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PERSONAL
Born April 2, 1933, Debrecen, Hungary; died September 13, 2019, Budapest, Hungary; son of József Konrád and Róza Klein; married Vera Varsa, 1955 (divorced, 1963); married Júlia Lángh (a journalist and writer), 1963 (divorced); married Judit Lakner (an historian and children’s book author), 1979-2019; children (with Varsa) Anna Dóra and Miklós István; (with Lakner) Áron, József, and Zsuzsanna.
EDUCATION:Loránt Eötvös University, Budapest, Hungary, graduated 1956.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, essayist, and sociologist. Worked as a tutor, author of reader reports, translator, and factory hand. Children’s welfare supervisor, Budapest, Hungary, 1959-c. 1966; Magyar Helikon publishing house, Budapest, Hungary, reader, 1960-65; Urban Science and Planning Institute, Hungary, researcher, 1965-c. 1973; Colorado College, Colorado Springs, faculty member, 1988. Also served as founding member of the Alliance of Free Democrats, president of the Budapest Mayor’s Advisory Body, and a cofounder and a spokesperson for the Democratic Charter, Hungary.
AWARDS:New York Institute for the Humanitie fellowship, c. 1983; the Herder Prize, University of Vienna, 1984; Charles Veillon Prize;,1990; Kossuth Prize, 1990; Manes-Sperber Prize, 1990; Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, 1991; Officier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur 1996; Goethe Medal, 2000; Internationale Karlspreis zu Aachen, 2001; Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, 2003; Hungarian Republic Legion of Honor Middle Cross with Star, 2003; Franz Werfel Human Rights Award, 2007; and National Jewish Book Award in the memoir category, 2008, for A Guest in My Own Country. Honorary citizen of Berettyóújfalu, 2003, and of Budapest, 2004.
WRITINGS
Novels include (titles in English) include: The Case Worker, Departure and Return, The City Builder, The Loser, A Feast in the Garden, Stone Dial, and Legacy. Nonfiction books and memoirs include: (With Iván Szelényi) The Intellectual on the Road to Class Power, 1978; The Melancholy of Rebirth, 1995; The Invisible Voice: Meditations on Jewish Themes; Jugoslovenski rat (i ono što posle može da usledi), 2000; Up on the Hill During a Solar Eclipse, 2003; The Writer and the City, 2004; The Roosters’ Sorrow, 2005; Figures of Wonder: Portraits and Snapshots, 2006; Ásatás (Excavation I-II), with the subtitles Falevelek a Szélben (title means “Leaves in the Wind”) 2017, and Öreg Erdő (title means “An Old Forest”), 2018. Contributor of essays to books, including The Temptation of Autonomy and Antipolitics, 1999. Contributor to journals, including Jelenkor, Kortárs, Nagyvilág, Telos, and Valóság. Editorial board member at Életképek, beginning 1956. Novels have been translated into foreign languages, including The Case Worker, translated into thirteen languages.
SIDELIGHTS
Gyorgy Konrad was a Hungarian writer who also worked for a time as a sociologist. His affluent family was one of the few Jewish families to survive intact following the German occupation of Hungary during World War II. When his parents returned to Hungary from deportation following the war, Konrad’s father revived his hardware business only to have it taken over by the Hungarian communist regime. Konrad’s time as a youth is depicted in his autobiographical novel Departure and Return.
Although expelled from university twice, Konrad eventually completed his studies in 1956. Many of his novels and his nonfiction writing focused on social and political issues and his own experiences living in Hungary. For a time he worked closely with Iván Szelényi, an urban sociologist. Konrad’s first novel, The Case Worker, was published in 1969. He would go on to write numerous novels, memoirs, and other works of nonfiction. Many of his works, however, were initially published outside of Hungary as the Hungarian government considered him a dissident. “I write what I write; the state publishing houses in Hungary publish of my work what they will, while I publish as much of it as I can,” Konrad noted in a 1974 interview for Die Zeit, as noted by Helga Balikó in a 2008 biography of Konrad posted on Konrad’s home website.
In his memoir titled A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life, Konrad covers his live from his time as a child on through to 1970. A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that, although Konrad writes about his own life, the Holocaust, and his own evolution as a writer, the book “is primarily a meditation on the conflicts between national and individual identity.” The book is broken up into two parts, the first focusing on his childhood and the second on Konrad’s life after World War II.
As for his life as a child, Konrad details how he and his sister survived the Holocaust by living in Swiss safe houses. He reveals that his parents ended up in an Austrian interment camp, returning to Hungary after the war was over. Konrad goes on to describe how he forged a new life, attending university, working as a social worker and magazine editor, and eventually becoming a writer and novelist. Discussing his college days and his support for Hungarian revolution of 1956, Konrad reveals that he was a university student who joined his classmates as a member of the National Guard, primarily to witness what was going on in the streets. He never fired his gun.
A Guest in My Own Country “is fascinating on many levels (philosophical, historical, political, and as a work of literature),” wrote Maria C. Bagshaw in Library Journal. A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked: “Konrad’s novelistic skills … produce vivid, terse sketches of numerous relatives and acquaintances, and the book features dozens of heart-stopping perceptions,” adding that the memoir is “a valuable and absorbing chronicle.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2007, review of A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life, p. 113.
Library Journal, July 1, 2007, Maria C. Bagshaw, review of A Guest in My Own Country, p. 98.
Publishers Weekly, January 22, 2007, review of A Guest in My Own Country, p. 172.
ONLINE
Konrad Gyorgy, http://www.konradgyorgy.hu (November 18, 2019), includes biography by Helga Balikó, 2008.
OBITUARIES
Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ (October 7, 2019), George Gomori, “György Konrád Obituary.”
Hungary Today, https://hungarytoday.hu/ (September 14, 2019), “Author György Konrád Dies Aged 86.”
Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/ (September 3, 2019), “Hungarian Writer and Former Dissident Gyorgy Konrad Dies at 86.”
Times of Israel, https://www.timesofisrael.com/ (September 14, 2019), “Jewish Hungarian Author and Dissident Gyorgy Konrad Dies, Aged 86.”
George Konrád was born at the university hospital in Debrecen on April 2, 1933. He spent the first eleven years of his life in Berettyóújfalu in eastern Hungary. His father József Konrád (1897–1970) was a successful hardware merchant; his mother, Róza Klein (1905-2004) came from the Nagyvárad Jewish bourgeoisie. His sister Éva, born in 1930, is currently a biologist living in New York. George Konrád attended the local Jewish elementary school, then one year of middle school, until the spring of 1944.
After the German occupation of Hungary, the Gestapo and Hungarian gendarmerie arrested his parents and deported them to Austria. The two children, together with two cousins István and Pál Zádor, managed with difficulty to procure travel permits enabling them to visit their relatives in Budapest. The following day, every Jewish inhabitant of Berettyóújfalu was deported to the ghetto in Nagyvárad, and from there to Auschwitz. Konrád's classmates were, almost without exception, all killed in Birkenau. The two children and their cousins survived the Holocaust in a safe house under Swiss sponsorship, thanks to their great aunt Zsófia Vágó.
At the end of February 1945, Eva and George returned to Berettyóújfaluba. Finding their house empty, and no word from their parents, they were taken in by László Kun, an older cousin who lived in Bucharest. In June of 1945, their parents returned home from deportation, and the Konrád family ultimately survived intact, the only such family among the some 1000 Jewish inhabitants of Berettyóújfalu. His father continued his hardware business, and adopted Konrád's now-orphaned cousins. He spent 1945 as a home student, beginning studies in 1946 at the Main Reformed Gimnázium in Debrecen, and resident of the illustrious Reformed College there. From 1947 to 1951, he attended the Madách Gimnáziumba in Budapest.
In 1950, when the state appropriated his father's business and the family residence, Konrád's parents moved in with their children studying in Budapest. The story of Konrád's survival as a child is told in his autobiographical novel Departure and Return (Hungarian version 2001).
Because of his bourgeois family background, in 1951 he was able to find work only in the University Russian Institute, but was dismissed in April of 1953, when the institution was renamed after Lenin. In the fall of 1953, he began studies in the Department of Hungarian at Loránt Eötvös University, which he completed in 1956. He was expelled from that institution as well on two occasions, but was able to continue his studies through the intervention of his professors George Lukács and István Sőtér. He wrote his final thesis on Károly Papp.
In 1955 he married his university classmate Vera Varsa, with whom he lived until 1963. Also in 1955, his first publication appeared in the periodical Új Hang (New Voice). In the fall of 1956, he joined the editorial board at Életképek, a journal critical in tone that was just getting its start.
During the 1956 Revolution, he rejoined his university community. Now a member of the National Guard, which drew its ranks from university students, he moved through the city with a machine gun, motivated by curiosity more than anything else. He never used his weapon. His workplace was soon closed down, and his friends, his sister, and his cousins emigrated to the West. Konrád chose to remain in the country.
He made his living through ad hoc jobs: he was a tutor, wrote reader reports, translated, and worked as a factory hand. Beginning in the summer of 1959, he secured steady employment as a children's welfare supervisor in Budapest's seventh District. He remained there for seven years, during which time he amassed the experiences that would serve as the basis for his novel The Case Worker.
In 1963 he married journalist and writer Júlia Lángh, then still a university student. They had two children, Anna Dóra in 1965, and Miklós István in 1967.
At the beginning of the 60s, Konrád was one of a circle of young, non-official authors, associated with periodicals and coffeehouse tables, who met socially from time to time. His circle of closest friends included Gyula Hernádi, Miklós Mészöly, Ferenc Fehér, Mihály Sükösd, Miklós Jancsó, and Károly Makk. Between 1960 and 1965 he was also employed as a reader at the Magyar Helikon publishing house, where he was chief editor of works by Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Babel, and Balzac.
His essays appeared in the journals Jelenkor, Kortárs, Nagyvilág, and Valóság.
In 1965, he changed employment, joining the Urban Science and Planning Institute, there undertaking research in urban sociology with the sociological research group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was now working closely with urban sociologist Iván Szelényi. Numerous studies were the fruit of this collaboration: one book On the Sociological Problems of the New Housing Developments (1969) and two extensive works on the management of the country’s regional zones, as well as on urbanistic and ecological trends in Hungary.
Konrád and Szelényi frequently travelled to the countryside. Between 1967 and 1972, they supervised comprehensive sociological research on the entire cities of Pécs and Szeged. It is during this period that Konrád writes his first novel, The Case Worker (1969), which drew a vigorous and mixed response: the official criticism was negative, while unofficially the book was positively received, selling out of bookstores in days. It was soon translated into 13 languages, and well regarded by leading publishers and critics abroad as well as writers at home. According to Irving Howe, leading American critic of the time, this book alone established Konrád in the forefront of European literature.
His experiences as an urbanist provided material for his next novel, The City Builder, in which he radically extended the experiments in language and form, and the condensation and accumulation of metaphor that marked The Case Worker. “Hier spricht ein Wahnsinniger” – “Here speaks a madman,” wrote one German critic, within a review of highest praise. The City Builder was allowed to appear in Hungarian only in censored form from Magvető Publishers in 1977. It was published abroad by Suhrkamp, Seuil, Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, and Philip Roth’s Penguin Series, with a foreword by Carlos Fuentes.
Konrád’s collaboration with Iván Szelényi evolved into a profound friendship. A summary of their experiences furnished an outline for their conception of social theory, which they presented in 1974, in their book The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. Together they rented a house in Csobánka, a village not far from Budapest, and developed a technique for writing together. There was plenty of time for this, as Konrád had lost his job by order of the political police in July of 1973. For half a year he worked as a nurse’s aide at the work-therapy-based mental institution at Doba.
By this time the critical intelligentsia was organizing more decisively, and preliminary studies and articles by members of the democratic opposition began to appear. Konrád had high regard for the factory sociography A Worker in a Workers’ State by his young friend Miklós Haraszti, and was attempting to have it smuggled abroad when the police confiscated the manuscript at the border, and the state attorney put Haraszti on trial in the summer of 1973. Konrád was placed on probation and forbidden to travel for three years, while Haraszti was given a suspended prison sentence.
In May of 1974, shortly after the completion of The Intellectuals intended for foreign publication, the political police went into operation against the two authors: all of their residences were bugged, they were personally followed everywhere by agents, and their houses were searched. In the course of these searches, a significant part of Konrád’s diaries were confiscated and the authors arrested for agitation against the state. They were placed on probation and informed that they would be permitted to emigrate with their families. Szelényi accepted the offer, while Konrád remained, choosing internal emigration and all that it entailed. A smuggled manuscript of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power found its publishers abroad; it was translated into several languages and has a place on numerous university reading lists to this day.
In an interview for Die Zeit in 1974, Konrád described his principles for publication: “I write what I write; the state publishing houses in Hungary publish of my work what they will, while I publish as much of it as I can.” This included both domestic samizdat and the choice of western publishers free from the constraints of censorship and requirements of official permission. Virtually from this period until 1989, Konrád was a forbidden author in Hungary, deprived of all legal income. He made a living from honoraria abroad. His works were placed in restricted sections in libraries, designated in the catalogues by the letter Z. Naturally he was also forbidden from speaking on radio or television.
The prohibition against travel expired in 1976. Since his two novels had already appeared in German, the Berlin artists’ program board of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) offered him a one-year fellowship. Konrád spent a year in Berlin, then another year in the United States on a stipend from his American publisher. During this period, he wrote his novel The Loser. He was by then living separately from his wife, who had settled in Paris with their two children.
Since 1979, Konrád has lived with Judit Lakner, his third wife and a specialist in French history, as well as an author of historical scholarship and children’s books. Together they have three children, Áron (1986), József (1987), and Zsuzsanna (1994).
Between 1977 and 1982, two volumes of Konrád’s essays appeared: The Temptation of Autonomy (not translated into English) and Antipolitics. These works called into question the entire European political status quo. Antipolitics portrayed the Yalta Agreement, foundation of the European bloc system, as the potential cause of a possible Third World War. The book’s subtitle was Central-European Meditations, and it was to become one of the voices demanding that region’s secession from the Soviet bloc as a requisite for peace in Europe. Konrád was one of the first to predict the imminent disappearance of the Iron Curtain. In 1984, he read his essay “Does the Dream of Central Europe Still Exist?” in the Schwarzenberg Palace as he received the Herder Prize from the University of Vienna. Critics have compared his essays to the writings of Adam Michnik, Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, Czeslaw Milos and Danilo Kiš. During his time in Germany, he came into contact with the independent peace movement there, whose talk was not merely of reducing the missile stockpiles but also putting an end to the division of Europe, and that of Germany within it.
Between 1973 and 1989, there developed in Hungary what was more or less a circle of friends that constituted the nexus of the political and artistic subculture, independent of official culture. Konrád was one of the determining voices in this democratic opposition, which expressed itself in many spheres. His work appeared in the samizdat journals of the opposition: Beszélő, Hírmondó, and others. His books were published by AB, Gábor Demszky’s samizdat house. In interviews granted to Radio Free Europe, Konrad’s thinking reached a wider Hungarian audience.
Beginning in September of 1982, he was a year-long guest at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; the following year he received a fellowship at the New York Institute for the Humanities. His novel The Loser was published during this time.
Over the four years that followed, Konrád wrote A Feast in the Garden (Hungarian version 1985). Now released from the official prohibition against publication, he sent the manuscript to the Magvető publishing house in Hungary.
In January of 1986, together with Sándor Csóori, Konrád was a guest of honor at the world congress of the International P.E.N. Club in New York. He persuaded most of the guests to support a statement appealing for protection of the rights of Transylvanian authors, and Romanian writers generally.
Following this, Konrád and Danilo Kiš took part in a Central Europe conference at Ann Arbor at the invitation of Czesław Miłosz. The two also received an invitation from the Jerusalem Literary Fund, spending a month in that city. This was the period when Konrád primarily penned those essays and diary entries that would be collected for the volume The Invisible Voice (Hungarian version 1997). Its title refers to the inner voice – the voice of God – that has spoken to prophets and poets.
In 1988, he taught world literature at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.
Five of his books were published in Hungary in 1989. In 1990, he was awarded the Kossuth Prize.
In the first years after the fall of the old regime, beginning in 1989, Konrád took an active part in public life in Hungary, and was one of the thinkers who paved the way for the transition to democracy. He was a founding member of the Alliance of Free Democrats, elected to that party’s national committee, President of the Budapest Mayor’s Advisory Body, and one of the founders and spokespeople for the Democratic Charter. He made frequent appearances in both the print and electronic media.
In the spring of 1990, at the suggestion of the Dutch and Scandinavian P.E.N. Clubs, Konrád was elected President of the International P.E.N. Club, holding this office for the full term until 1993. He made strenuous efforts on behalf of imprisoned and persecuted writers and called the writers of disintegrating nations together to roundtable conferences in the interest of peace.
Since 1991, he has spent his summers working in a renovated old house in the village of Hegymagas, just north of Lake Balaton, with his family. This is where he wrote the novels Stone Clock (1995) and Legacy (1998) among others; these works expound on the world and characters in A Feast in the Garden.
Konrád returned to Israel in 1992 and 1996. The first occasion was for a long biographical interview for the University of Jerusalem, while on the second, he gave a lecture entitled “Judaism’s Three Paths” at the Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva.
From 1997 to 2003, Konrád was elected President of Berlin’s Akademie der Künste for two terms. As the first foreigner to hold that post, Konrád was an effective contributor to the intellectual rapprochement between the East and West of Europe, and did much to introduce writers and other creative figures from Central Europe, and particularly from Hungary, to the West. His efforts were greeted by an appreciative German public. During his presidency, he received the Karl Prize (2001) and the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2003).
Though Konrád has frequently portrayed his Berettyóúfalu childhood in his novels, and particularly in The Feast in the Garden, he has attempted to present this period in a more precise documentary form in two more recent books, Departure and Return (2001) and Up on the Hill During a Solar Eclipse (2003). The first of these books treats a single year – 1944-45 – while the second covers fifty, after beginning with a reflection on the final years of the twentieth century, more precisely the morning solar eclipse of 1999, experienced from the peak of St. György Hill.
These books were published separately in Europe, and together in New York as A Guest in My Own Country (2007), which won the National Jewish Book Award in the category of memoir and autobiography in the year of its publication.
The year 2006 saw the publication of his volume Figures of Wonder, subtitled Portraits and Snapshots. These portraits are modeled primarily on friends, some still living – descriptions that constitute a continuation of the series presented by Konrád in his book The Writer and the City (2004) together with longer essays. Two more recent books, The Roosters’ Sorrow (2005) and Pendulum (in preparation, 2008) present his philosophy of life with a near-poetic density.
Konrád is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the Herder Prize (1984), the Charles Veillon Prize (1990), the Manes-Sperber Prize (1990), the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (1991), the Goethe Medal (2000), the Internationale Karlspreis zu Aachen (2001), the Franz Werfel Human Rights Award (2007), and the National Jewish Book Award in the memoir category (2008).
He has received the highest state distinctions awarded by France, Hungary, and Germany: Officier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’Honneur (1996); The Hungarian Republic Legion of Honor Middle Cross with Star (2003); and Das Grosse Verdienstkreuz des Bundesrepublik Deutschland (2003). He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Antwerp (1990) and the University of Novi Sad (2003). He is an honorary citizen of Berettyóújfalu (2003) and of Budapest (2004).
Helga Balikó, 2008.
György Konrád
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György Konrád
Born
2 April 1933
Berettyóújfalu, Hungary
Died
13 September 2019 (aged 86)
Notable works
The Case Worker (A látogató, 1969)
Spouse
Vera Varsa
(m. 1955; div. 1963)
Júlia Lángh
Judit Lakner (m. 1979)
Children
5
György (George) Konrád (2 April 1933 – 13 September 2019)[1] was a Hungarian novelist and essayist, known as an advocate of individual freedom.[2]
Contents
1
Life
2
Death
3
Awards and honors
4
Partial list of works
4.1
Fiction
4.2
Non-fiction
4.3
Articles
5
References
6
External links
Life[edit]
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George Konrad (he preferred the English version of his name in translations) was born in Berettyóújfalu, near Debrecen, into an affluent Jewish family. His father, József Konrád, was a successful hardware merchant; his mother, Róza Klein, came from the Nagyvárad Jewish middle class. His sister Éva was born in 1930.
After the German occupation of Hungary, the Gestapo and Hungarian gendarmerie arrested his parents and deported them to Austria. The two children, together with two cousins, managed with difficulty to procure travel permits enabling them to visit their relatives in Budapest. The following day, every Jewish inhabitant of Berettyóújfalu was deported to the ghetto in Nagyvárad, and from there to Auschwitz. Konrád's classmates were, almost without exception, all killed in Birkenau. The two children and their cousins survived the Holocaust in a safe house under Swiss sponsorship.
At the end of February 1945, Eva and George returned to Berettyóújfalu. In June 1945, their parents returned home from deportation, and the Konrád family ultimately survived intact, the only such family among the some 1000 Jewish inhabitants of Berettyóújfalu. Konrad began his studies in 1946 at the Main Reformed Gimnázium in Debrecen, and from 1947 to 1951, he attended the Madách Gimnázium in Budapest, where he was graduated in 1951, and entered the Lenin Institute where he studied literature, sociology and psychology. Eötvös Loránd University. By 1950, when the state appropriated the father's business and the family residence at Berettyóújfalu, the Konráds returned there, while Konrad completed his university education in the Department of Hungarian literature and language at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.
In 1956 Konrad participated in the Hungarian Uprising against the Soviet occupation, during which he served in the National Guard, which drew its ranks from university students. He moved through the city with a machine gun, motivated by curiosity more than anything else. He never used his weapon. His friends, his sister and his cousins emigrated to the West. Konrád chose to remain in Hungary. The story of Konrád's survival as a child is told in his autobiographical novel Departure and Return (Hungarian version 2001).
He made his living through ad hoc jobs: he was a tutor, wrote reader reports, translated, and worked as a factory hand. Beginning in the summer of 1959, he secured steady employment as a children's welfare supervisor in Budapest's seventh District. He remained there for seven years, during which time he amassed the experiences that would serve as the basis for his novel The Case Worker (1969). The book drew a vigorous and mixed response: the official criticism was negative, but the book quickly became very popular and sold out in days.
Between 1960 and 1965 Konrad was employed as a reader at the Magyar Helikon publishing house, where he was chief editor of works by Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Babel, and Balzac. In 1965, he joined the Urban Science and Planning Institute, there undertaking research in urban sociology with the sociological research group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was working closely with urban sociologist Iván Szelényi with whom they wrote a book On the Sociological Problems of the New Housing Developments (1969) and two extensive works on the management of the country's regional zones, as well as on urbanistic and ecological trends in Hungary.
His experiences as an urbanist provided material for his next novel, The City Builder, in which he radically extended the experiments in language and form that marked The Case Worker. The City Builder was allowed to appear in Hungarian only in censored form from Magvető Publishers in 1977. It was published abroad by Suhrkamp, Seuil, Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, and Philip Roth's Penguin Series, with a foreword by Carlos Fuentes. Konrád lost his job by order of the political police in July 1973. For half a year he worked as a nurse's aide at the work-therapy-based mental institution at Doba.
Together with Iván Szelényi, Konrád published The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power in 1974. Shortly after the completion of The Intellectuals intended for foreign publication, the political police bugged and searched Szelényi's and Konrád's apartments. A significant part of Konrád's diaries were confiscated and the authors were arrested for incitement against the state. They were placed on probation and informed that they would be permitted to emigrate with their families. Szelényi accepted the offer, while Konrád remained in Hungary, choosing internal emigration and all that it entailed. A smuggled manuscript of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power was published abroad and remains on university reading lists to this day.
He published in Hungarian samizdat and by publishers in the West. Virtually from this period until 1989, Konrád was a forbidden author in Hungary, deprived of all legal income. He made a living from honoraria abroad. His works were placed in restricted sections in libraries. Naturally he was also forbidden to speak on radio or television. When the restriction of travel expired[clarification needed] in 1976, Konrád spent a year in Berlin on a DAAD fellowship, and another year in the U.S, on a stipend of his American publisher. During this period, he wrote his novel The Loser.
Between 1977 and 1982, two volumes of Konrád's essays appeared: The Temptation of Autonomy (not translated into English) and Antipolitics. These works called into question the European political status quo. Antipolitics portrayed the Yalta Agreement and the spheres of influence system as the potential cause of a possible Third World War. The book's subtitle was Central-European Meditations, and it was to become one of the voices demanding that region's secession from the Soviet bloc as a requisite for peace in Europe. Konrád was one of the first to predict the imminent disappearance of the Iron Curtain. In 1984, he read his essay "Does the Dream of Central Europe Still Exist?" in the Schwarzenberg Palace as he received the Herder Prize from the University of Vienna. Critics have compared his essays to the writings of Adam Michnik, Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, Czeslaw Milos and Danilo Kiš.
The years between 1973 and 1989 witnessed the evolution of a dissident political and artistic subculture, independent of official culture. Konrád was one of the determining voices in the democratic opposition. His works appeared in the underground so called samizdat journals of the opposition. In interviews given to Radio Free Europe, Konrad's ideas reached a wider Hungarian audience. Beginning in September 1982, he was a year-long guest at the Wissenschaft-skolleg zu Berlin; the following year he received a fellowship at the New York Institute for the Humanities. Over the four years that followed, Konrád wrote A Feast in the Garden (Hungarian version 1985). Now released from the official prohibition against publication, he sent the manuscript to the Magvető publishing house in Hungary.
In 1986 Konrad received an invitation from the Jerusalem Literary Fund, spending a month in that city. This was the period when Konrád primarily penned those essays and diary entries that would be collected for the volume The Invisible Voice (Hungarian version 1997). Konrád returned to Israel in 1992 and 1996. During his first visit he gave a long biographical interview for the University of Jerusalem, while on the second, he gave a lecture entitled "Judaism’s Three Paths" at the Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva. In 1988 he taught world literature at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.
In the first years after the fall of the old regime, beginning in 1989, Konrád took an active part in public life in Hungary, and was one of the thinkers who paved the way for the transition to democracy. He was a founding member of the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), and one of the founders and spokespeople for the Democratic Charter. He made frequent appearances in both the print and electronic media. In the spring of 1990 Konrád was elected President of PEN International, holding this office for the full term until 1993. He made strenuous efforts on behalf of imprisoned and persecuted writers and called the writers of disintegrating nations together to roundtable conferences in the interest of peace.
Between 1997 and 2003, Konrád was twice elected President of Berlin's Akademie der Künste.[3] As the first foreigner to hold that post, Konrád was an effective contributor to the intellectual rapprochement between the East and West of Europe, and did much to introduce writers and other creative figures from Central Europe, and particularly from Hungary, to the West. His efforts were greeted by an appreciative German public. During his presidency, he received the Internationale Karlspreis zu Aachen (2001) and the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2003).
Though Konrád frequently portrayed his Berettyóúfalu childhood in his novels, and particularly in The Feast in the Garden, he attempted to present this period in a more precise documentary form in two books, Departure and Return (2001) and Up on the Hill During a Solar Eclipse (2003). The first of these books treats a single year – 1944-45 – while the second covers fifty, after beginning with a reflection on the final years of the twentieth century, more precisely the morning solar eclipse of 1999, experienced from the peak of St. György Hill. These books were published separately in Europe, and together in New York as A Guest in My Own Country (2007).
The year 2006 saw the publication of his volume Figures of Wonder, subtitled Portraits and Snapshots. These portraits are modeled primarily on friends, some still living – descriptions that constitute a continuation of the series presented by Konrád in his book The Writer and the City (2004) together with longer essays. His books, The Roosters’ Sorrow (2005), Pendulum (2008), The Chimes (2009), and The Visitor’s Book (2013) present his philosophy of life with a near-poetic density.
Konrád was married three times. In 1955 he married Vera Varsa, with whom he lived until 1963, then married Júlia Lángh, with whom they had two children, Anna Dóra in 1965, and Miklós István in 1967. Since 1979, Konrád lived with Judith Lakner, his third wife, and together they had three children, Áron (1986), József (1987), and Zsuzsanna (1994).
Death[edit]
György Konrád died at his home in Budapest. His family stated that he had been gravely ill.[2]
Awards and honors[edit]
Herder Prize (1983)
Charles Veillon Prize (1985)
Manes-Sperber Prize (1990)
Kossuth Prize (1990)
Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (1991)
Goethe Medal (2000)
Internationaler Karlspreis zu Aachen (2001)
Franz Werfel Human Rights Award (2007)
National Jewish Book Award in the memoir category (2008)
He received the highest state distinctions awarded by France, Hungary, and Germany: Officier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’Honneur (1996); the Hungarian Republic Legion of Honor Middle Cross with Star (2003); Das Grosse Verdienstkreuz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (2003). He held honorary doctorates from the University of Antwerp (1990) and the University of Novi Sad (2003). He was an honorary citizen of Berettyóújfalu (2003) and of Budapest (2004).
Partial list of works[edit]
Fiction[edit]
The Case Worker
The City Builder
The Loser
A Feast in the Garden
The Stone Dial
Non-fiction[edit]
The Intellectual on the Road to Class Power (1978), with Iván Szelényi
Antipolitics (1999)
The Melancholy of Rebirth (1995)
The Invisible Voice: Meditations on Jewish Themes
A jugoszláviai háború (és ami utána jöhet) (1999)
Jugoslovenski rat (i ono što posle može da usledi) (2000)
A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life (2003)
Departure and Return (2011)
Articles[edit]
“The Intelligentsia and Social Structure”. Telos[4] 38 (Winter 1978-79). New York: Telos Press.
György Konrád obituary
Hungarian author, sociologist and essayist who was on his country’s list of forbidden authors from 1977 until 1988
George Gomori
Mon 7 Oct 2019 13.19 BST
Last modified on Mon 7 Oct 2019 13.38 BST
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György Konrád in Paris in 2012. He was a staunch opponent of all authoritarian regimes throughout his life. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
Over the past 30 years Hungarian fiction has firmly established itself on the map of modern European literature, with writers such as Péter Nádas, Péter Esterházy and László Krasznahorkai widely known across the world. However, the renaissance of fictional writing in Hungary had already begun in 1969 with György Konrád’s short debut novel, A Látogató, which was translated into English in 1975 under the title The Case Worker.
Konrád, who has died aged 86, used the book to subtly critique Hungary’s communist regime. But it was also an exceptional stylistic achievement, with sparse dialogue and long streams of consciousness. While the authorities disapproved of its themes – based around the life of a soul-searching social worker dealing with people with mental health problems – the Hungarian public responded much more positively, and the first pressing of A Látogató sold out in a few days.
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Later, in the mid-1970s, after being arrested and harassed because of his writing, Konrád agreed a compromise with the government under which he went unpublished in Hungary, but was allowed to travel and publish abroad. After communism fell in the late 80s he received his full due as a writer, and was acknowledged as one of the groundbreakers for the likes of Nádas, Esterházy and Krasznahorkai.
Konrád was born into a Jewish merchant family in Debrecen and grew up in Berettyóújfalu, close to the Romanian border; his father, József, and his mother, Róza (nee Klein), owned a hardware shop in the small town. In 1944, when the German army occupied Hungary, days before the ghettoisation and deportation of the Jewish population from the countryside began, György and his sister, Éva, were sent to relatives in Budapest – a decision that almost certainly saved their lives.
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After the second world war he went to school first in Debrecen and then in Budapest, and in 1951 was accepted at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest to study Russian and literature. He was briefly expelled from the university by the authorities, who deemed him a “class alien” due to his bourgeois background, but was readmitted in 1953 during the reformist prime ministership of Imre Nagy, switching to study Hungarian literature and graduating in 1956 shortly before the Hungarian revolution erupted.
Konrád fully supported the revolutionary call for independence and a multiparty system, and joined the pro-revolutionary National Guard. But when the Soviets crushed the revolution, he abandoned his tommy-gun in a dark alleyway.
Just before the revolution Konrád had had his first piece published in the periodical Új Hang (New Voice).
He joined a group of young aspiring writers and artists who met regularly in a Budapest coffee house, and, after an unsettled period working in various temporary jobs, found a permanent position as a social worker in the city.
His six years of experience in that job were used in his first novel and his next job, as a sociologist at the Institute of Urban Planning, gave him material for his following novel, A Városalapító, which was published in censored form in Hungary in 1977 and translated in the same year into English under the title The City Builder.
By this time Konrád had become a political player due to the clandestine publication of a study translated into English as The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power that he had written with the sociologist Iván Szelényi. Copies of the publication, which argued against the Marxist view that the communist system is a dictatorship of the proletariat, were confiscated by the Hungarian security police and he and Szelényi were arrested – although as a result of international protests they were soon released.
Szelényi subsequently emigrated, but Konrád chose to stay in Hungary on condition that he received a permanent exit visa enabling him to publish and teach in Germany and the US. It was in New York that he wrote his third, most Hungarian, novel, A Cinkos (The Loser, published in English in 1983) with a brilliant chapter, The Feast Day, about the beginnings of the 1956 revolution, which Konrád said was “the only event of world historical significance that we Hungarians accomplished in this [the 20th] century”.
Since he was on the list of Hungary’s forbidden authors from 1977 until 1988, Konrád’s two political studies: Az Autonómia Kisértése (The Temptation of Autonomy, 1980) and the excellent Anti-politica (1986) were only published abroad. In these he positioned himself as a left-liberal thinker and staunch opponent of all authoritarian regimes, a role he continued to fulfil until his death.
In 1990, after the fall of communism, he was awarded the state-sponsored Kossuth prize for literature, was elected president of the International PEN Club, and became a member of the council of a new Hungarian political party, the Free Democrats, which was in opposition to the government. In 1991 he was a founder of the Demokratikus Charta movement, which campaigned against the autocratic inclinations of Hungary’s first post-communist administration under József Antall.
As incidents of antisemitism in Hungary rose, Konrád produced several writings on Jewish themes, while Kerti Mulatság (A Feast in the Garden, 1987) and Kőóra (Stonedial, 1994) were mostly autobiographical, similarly to the texts that went into the volume A Guest in My Own Country (2013).
His opposition to the populism that has been stifling Hungary over the past nine years was made clear in his last two nostalgic essay-novels, Ásatás (Excavation I-II) with the subtitles Falevelek a Szélben (Leaves in the Wind, 2017) and Öreg Erdő (An Old Forest, 2018).
Konrád received many awards and honours, of which the most important were the Herder prize (1983), the Central European prize (1998) and the International Charles prize of Aachen (2003). In his last years he spent most of his time in the family house at Hegymagas, a village close to Lake Balaton.
He is survived by his third wife, the author Judit Lakner, by their three children, Áron, József and Zsuzsanna, and by a son and daughter, Anna and Miklós, from his second marriage, to Júlia Lángh, which ended in divorce.
• György Konrád, writer, born 2 April 1933; died 13 September 2019
World NewsSeptember 14, 2019 / 3:36 AM / 2 months ago
Hungarian writer and former dissident Gyorgy Konrad dies at 86
3 Min Read
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Internationally acclaimed Hungarian writer Gyorgy Konrad, a leading figure in the dissident movement under communist rule, died on Friday at the age of 86 after a long illness, state news ageny MTI reported, citing his family.
Konrad, who was born into a Jewish family and survived the Holocaust, wrote his first novel, “The Case Worker”, in 1969. It was soon translated into 13 languages, according to his website.
In 1965, he undertook research in urban sociology and his experiences provided material for his next novel, “The City Builder”.
In an interview for Die Zeit in 1974, Konrad said: “I write what I write; the state publishing houses in Hungary publish of my work what they will, while I publish as much of it as I can.”
In the last decades of communism until the collapse of the regime in 1989 Konrad was a forbidden author in Hungary.
He was one of the key voices in the democratic opposition, with his works published in samizdat journals, in clandestine distribution of literature banned by the state.
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From 1989 onwards, Konrad was one of the thinkers who paved the way for the transition to democracy in Hungary.
He was an outspoken critic of right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been in power since 2010, for what he said was an erosion of democratic values.
“My homeland is beginning to resemble the post-Soviet dictatorships of Central Asia; some are even calling it Orbanistan. A number of young Hungarians are planning to leave, many for Western Europe,” Konrad wrote in a piece in the New York Times in 2012.
From 1997 to 2003, Konrad was elected President of Berlin’s Akademie der Künste for two terms and in this role he contributed to the intellectual rapprochement between the East and West of Europe and helped introduce writers and other creative figures from Central Europe to the West.
His book “A guest in my own country: A Hungarian life” won the National Jewish Book Award in the category of memoir and autobiography. It traced his life as a Hungarian child during the Holocaust and later as a student during the 1956 revolution against Soviet rule.
Konrad was President of the International P.E.N. Club in the early 1990s. He also received the Herder Prize, the Charles Veillon Prize, and the Goethe Medal among others.
Reporting by Krisztina Than; Editing by Gareth Jones
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Jewish Hungarian author and dissident Gyorgy Konrad dies, aged 86
Holocaust survivor was key figure in movement that led to end of communism in country and was a harsh critic of current PM Viktor Orban
By AFP
14 September 2019, 8:03 pm 0
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File: Hungarian writer and former communist dissident Gyorgy Konrad addresses the media on the state of freedom and democracy in Hungary, in Brussels, Friday Jan. 27, 2012. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
BUDAPEST — Acclaimed Hungarian author and anti-communist dissident Gyorgy (George) Konrad died Friday aged 86, his family told the Hungarian state news agency MTI.
Considered one of Hungary’s finest writers, Konrad, whose novels and essays were widely translated around the world, died at home after a long illness.
Born in 1933 into a Jewish family in the eastern city of Debrecen, he grew up in the town of Berettyoujfalu close to the Romanian border.
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In June 1944, he narrowly survived the Holocaust by jumping on a train to Budapest a day before the deportation of the town’s Jewish population to Auschwitz. Almost all of his school classmates perished.
“I became an adult aged 11,” he wrote in his autobiography “Departure and Return” (2001).
Konrad took part in Hungary’s failed anti-Soviet uprising in 1956 but unlike his sister and several hundred thousand refugees, Konrad decided to stay.
Konrad’s first novel, “The Case Worker” (1969), based on his experiences as a social worker dealing with children, was translated into 13 languages.
Later working as an urban sociologist, he co-wrote an essay that tackled social problems in new housing estates but rankled with the communist authorities.
His second novel, “The City Builder,” notable for its experimental language and form, was not published for political reasons.
Between 1973 and 1988 his books were almost constantly banned, first published outside Hungary or by underground so-called samizdat publishers.
One of the most internationally known Hungarian writers at the time, Konrad was elected president of the PEN club worldwide writers association in 1990.
The recipient of several literature and state honors at home and abroad, in 1997 he also became the first foreigner elected as head of Berlin’s prestigious Akademie der Kunste.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban delivers his speech at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, September 11, 2018. (AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias)
Konrad was also a key figure in the dissident movement that led to the end of communism in Hungary in 1989.
He co-founded the liberal SZDSZ political party in 1988, and decades later became a harsh critic of current Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Orban was the “most toxic politician Hungary has known since the fall of communism,” he said after the government launched a media campaign against the liberal US-Hungarian financier George Soros in 2017.
Author György Konrád Dies Aged 86
MTI-Hungary Today 2019.09.14.
Author, essayist and sociologist György Konrád died on Friday afternoon, his family said.
Konrád died after a long illness at the age of 86. He was one of the best-known representatives of Hungarian prose around the world, with works translated into many languages.
Born in Debrecen in 1933, Konrád survived the Holocaust in a safe house in Budapest. He graduated as a teacher from Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd University in 1956. After serving in the National Guard during the 1956 revolution, he made his living through ad hoc jobs for a few years. In 1959 he got full-time state employment, working as a children’s welfare supervisor until 1965. The experience amassed during this time served as the basis for his first novel The Case Worker.
He was working closely with urban sociologist Iván Szelényi with whom he wrote a book on the sociological problems of new housing estates.
Citing political reasons, the communist authorities banned the publication of his second novel, The City Builder.
After losing his job in 1973, Konrád, together with Szelényi, wrote The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, a sociological analysis of political history questioning workers’ rule in then Hungary. The political police, however, confiscated the manuscript and arrested the authors for incitement against the state.
They were informed that they would be permitted to emigrate with their families. Szelényi accepted the offer, while Konrád remained in Hungary, choosing internal emigration.
He published in Hungarian samizdat and through western publishing houses. Virtually from this period until 1989, Konrád was a forbidden author in Hungary, deprived of all legal income. In 1987-88 he taught world literature at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.
In the 1980s Konrád was member of the Democratic Opposition and in 1988 became a founder of the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ).
In 1990 he was elected president of PEN International, holding the post full time until 1993. Between 1997 and 2003, Konrád was twice elected president of Berlin-Brandenburg’s Akademie der Kuenste.
His long list of awards included the Kossuth Prize (1990), the peace prize of PEN International (1991), the French Legion of Honour (1996), the Charlemagne Prize (2001), the Hungarian Republic’s Order of Merit Middle Cross with Star (2003), the honorary citizenship of Budapest (2004) and the Franz Werfel Human Rights Award (2007).
Featured photo by Lajos Soós/MTI
Konrad, George. A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life. Other. 2007. 308p. ed. by Michael Henry Helm. tr. from Hungarian by Jim Tucker. ISBN 978-1-59051-139-8. pap. $15.95. AUTOBIOG
Part memoir and part philosophical rumination, this haunting work evokes the repressive atmosphere of Hungary during the last half of the 20th century. Konrad, a preeminent Hungarian writer and former president of International PEN, divides his book into two parts: his childhood during the Nazi repression and his life post--World War II, particularly the years 1950-70. His writing style, as it comes through in this translation, allows the reader to feel his tension in the face of almost continuous persecution from childhood onward. In spite of this, he somehow was unable to abandon Hungary for a freer life in the West. Konrad speaks frankly of the horrors that he encountered during the Nazi occupation of Budapest and of his personal struggle as one of the only surviving Jewish students from his school. He also describes his rather casual support of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; he was able to stay in the country when many intellectuals fled for fear of execution. Although not a detailed history like Charles Gati's Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt, this book is fascinating on many levels (philosophical, historical, political, and as a work of literature) and is recommended for both public and academic libraries.--Maria C. Bagshaw, Lake Erie Coll., Painesville, OH
Bagshaw, Maria C.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bagshaw, Maria C. "Konrad, George. A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life." Library Journal, 1 July 2007, p. 98+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A166536961/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=30d9c692. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A166536961
Konrad, George A GUEST IN MY OWN COUNTRY: A Hungarian Life Trans. by Michael Henry Heim Other Press (352 pp.) $15.95 paperback original Apr. 24, 2007 ISBN: 1-59051-139-5
A notable European intellectual's path from persecution, exile and privation to the status of spokesman for his embattled country's resiliency.
Born in 1933, Konrad grew up among a well-to-do middle-class Jewish family supported by his father's hardware store, until the Nazis' approach persuaded the Hungarian government to capitulate. "The town had deported its Jewish citizens," Konrad recalls more than 60 years later, "and viewed all their possessions as its own, moving strangers into their houses." The episodic story of young George's survival (with his sister and two male cousins) after the "removal" of their parents from their village (Berettyoujfalu) is an odyssey of hasty travel, crowded and imperiled experiences at home and abroad shared with those who sheltered them, and--following "Liberation" in 1945--return to Hungary (in a cattle car) to a nearly destroyed home and a future whose bleakness was mitigated by their parents' safe return from an Austrian internment camp. The book's latter half depicts Konrad's salvation through formal education; jobs as social worker, magazine editor and teacher; the publication of his brilliant first novel (The Case Worker, 1969) and the polarizing sociopolitical study (The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, 1979) he coauthored; and the hard-won acquisition of survival skills required of Hungary's Jews, doubly victimized by the Third Reich and by the violent class struggle of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Konrad's novelistic skills (also displayed in such fiction as The City Builder, 1977, and Stonedial, 2000) produce vivid, terse sketches of numerous relatives and acquaintances, and the book features dozens of heart-stopping perceptions (e.g., the realization that his aged mother's "forgetfulness may help her.... She is letting go of her burdens"). But the book is flawed by confusing past-present shifts, and an imbalance that is presumably the result of its "slightly edited" second half.
Still, a valuable and absorbing chronicle of a terrible ordeal and of the transcendent courage shown by both its survivors and its victims.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Konrad, George: A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2007, p. 113. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A159787241/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f6fa7c1f. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A159787241
A Guest in My Own Country: A Human Life GEORGE KONRAD. Other Press, $15.95 paper (352p) ISBN 978-1-59051-139-8
This powerful, highly literary memoir by a world-famous author--essayist and novelist Konrad was elected president of International PEN in 1990--discursively traces his life as a Hungarian child during the Holocaust, and later as a student during the Hungarian revolution of 1956. While it deals with his growth as an intellectual and writer, it is primarily a meditation on the conflicts between national and individual identity. Konrad's prose is distanced and unemotional, but always carries a potent punch: "In the winter of 1944-45 I saw any number of dead bodies. I could picture myself among them, but the tasks of day-to-day existence obscured most of my imaginings. Danger makes you practical." This cool, objective voice works as well for the smaller vignettes as it does when he is musing on Dr. Mengele's obsession with killing Jewish children. There are moments of almost surreal narrative here--his mother and father tell Konrad (b. 1933) and his sister bedtime "adventure stories" of how they survived the war--but also moments of stately, traditional bildungsroman. His account of the 1956 revolution, in which he was an active participant, is equally laconic. This memoir provokes in unexpected ways that linger after it is read. (Apr. 24)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Guest in My Own Country: A Human Life." Publishers Weekly, 22 Jan. 2007, p. 172+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A158576993/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2cc6300c. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A158576993