will remain through culture, which is really the vessel of memory. Tadeusz Borowski also feared that the memory of Auschwitz casts a long shadow over European civilization, it is still the vital question of our culture. I spoke about this as part of the presentation, and the audience, mostly members of the younger generation, seemed to show interest. And I began to think a bit about the nature of trauma and historical memory. The Holocaust was a trauma, and for the generation that lived through it, it remained stifled, there were these mute decades. Then symptoms began to show in our culture, and the symptoms were what had happened. Of course in Eastern Europe the whole discussion was distorted by the system, by the official version of liberation etc. Even today one can see significant differences in the way the Holocaust has been treated as historical memory in the East and the West.

From what perspective?

Simply that it has been given such thorough attention, in history, art, literature, it has become a part of Western Europe’s cultural past. The Holocaust is an absolute turning point in Europe’s history, an event in the light of which everything before and after will be seen. Chancellor Angela Merkel, when she took office, said that the Holocaust was part of the German Volk, the identity of the German Volk. And of course most of the historical scholarship on the Holocaust has been done in Germany. But the point is it’s not seen simply as an event of history it’s seen as an event that casts all our ideas about ethics and morality in a different light.

And you are suggesting that the communist regime in Hungary played a role in stifling similar discussion?

Absolutely, and they were quite candid about it too. The whole question of anti-Semitism was swept under the carpet under János Kádár. Of course you couldn’t be openly anti-Semitic, that wasn’t tolerated, but it was all false. They used to just use the word ‘persecuted’ instead of ‘Jew’, it was risky to say ‘Jew’. So in a way we became invisible. We were there as the victims of the persecution from which the Soviet army had supposedly saved us, but we couldn’t just be there as Jews.

Did cold-war alliances have any role in this?

Yes, definitely. The basic stance of the government was, ‘it’s fine to be Jewish in Hungary, but only if you bear no sympathies for Israel.’ It was just another kind of total assimilation. I could tell a story about this, I remember, a man prominent in cultural life in Hungary asked me for a manuscript. I ran into him at the theatre and he asked me if I was working on anything. I said I wasn’t working on any novella or anything like that, but I had an essay he might be interested in. ‘More Holocaust stuff?’ he asked. He was  Jewish himself, and this was how he responded. But the whole Jewish intelligentsia is so accustomed to this pressure to assimilate, to talk but to be quiet at the same time. You know, there was a Numerus Clausus in the interwar period, and society was much more openly anti-Semitic, and under Bethlen the Jewish communities of Hungary rename themselves Neologue. Only they knew exactly what they meant by this, but at the very least it was as if they wanted to make it clear that they bore no affinities with Orthodox Jewry, with Jews in the eastern part of the country. And they showed their perfect willingness to assimilate, at least as much as they would be allowed to do so. Even to convert, though of course this meant nothing when deportations began. You know the poet Miklós Radnoti, he was a converted Catholic and always thought of himself as a Hungarian. He was sent to the camps, and then they shot him by the side of the road in the course of a march to Germany. But the role of the Church in Hungary was different from that in Germany. In Germany the Catholic Church had little significance, and the Jewish question had nothing to do with the churches, it was entirely secular. In Hungary the Bishops had to vote on the Jewish laws, like the 1938 laws. This is something people should know. The parliament in Hungary had an upper house and a lower house, and the Bishops sat in the upper house. And when the question came up in 1938 they voted in support of the Jewish laws. Of course, they weren’t voting to kill all the Jews, but they did vote to have them excluded from schools, to allow for the seizure of their property, etc. The Church in Hungary had a role in this. You know in Switzerland they organize a book fair every two years. They invited me once, and to my great surprise, the man who was there representing the Hungarian embassy, not officially, he had just come to the fair, but he gave a very eloquent speech about the Holocaust. We spoke, and it turned out that he was Lászlo Ravasz’s nephew. He was deeply ashamed of the anti-Semitism of the Church in Hungary, and he had always worked to further knowledge of the events of the Holocaust. But the point is these people, they were there, they had to vote for or against these laws, and they voted for them. The persecution of the Jews in Hungary was a bit different from the persecution of the Jews in Germany in this regard. In Germany the government first took all power from the churches, then there was one-party rule.

———————————————————————————–

The Holocaust as Culture, A Conversation with Imre Kertész, soon to be published in English by Seagull Books.

An extract from an interview by Thomas Cooper.

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Following her highly acclaimed ‘Art of the Book‘ exhibition in June 2010, a brand new exhibition of digital collages by artist, Sunandini Banerjee, is set to open on Wednesday 1 June 2011 at the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre.

Sunandini Banerjee, much in the manner of a magpie, collects images from a wide variety of sources and creates innovative, humourous digital collages—a potpourri or a medley or a luck bag, call it what you will.

Created for the annual Seagull Books catalogue, this year’s collages are, unlike the large-sized prints of her last show, smaller and in the nature of contemporary miniatures.

Thieving Magpie

Collages by Sunandini Banerjee

1st June, 2011. 6:30 p.m.
at Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre
36C, S.P. Mukherjee Road. Calcutta – 700025.

The show continues till the 3rd of July, 2011. 11 am – 8pm, daily.

There will be 86 works on display. Each collage is printed on archival paper and is part of an edition of 7. Each collage is available for sale.

Click here to view the exhibition online.

So the magpie adorns its nest with everything it finds, no matter how nondescript. It likes to pull out everything that glitters, not caring much whether it’s paste or diamond.

You do know what I mean.

What I’m trying to say is this:

What you have before you is a capriccio, a quodlibet, a potpourri, or rather a mixtum compositum, or plain and simple a general brouillon.

Do I make myself clear?

I mean a hodgepodge, a maremagno, a salmagundi.

In other words: this is probably an olla podrida, a Kudelmuddel, a Sammelsurium or a ragout. Of course, I could also talk of a macédoine, a charivari or a pêle-mêle—no, just a minute, I’ve got it!—it’s a gakkimaufrym a ragbag, a pasticcicciaccio or, damn it, it’s on the tip of my tongue, in a word, it’s a zibaldone, a medley, a farrago, in short, and that’s an end to it, it’s a scrapbook.

Or is that claiming too much? Perhaps it’s no more than a lucky bag. But so that we understand one another, my dears: it’s no different in our brain (the brain is no different), an undisciplined organ, which doesn’t stick to any sequence, manages without a table of contents and knows no chronology.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger
German German author, poet, translator, and editor. Seagull author.
The opening quotation for Seagull Books’ 2010–11 catalogue.

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General editor of Seagull Books ‘In Performance’ series

‘One’

Awake in the night again. In my dream there was Europe. I enter her from the southwest corner and travel through small side streets looking got someone or searching for something just out of reach. Someone said, ‘I am singing for you in all languages.’ In the dark, a relief map of Europe is etched on your back. Each place comes alive as I run my hand over it.

Such were her thoughts as she sat in yet another meeting in which the content had long ago evaporated in favour of obeying the protocol of status. The chair of all meeting was delivering a lecture on professional courtesy all the while being rude enough to prevent any conversation from taking place. One man wore shiny slim black leather shoes that radiated his contempt right up from his black soles.

At times like these she often remembered her colleague with the brilliant ability to say the most revolting things in the most casual way. She always stopped this memory when she felt a smirk beginning to fleet across her face. Her notes for the meeting read: ‘Money, no money, too money, not enough money, money for this, but not for that. Meeting over.’

 

‘Two’

I saw the most beautiful couple on the Paris Metro. They sat down across from me gently fitting into the tiny space between seats left for legs and then sitting as if suspended from another time. She. She was glorious. Her eyes were liquid blue and appearing as if she were about to ask a question that she could not quite formulate. He. He was dark, opaque, pained and grave. They were dressed in what might have been fine clothes 50 years ago. She in a frayed and soiled white coat with a fur collar. He in a rough fabric suit brown with age. The wrinkles on her face were deep estuaries that circled back to her impossibly beautiful eyes. Eyes like a girl in the first blush of love. Her skin was transparent and white. His high cheekbones were Asiatic and foreboding.

They seemed to have levitated across time and appeared just there across from me on the Metro. ‘Where are you from,’ I heard myself ask. He said with an air of great privacy that they were from ‘outside of Paris’. She shook her head simultaneously yes and no as he spoke with an air if impertinent elderly grandeur. They were too perfect He once had a vigorous body, a big and strong. She was once a great beauty. They must have mistakenly stepped out of time and were trying to get back in when they happened on the Paris Metro. I love them. I love them. Every day I look for them. They are there somewhere. I am waiting for them.

I dreamed of them. In the same dream my father appeared as a young man. He sat next to me and signed my book and then gave it to me. But when I woke up there were only thoughts about the man and woman from outside Paris. I was possessed with their image and woke up sweating with longing for them. Not to know them, but to see them, just to see them again.

 

‘Three’

Last week I went to the Musee Carnavalet which is situated on the same square as Victor Hugo’s house, r rather, his former house. The Carnavalet includes includes Proust’s room, reportedly his room,. actually his room or, perhaps, a reconstruction of the furniture that was in his room when he wrote Remembrance of Things past. The chaise is beautiful. As the room is presented as Proust’s room, i thought, as do others, ‘Oh, this is Proust’s room’ even though it is, in fact, a collection of furniture in a museum in an arrangement that little to do with how furniture is situated in rooms where people live.

 

‘Four’

A young woman dropped a gold ring near my foot when I was looking at a Metro map. She picked it up and said, ‘You have good luck. It’s for you.’ I took it, looked at it and handed it back to her and said, ‘No, it is your good luck. You found it.’ She said, ‘I think it is old.’ I looked at it again and commented that there was a stamp inside. The young woman put the ring back in my hand and begged for me to give her something for it. I turned to a woman seated on a blanket on the sidewalk with a begging bowl who had been watching the whole interaction and said to the scam artist, ‘Let’s give it to her.’ I took a handful of change from my wallet and dumped it in the begging bowl (which I had intended to do) along with the ring. The begging woman was delighted. the scam artist was miffed. I went on my way. I turned back for a moment to see if the scam artist would try to take the ring out of the begging bowl. She didn’t. The begging woman gave me a big smile and a friendly wave goodbye.

From the Seagull Books catalogue 2010

Books edited by Carol Martin:

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from On Theatre by Badal Sircar
Published by Seagull Books

Photo by: Naveen Kishore

Most theatre groups in the country have a symbol or a logo. This logo appears on brochures, letterheads, envelopes. Several of these are actually designed as variations of masks. It is not uncommon to find these displayed on bookcovers, periodicals, published plays or even as text ornaments in essays on theatre.

It gives you the feeling that the mask is a symbolic representation of theatre. Or, alternately, the essence of theatre is the donning of masks.

The trends of contemporary theatre actually make you feel that this is true! Seventy-five per cent of contemporary theatre is naturalistic or dependent on realism. It seeks to portray real-life characters realistically—what they do, how they go about their lives. In order to make the plays realistic, the actors are told to be normal on stage, act naturally. In other words, bring the ordinary, everyday rhythm into your acting on stage—walk, sit, talk, laugh, light up a cigarette like you would in your daily life, bring in the same natural ease.

Despite all our protestations about ‘being naturalistic’, we forget something. There can be nothing more unnatural or strange than what we do, or are compelled to do in our daily lives. We cannot laugh when we want to; we hold back our tears when we want to weep; restrain ourselves from screaming; cannot think of converting an urge to dance into working. And all this because we are civilized creatures living in a civilized society. Civilization demands masks. Civilization demands that our real nature be hidden beneath the mask. Whether this is at all necessary to keep society under control is debatable. It is also a matter of conjecture whether strictures imposed by society actually help keep a very small section protected—perhaps yes but at the cost of hastening the destruction of a much larger section. Hence, one can also question whether the society in it’s present state needs to be saved at all. I will not go into the details right now; at least, not in the present essay. All that I want to reiterate for the time being is that everything that we mark out as ‘normal’ behaviour is, in reality extremely abnormal.

The so-called realist-naturalist theatre imitates all these ridiculous ways of talking-walking-behaving. For instance, I, Ram, spend my days behind a mask everywhere—at home, at work, at leisure. When I act as Shyam in theatre, all I do is exchange my mask with Shyam’s, because the playwright has created his character with a mask as well. It is thus quite natural that this theatre should have the mask as it’s logo.

But Ram has an inner nature—an independent existence/presence—something that should also be inherent in the character of the play. That is the reality. The real naturalistic theatre would have been possible only if this essence could be distilled; but, for all practical purposes, that is what is marked out as unreal, abnormal. We are so used to wearing masks that we mistake the mask for the natural self.

But theatre was a space where it was possible to reveal one’s normal self, to bring in some introspection about one’s inner essence. We could have done in theatre what was impossible to do in real life—laughing-crying-dancing-screaming. Try doing all these at home, and your relatives will spend sleepless nights worrying to death about you; on the streets, chances are that you will be stoned or have the dogs let loose on you; but do these in the theatre and people will watch you with rapt attention. They will watch the real human being, the true human being, behind the mask. And the mask of the viewer will unconsciously start peeling off too, bit by bit. So there will be an easy give-and-take between human natures, and one man will communicate with another. If this is not theatre, what is?

Theatre is of the people. People do theatre; peaople watch it. Theatre talks about people; there is an active communication between one man and another through theatre.

A poet writes a poem some day in his room. Someone reads the poem in his room, some other day. The poet is not even aware of it. At a time when we are watching a movie star in a film in an auditorium in Calcutta, that same movie star may be shooting for another film in Kashmir or spending a vacation somewhere else. When we admire a painting by an artist in an exhibition, or in print, the artist is not present. There is communication in each case, but of the passive variety.

Communication in theatre is always active communication. It is in the here and now. Both parties—the actor and the viewer—must be present at the appointed hour at a definite place. And the communication will happen there. Direct communication. That is the uniqueness of theatre.

Will the actor wear a mask even here? What use is direct communication then? If I am unable to rip off the mask and bring out the real person, then it will just amount to the costumes eyeing each other, the masks sniffing each other, the armours clanging against each other. Where are the people there?

So much for theatre. The commerce part is a different proposition altogether. Theatre is nothing but a mere commodity in business. It has to be sold. This demands glitzy packaging, titillating advertisements. The brighter the packaging, the glitzier the advertisements—the greater the sale with bright costumes and magical tricks devised with light and sound. Advertisements are also about packaging the external trappings, not of the inner essence. Masks are a necessity for acting under such terms. Masks that are ingenuous in their myriad manifestations; masks that can enthrall the audience with their glamour and artifice—the same old manner of speaking, the same old voice modulation, the same old flourishes of laughter, villainous or coquettish, the same old postures of walking about and turning around. Here, the performing artiste masters the various formulae that lead him to learning the techniques of body language, facial expression and emotions to express joy, sorrow, anger, pain, love, hatred, etc. That is his neat little booty. He whips out the right kind of mask to suit the character and the situation and sticks it on his face. Gets applauded too. Who cares about the content of the play? Or about the life of the performing artiste—his inner being? Absolutely irrelevant.

Ours is a crass commercial world with equally commercial social norms. Just as the bare essentials of human life are nothing but items for commerce, so also the art of human beings is just a commodity for buying and selling. The world of commerce is a competitive world; every businessman vying with a rival in the competition to sell. Art suffers the same fate when it is reduced to being a commodity.

But if there’s anything called true art, it can never become a commodity to be bought and sold. There is no room for any competition then. Because real human beings are not commodities to be bought and sold; neither are they pawns in a commodities game. In the present age, and in this commercial world of ours, real human beings are perhaps visible only in the domain of the arts. Hiding ourselves behind masks in our daily humdrum existence becomes a necessity; but it is only in art that true feelings of one’s innermost being can be revealed. There are some artists who still continue to create works of art without thinking of selling them, or even bothering about competition. At least, not at the beginning of their careers. Once a work of art is created, the trader swoops on it like a bird of prey; he buys, sells, commissions, draws up agreements, explains to the artist what kind of art will sell, what the current marketplace is hungry for. So packaging makes an entry, and so do masks.

Real art can never be a mask; it is an expression of and communicates with true, innermost feelings. The identity of real art is in its integrity, its truth. In the crass commercial world, masks might seem indispensable; but this just shows that it is only untruth and dishonesty that the world needs.

If one has to strive towards a world where there would be no need to be untruthful or dishonest, where there would be no hindrance in the expression of one’s essential spirit, one has to seek out all the untruths and dishonesties in this crass, materialist world—both within one’s own being, and without. This is possible in the field of art—a valuable field where, perhaps, even in the present situation, some honesty is possible.

Theatre is an art form. Honesty is possible in theatre too. It is possible not to let it slide into the mire of commercialism. It is not true that a lot of money is required for theatre. Money is needed for the flashy trappings and masks—not for theatre. Money is required for lights, sound, sets, glitzy costumes, hire charges for the brick-glass-concrete-air-conditioned space—not for theatre. What theatre needs is people—performing artistes and an audience. Once this is achieved, theatre will be liberated. It can then start the process of peeling away the masks that have become so much a part of one’s daily life, so much a part of one’s habit; masks that have almost sunk into the face.

No art is possible without education. It is only in theatre that one comes across people who think they are born artistes. This is so perhaps because acting is supposed to be nothing but a more lucid demonstration of the masked condition of one’s daily life.
Learning to rip off the mask is not that easy. The first step in this learning process is getting to know oneself, learning to recognize one’s inner human sensibilities. The next step is to learn how to express these sensibilities and to express the truth honestly. Art cannot be separated from an artist’s life. Hence, in this mode of learning, there is no room for any kind of shortcuts or tricks; neither is there any room for facile imitation.

The actor’s body is to theatre what paint and paintbrush are to the artist, and vocal ability and musical instruments to the musician. Artistic sensibility is an imperative in all these cases but, in the case of an artiste, there must be a harmonious union of the body with the mind. Doing theatre bereft of masks actually amounts to the actor expressing his innermost sensibilities through his body (and through his voice, since voice is very much a part of the body). Just as a sitarist creates music through his fingers moving on the strings of the sitar, so also an actor uses words from man’s innermost concerns to express through the body. Education is necessary for him.

Acting has only one definition—expressing the innermost thoughts of man. If I do not empathize with the play that I am doing, then the purpose of doing theatre is lost. My situation then becomes more like a pall-bearer of the corpse of the play, leading a funeral procession. Acting is ‘to act’. Act—action—work. Theatre is the work of human beings. A human act. If we believe in all this, then the word ‘acting’ becomes richly loaded with meaning. And if we do not, then the word abhinaya is good enough. It is then that the mask becomes the true symbol of theatre.

‘Theatre-er-Mukhosh’ (1978) in Nanarmukh (Calcutta: Anjali Bose, 1988). Translated by Sudeshna Banerjee.

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