Fatelessness

Name: Fatelessness
Author: Imre Kertész

by Imre Kertész

A boy in Auschwitz, narrating it politely.

For you if

you want the Holocaust without a moral handed to you.

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György is fourteen when he is taken off a Budapest bus and sent to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald. Kertész, who survived both, tells it in a flat, curious, almost polite voice, and that is what makes it hard to put down: a boy who tries to make sense of the camp as if it were just a new set of rules. Nobel Prize winner, and one of the strangest Holocaust books.

Where This Book Lives

Setting: Hungary • Europe
Voice: Written by a Hungarian author
Themes: courage grief and loss war and atrocity who tells history

Pass. Grim, camp conditions, starvation and death; adult shelf. Kertész won the Nobel in 2002 and the novel's deadpan tone was controversial in Hungary. No documented author concerns. Close relatives: If This Is a Man (suggested 10-21), Kolyma Tales (suggested 10-31) and The Diary of a Young Girl.

Related Viewing

Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Ida(2013)

dir. Paweł Pawlikowski

Same country: Poland · Same themes: Grief and Loss, War and Atrocity

A novice learns she is Jewish, and what her town hid.

Poland, 1962. Anna is a novice about to take her vows when the mother superior sends her to meet her only living relative, her aunt Wanda, a hard-drinking former state prosecutor. Wanda tells her she is Jewish and that her real name is Ida, and the two women drive into the countryside to find out what happened to her parents. It is shot in black and white, in 82 minutes.

Why it’s here: The film puts Polish complicity in the Holocaust on screen through a quiet road movie. What's punk is Wanda, who once sentenced people for the state and now has to live with it. What's pedagogical is how it handles guilt, memory and what a country hides. Pairs with Number the Stars and Everything is Illuminated.

Where to watch: Prime Video, MUBI; free on Kanopy, Hoopla, Tubi, Plex; rent $2.99 (JustWatch US)Letterboxd ↗

The Tin Drum(1979)

dir. Volker Schlöndorff

Same countries: Poland, Germany

A boy who refuses to grow up in a country that won't.

Born in Danzig in 1924 with an adult intellect, Oskar decides to stop growing at age three and watches, tin drum in hand, as Germany slides into Nazism and war. Adapted from Günter Grass's Nobel-adjacent novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in its total commitment to a surreal metaphor — Oskar's stunted body becomes a mirror for a society arresting its own moral development under fascism. Pedagogical, with a real caveat around its content, in using grotesque satire to indict complicity rather than heroism.

Where to watch: Streaming on Criterion ChannelLetterboxd ↗

Same pattern, different era

Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

Christopher Alexander et al.