It was 1990 when you left this country. I first met you in 1997. What’s more, I met you on the very day when you first gave a reading in Berlin. At that time, you impressed me as a fully integrated person. You had spent seven years living in a country whose language you spoke fluently even before you arrived. You were living with a German man, in Berlin, which you apparently knew extremely well both in the topographical and the sociological sense. How did you spend the seven years before 1997?

It had really been my heart’s desire to move to Berlin (witness German man), but even so, the first three years entailed some great difficulties, despite the fact that I spoke the language and had a place and a person to go to.

The early nineties were very troubled times – filled with a great deal of hope, of course, but also with a great deal of uncertainty. I was foreign; I was young; I had not gotten over all that had happened before, and it was hard to get used to all that awaited me in Germany. It was lucky that I was still a student. I did not do very much before 1997, apart from a one-year intermezzo in film dramaturgy (the field in which I was originally trained). I just spent my time watching and learning. When I had finished studying, I became a full-time writer. By this time, I had become mature and settled enough to start transmitting all that I absorbed. I am unspeakably grateful for ever having reached that stage. That is about all.

Curious Material (Seltsame Materie, 1999) is a string of admittedly autobiographical stories, reports by a child or an adolescent about a microcosm in which she is forced to live. She is merciless and yet has solidarity, particularly toward her own blood relatives, the people she suffers most from. Then, in your first novel, Day by Day (Alle Tage, 2004), the way in which children carry disproportionately heavy burdens on their feeble shoulders is again inscribed in all relations between children and parents, children and grandparents. They carry the weight of the spoiled lives of their parents, their insecurities, and all the “bad child-raising” that follows from all of this. Do you think it is by definition a hopeless enterprise to give our children happiness?

No, not by definition. Just because Terézia Mora happened to write two books where this happens, it is not definitively the case. Anyway, I believe that Omar’s parents and grandparents (characters from Day by Day) are perfectly fine. The only burden Omar carries is that he is overly intelligent and sensitive. Imagine the same thing happening in a brutal environment. I think that would be catastrophic. We must notice that in many families what is taking place between people on a private (not a political or an economic) level is nothing less than a form of violence. This violence has extremely deep roots and is passed down from one generation to the next. I find this outrageous. To be sure, it is not much fun to grow up under a dictatorship, but at that time, I only experienced genuine, daily suffering as a result of violence in my direct surroundings. We are all dependent on the mercy of other people, particularly as children. I must hastily add that there are no truly private problems. All of this is also a political question… If a society (women, men, children; citizens) is relatively emancipated, it finds it easier to defend itself against everyday acts of cruelty. When I was a child, tolerance (as the most direct manifestation of democracy) was not even known as a word. Perhaps, that has changed since that time.

The mysterious and attractive hero of Day by Day, Abel Nema, spent his childhood somewhere in Eastern Europe near a point where three national borders meet. The topography of the city and the characteristic names of its public spaces leave no doubt that we are talking about Sopron. And yet, the historical moment which appears in the book (namely the ethnic war) removes this city to the territory of the former Yugoslavia. What inspired you to give Eastern and Southern Europe, which we here experience as so heterogeneous, a unified façade, as it is seen by the receiving country? A picture of the “second world.”

This is not Sopron, nor is it Sarajevo; it is literature. The fact that (occasionally) it is actually Sopron (mainly at the beginning, while later it becomes Sarajevo) is only significant for insiders. In order to understand the novel, you do not need to know whether there is such a place at all in the world. There are two reasons why I decided that if anyone should recognize it, well, let them recognize it. Partly, a very powerful factor behind my work was that I actually imagined how I would feel if my city, where 3-5 different ethnicities had been living together for centuries, was disrupted by a conflict like the one in the former Yugoslavia. For a while, I believed my primary response would be despair or anger, or that I would experience fear. Finally, however, I realized that most of all I would feel terribly ashamed. Just like Abel Nema in “Delirium” (one of the chapters in Day by Day). This is why I decided to call the one-time Jews’ Street by that name again. In other words, I was not homogenizing South and East. Instead, I was concentrating on just how universal the problem was. Anyway, how can we know which is the receiving country? And – is there only one? How do we know just how homogeneous they perceive Southern and Eastern Europe to be from over there? (Where?) No more homogenous than we perceive the West to be? Or do they see us in a totally different way? Secondly, I did it because I was in a position to do it. Behold my authorial will!

What does an author have in mind when they systematically refuse to name their own background? Does anger, hatred, despair, or frustration play a part?

Yes, I have been angry. Sometimes I still am, but there is more to it than that. After all, I could be angry and still name my background. Incidentally, I think I did. I believe it is possible to name things without stating precise names and topographic points.

At any rate, my general observation is the following. There are authors who name their background when they make it a subject matter, and others do not. I am one of those who do not. Naturally, in each case they also do a bit of the contrary as well. Authors who name themselves (let us take Esterházy, for example) still appear in disguise, while authors who seem to be hiding still reveal themselves. There may be personal reasons for this. An author who is hiding is obviously refusing to represent certain things – e.g., their own biography. This may be because they believe that the author should be identical with their text, and that is all there is to it. Or perhaps they do not wish to represent a particular national literature. I personally could say the following: I am sure that I am a Central European author. I would not like to define this more narrowly. There is no need.

Why does violence play such a frequent role in the lives of your characters?

I would like to refer to the short story I chose to be the last one in Curious Material (“The Castle”), where, in order to justify leaving, the protagonist says, “I am surrounded by violence everywhere.” This is my heritage. On the one hand, I mean specific, concrete, objective violence as it presents itself in totalitarian structures – in Communism, Catholicism, traditionalism. On the other, it is the subjective reflection of all this in me personally. Let my quote a female friend of mine who once said, “We were all exposed to atrocities, but some of us were more badly damaged than others.” Unfortunately, I am one of those hypersensitive people who suffer badly from violence even if it takes place on a different continent and affects totally different people. And, just as sadly, I also notice the most minute everyday manifestation of violence.

Psychological illness is an important metaphor informing your work. More specifically, you see panic syndrome and depression as acute manifestations of a basic existential angst. “Panic is not the state of a person. It is the human condition.” This is the most frequently quoted statement in your novel. This can be no accident, I assume. We all feel hit by the statement, even if one does not suffer from such psychological illness personally.

Yes, that’s right. If we are able to understand Abel Nema, this is because his psychological condition is no more than a higher level of the fear, shame, and helplessness (Ohnmacht) we all carry inside us. This is why I say that this is the human condition.

I don’t want to question you about your plans, particularly as a Swiss periodical has done that only recently. You revealed that you “already have the story, but do not know how to tell it – for example, how to insert magical moments into a realistic story without using a crowbar.” This surprised me. In your short stories, you seem to have no difficulty in relating histories that could be told in a bone-dry realist vein and still allow us to see the magical aspect. In Day by Day, you make miracles literally an everyday event – in the form of unique capabilities, experiences of the divine, or steps taken on a wonderfully intuitive basis. I would have thought you had already managed to execute the task named in this interview. Do you still consider your prose too disciplined or down-to-earth?

I wonder what I was talking about. Magic as such plays no part in the text I am working on right now, so I am not at all excited by this question at the moment. Naturally, I still have my views on crowbars. I believe that using such an instrument is justified if it is part of the overall concept – i.e., if I want it there. It is unjustified if it is only used because I cannot solve my creative problem any other way. And as for discipline: yes, I feel I am very disciplined (meaning my prose, in this case), but this is not the same as being down-to-earth. Even so, I am rather fond of prose which is not so disciplined. (This is the kind I usually get to translate.) Sometimes I am sorry that I cannot or dare not be much, much more wild than I am. This is why I love the “Delirium” chapter in Day by Day.

Let me quote a rather long passage from Day by Day.  Eric, the publisher who is always up-to-date and ready to act, says, “We have never had less cause to loose heart than now. It is unlikely to last longer than three years, and then the balloon will burst and a bloodbath will ensue, but until then! The most we can argue about is whether we should bomb B or not. All self-respecting people are pro. How do you feel?” I think this really hit the nail on the head. I was in Berlin, too, in the late 90’s and saw many of these Erics around. Their prophecies seem to have come true; the balloon did burst. This bursting is probably the third phase you underwent in Berlin. What was the atmosphere like in the early 90’s? What was it like around the turn of the century, and how do you perceive it now?

When you talk about a question like this, you must always take into account the age of the person experiencing the events. More specifically, you have to consider which phase of life I was in. In the early 90’s, roughly between ’93 and ’95, the main role to be played was “getting sorted out” after the great change. In East Germany, where I was living, this was first accompanied by great euphoria, later by great fears. It was an insecure, heated period, so it suited me as I was at the time perfectly. By the way, I only recently noticed, while teaching people in their early twenties, just how fragile, how vulnerable one is at this age, how pre-occupied with oneself… how little one knows. I could say there were two of us trying to “survive the past”, the times and me.

By the end of the century, we became somewhat consolidated (or irrevocably lost). The “new economy” was beginning to yield unrealistic (virtual) profits… By the way, it was André Kosztolányi who said that all of this would come to a bloodbath one day. Luckily, the book market was also in a “Gier frißt Hirn” mood, as the Germans say. The thirst for profits was driving publishers to take on crazy risks. This is the only way to explain how I got a publisher’s contract for my very first and only short story. Had that not happened, I probably would not be a writer today. This has mainly personal reasons. Some people’s artistic identities make them go from door to door, from one publisher or periodical to the next, because it is paramount for them to get their writing published. Others sit back with pride and wait to be discovered. In such cases, when the discovery finally comes, it strikes people as divine judgment, which makes it twice as effective. Naturally, this is naïve, childish pride. As I said, I was actually just really lucky, because things worked out in my favor. To sum up, we were superficial at the time of the turn of the century, and we were also fired up, but in a different way this time. We really believed we were invulnerable.

Today we know – and have known since September 2001, in the worst case – that we are not invulnerable, that our power is limited and there is no such thing as virtual money. Since then we have been living in a permanent mild fear and a sense of indignation – particularly about the way the USA is behaving, but also about the terrorists’ behavior. We are also a little bit outraged about ourselves, they way we are still moaning why we are not doing better; whereas, in fact, we are living extremely well.

From my point of view, and from that of my book, the main benefit of this last phase (so far) has been that German criticism has started to read again. They are giving a more modest type of attention and are being less superficial than they were, even as recently as 2000. This is good. With the attitude they had in 2000, they may have simply brushed Day by Day to one side, saying it’s too complicated or too tragic. “Let’s live and enjoy life instead. After all, we can afford to. We are the navel of the world.”

Lídia Nádori

Terézia Mora's website (in German)