RIP Agnes Heller
Agnes Heller drowned in Lake Balaton, Hungary, while on holiday on July 19, 2019, aged 90.
“I promised myself to solve the dirty secret of the 20th century,” she wrote, “the secret of the unheard-of mass murders, of several million corpses ‘produced’ by genocides, by the Holocaust, and all of them in times of modern humanism and enlightenment.”
Agnes Heller was born in 1929 into a middle-class Jewish family. Her childhood in Budapest was overshadowed by her country’s authoritarian rule under Miklos Horthy and later its collaboration with the Nazi regime. Her father, Pal Heller, was a lawyer, writer and politician who sought to help as many as possible to escape persecution before he himself was deported in 1944 to Auschwitz. Agnes and her mother, Angela (née Ligeti), escaped capture and deportation on several occasions. The Holocaust, she reflected later, was a trauma that “the more you want to forget it, the less you can forget it”.
Agnes Heller once said that as a survivor of the Holocaust she felt that she had a debt to pay. “I had to find out what morality is all about, what is the nature of good and evil.” It was a debt that she also felt she owed her father, who was murdered in Auschwitz, “a very strict, a very moral person, which is why he left a great impression on me”.