The unwilling executioner
Carole Angier
DETECTIVE STORY by Imre Kertész Harvill/Secker, £12.99, pp. 113, ISBN 9781846551833 ✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Fatelessness, Imre Kertész’s first novel, fitted one of the coolest accounts we have of Auschwitz into a mere 262 pages. Detective Story, his third, distills it still further into 113, each of them mercilessly sharp and clear.
This time Kertész sets his story in an unnamed South American dictatorship; but there are several connections. Like Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, the Colonel’s regime lasts only a few years; one of his torturers carries a book about Auschwitz; and their two main victims are Jewish.
Like many of the Nazis’ victims, Federigo and Enrique Salinas are wealthy, educated and assimilated members of their society. The perpetrators — apart from the Colonel, who calls them, affectionately, his ‘filthy little piggies’ — are Diaz the chief, Rodriguez the sadist and Antonio Martens, the ‘new boy’ and our narrator. Into these few characters, as into his 113 pages, Kertész packs the whole range of victims and perpetrators.
Or rather, interestingly, not quite the whole range. Among the victims we meet only the innocent and apolitical — Enrique, who wants to join the resistance but hasn’t yet, and his father and his fiancée, who want to stop him. This too is a reflection of the Jews of Europe, who unlike the Basques, or Irish, or Muslims today, never formed an armed resistance. And in the clashes between Enrique, Federigo and Jill we hear the classic arguments over opposition to oppressive regimes by such innocent and (so far) unaffected citizens. People like us have no reason to resist, Federigo says; let’s just be happy, Jill pleads. ‘One can’t be happy in a place where everybody is unhappy,’ Enrique insists. But you have only one life, Federigo replies: if you don’t live it now, you will only lose it forever. Detective Story shows that this is true, but that it may not save you either.
Even more interestingly, Kertész’s main focus among the perpetrators is on the relatively innocent as well. Martens has joined the Corps for money and ambition; but he has been, as he puts it himself, insufficiently brain-washed. He abhors Rodriguez, and fears Diaz even more; he develops headaches and a stammer; and he ends a friend of the Salinases, accepting responsibility for his crimes, and facing his own death with dignity.
Is Kertész suggesting that many perpetrators are, like Martens, unwilling executioners? I think he is. And I think he is exploring the possibility that anyone could become such an executioner, even himself — step by apparently ordinary step, as the victims became victims in Fatelessness. (Primo Levi explored similar questions later, through a man he called Mertens, perhaps as a deliberate echo.) Martens is Kertész’s alter-ego in Detective Story, trying to understand the logic that led to Auschwitz. His conclusion is that the moment power is exalted over law, we are unstoppably on the way. Levi would — indeed did — agree. But Detective Story is darker: for it shows that only those like Martens pay, while Diaz escapes, no doubt to start the cycle of limitless violence once more.
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