For decades, Jewish survivors of the concentration camps of World War II have written about their experiences. These tales are almost uniformly horrible, which makes sense – the time and the place certainly was horrible, an indelible stain upon the cloth of our collective soul. Imre Kertész, the Hungarian Nobel Laureate for 2002, has spent a large portion of his career writing about the Holocaust in an attempt to explain to others the unexplainable horror of what happened in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and other concetration camps. His best known work – which was has been published under the titles Fateless and, more recently, Fatelessness – was published in 1975, and portrays the survivor's experience. The novel took Kertész over a decade to write, and remains a masterpiece of Holocaust literature. Detective Story, written only two years later, takes a different approach. It is set in a nameless Latin American country, and is written from the point of view of a lowly police officer turned Corps-mans, Antonio Martens. Martens, along with his superiors, is horrifying largely because he is not horrifying at all. Detective Story is close to an exercise in banality, which makes the proceedings all the more disturbing.

Detective Story opens with Antonio Martens in prison, accused of murder and torture. He is a small fish in a very large ocean, but unfortunately the sharks and whales have swum far, far away, and are not to be found after the dictatorship has been overthrown. Martens, and men like him, are falls guys – men who perform the duties, who do the paperwork and who, eventually, answer for their own and other's crimes. Martens is fairly relaxed about the situation, aware in a pragmatic sense that his punishment is due, after all, even if he doesn't particularly want to die. He decides to write his confession, and that is what makes up the bulk of the novella.

It is typical for a story like this to attempt to humanise both the character responsible for the horrible acts, and to provide justifications for these acts. We are supposed to be slowly drawn into the character's plight as he slowly slides down the slippery scale of “just following orders”. Kertész, however, does not follow this route with Martens. Instead, we have a man who, in his own words, is “an honest flatfoot, I always was, and I take my work seriously.” Later he goes on to write that, “People everywhere are only human, and of all sorts, what is more.” This could be written by a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, a garbage man. That it was written by a torturer and thug makes it all much, much worse – but for the teacher, lawyer, doctor, garbage man. Just how close are we to performing the same acts? Close enough, suggests the Holocaust. Close enough, suggests any of the Latin American dictatorships of the last century. Close enough, suggests the spying, betrayal and deceit of the USSR satellites of Eastern Europe. Close enough, suggests the casual massacres of the Australian aboriginal people in the nineteenth century.

What is most striking about this novella is how utterly banal it all is. Martens, as the primary narrator, is a man possessing a limited vocabulary, and one who has similarly limited means of expression. Sentences are functional without ever really concerning themselves with metaphor or simile. A primary character is introduced as “distinguished, cool, and formal”, and little else is done to describe him to us. Psychologically, Martens is aware that what he is doing is probably unfortunate for the victims, but it doesn't seem to affect him overmuch. He was “the new boy”, which seems to justify (to him) most everything he does. There is no mention of going home at night and shaking with shock over what he is doing. There is no mention that perhaps his superiors are doing the wrong thing – he simply does, and collects his paycheck.

The journal of Enrique Salinas is injected into the story by Martens. Enrique was one of the victims Martens was involved in torturing and spying on for the dictatorship, and for some reason Martens saw fit to purchase the dead man's diary. We read snippets written by an obviously idealist but naive young man, but we wonder all the time – why did Martens purchase this diary? He himself does not know, but he likes to read the words of the man he helped destroy. This diary provides a counterpoint to Martens' confession, in that both are purely normal documents existing in a horrible and terrifying climate.

Kertész choses to keep the violence entirely 'off screen'. When Enrique is tortured, Martens simply mentions that he leaves, and then comes back a while later, needing help to stand. That is all. The violence of it, and the affects of it, touch us as lightly as they touch Martens. Because we know that this story is from the perspective of the 'bad guys', we constantly expect an outburst of violence and hate – some outward manifestation of evil. Kertész continuously frustrates these expectations, and why? Because for Martens, like so many others, a job is a job is a job. You do it because it needs to be done, and that's all there is to it. His moral compass is so skewed that it practically doesn't exist. We would like to think, perhaps, that if our job was to spy on, and torture, innocent or flimsily guilty civilians, that we would recoil. But would we? Wouldn't it all become routine, eventually? Kertész proposes yes, though he gives no reason why, and no explanation as to how this occurs.

Detective Story is short and bland, and left this reader with an overwhelming feeling of unmet expectations. Over time, however, the accuracy of Kertész's choice to leave everything off the table becomes clear. What is more horrible than a horrible event explained in an ordinary way? A reader would like, I think, for a man who does evil to be a slobbering madman, an insane butcher, a dastardly plotter. Instead, they are simply a man, and isn't that so much worse?

See Also

Appelfeld, Aharaon - Badenheim 1939
Wiesel, Elie - Night

Links

Wikipedia
Nobel Citation
The Complete Review
Bookslut
Guardian (UK)

Categories

Hungarian Authors