Anti-migration parties are making major gains across Europe and it should have a substantial impact on European migration policy.

The recent Spanish elections saw the anti-immigrant Vox party double its seats and become the third-largest party in the country. In Austria, the People’s Party of Sebastian Kurz is conducting coalition talks with the Greens and at the European Union level, incoming EU Commission head Ursula von der Leyen promised a new European migration policy by next summer.

Those are just a few items from recent headlines, but they point to the central role migration plays in today’s Europe.

Kurz’s coalition talks are of particular interest because his center-right People’s Party (OVP) won the elections on a ticket of continued strong anti-migration policies while the Green Party, their potential coalition partner, are very much pro-migration.

The outcome of the coalition talks is currently unpredictable, but we do know that the previous technocrat government of the independent Brigitte Bierlein has been consistently dismantling barriers to illegal immigration in Austria.

In Spain, the gains of the anti-immigration Vox party are very telling, albeit the liberal elite is doing its best to marginalize them.

In an enthusiastic speech last Friday lacking in detail, Ursula von der Leyen was quite optimistic regarding the new European migration policy that she promised will be drafted by next summer, saying it would take into account all relevant points of view.

This original manuscript was lost, but he used details from it in his second novel Fiasco, and the subsequent reconstruction of this manuscript was one of our most recent tasks. In this, the writer summed up the absurd circumstances of his own birth as follows: 

… when I came into the world, the Sun stood in the zodiac sign of the greatest economic crisis the world had ever known: From the Empire State Building to the mythological Turuls adorning the former Franz Joseph Bridge in Budapest, people were diving headlong from every prominence on the face of the earth into water, chasms, onto paving stones – wherever they could a party leader by the name of Adolf Hitler looked exceedingly inimically upon me from amidst the pages of his book Mein Kampf.

The first of Hungary’s Jewish laws, the so-called Numerus Clausus, stood at its culmination in my constellation, before others replaced it. Every earthly sign (I have no idea about the heavenly ones) attested to the superfluousness – indeed, the irrationality – of my birth.

On top of this, I arrived as a nuisance for my parents: They were at the point of divorcing. I am the material product of the lovemaking of a couple who did not even love one another. … I was the little son in common of a mommy and a daddy who no longer had anything in common with one another: a pupil at a private institution into whose custody they entrusted me, while they proceeded with their divorce case; a student for the school, a tiny citizen for the state. … I was fenced in on all sides, my consciousness taken into possession.

They brought me up. With a loving word here and stern warnings there, they gradually ripened me for the slaughter. I never protested, I endeavored to do what was asked of me; I languished with torpid goodwill into my well-bred neurosis. I was a modestly diligent – if not always impeccably proficient – accomplice to the unspoken conspiracy against my life.”

It is this “well-bred neurosis” that prevented him from escaping when he could do so. Instead, he obediently climbed onto a wagon bound for Auschwitz; and then, one year later, he did not stay in any of the Western countries offered to him, but with the same good manners boarded a train in Buchenwald to arrive in Budapest, where he continued the next process of compliance.

He embarked upon a career as a promising journalist and wrote scripts for successful musical comedies. Although he had the opportunity to do so, he did not rebel and he did not defect – neither in 1948 nor 1956. He lived with his first wife, Albina Vas, in a 28-square-meter one-room apartment, an apartment far too small for two people, which would be a symbol of continued captivity; the prison and bolt-hole of his intellectual existence, which he had chosen for himself.

He seemed to be conforming in every way to his external environment and to the opportunities for success that were open to him, when an experience worthy of a work of fiction (and, in fact, later incorporated into a novel) affected him so deeply that it led him to make an absurd, fateful decision.

In January 1956, as an out-of-work journalist, he received a special assignment from the national daily newspaper Magyar Nemzet to write about the causes of frequent delays on the railway system. Imre Kertész recounted the story several times, including in a speech in Stockholm, but allow me to quote the account he gave of it in our unpublished biographical interview with him: 

“I was in a long, completely empty corridor, and just then I heard footsteps coming from the shorter leg of this L-shaped corridor – a section I couldn’t see from where I was standing. These footsteps awakened within me … I suddenly had a vision of what these footsteps meant and of how I had lived my whole life within them: marching, marching, in a great historical procession of hundreds of thousands – or millions – of marchers; and one either had to march along with the others, or leave the procession.

And at that moment, I decided to leave it. What I experienced then was something that I would later come across when I was translating Nietzsche: The Dionysian experience, which is in fact a collective, mass experience. This experience is the essence of dictatorship: a dictatorship like that of the Nazis or the communists, which consists of perpetual celebration and self-deception, which is capable of taking wild hatred and intensifying it to orgiastic levels, and which has an incredible appeal for the frenzied masses.

This Dionysian experience seizes people. Those who have been seized by it will be unable to escape its clutches because they will have surrendered themselves to it so completely: They will have surrendered their individuality; they will have become part of the crowd; they will have grown accustomed to chaos and will have grown to like it. I realized … that, understanding the dangers of this Dionysian experience, I had been forced to make a choice because I could see how easy it was to become part of it.

I believe that this was, in essence, an existential moment, but practically speaking I had instantaneously received the mission to be a writer. In a sense, it was a mystical experience even though it was completely obvious that for a long time – for months or years – something had been developing within me, but which at that moment came to the surface.

When I heard those footsteps, it found clear expression inside me, and it presented me with the thematic core of my future work as a writer. That moment was the source of the detachment which is perhaps characteristic of my work; and it was there and then that I felt with complete clarity the obligation to be a disengaged observer.” (He went on to write the article that Magyar Nemzet had requested from him, which it published on Feb. 8, 1956.)

Kertész began his activities as an “independent writer” (to use the expression which his identity papers bore for many years) within a milieu in which the basic requirement for success was the submission and corruptibility of the individual. Ostensibly Kertész continued to conform to his surroundings, but now in opposition to the system.