Gyorgy Konrád

Hungarian writer who fought for intellectual freedom against totalitarianism

EVERY LIFE is better than no life; every life, including the pain that goes with it, is good.” Gyorgy Konrád, who has died aged 86, knew what he was talking about. He survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary only to find himself having to grapple with the Communist dictatorship that followed. First he had been punished for being a Jew, then for being ‘bourgeois’.

Yet he did manage to have quite a life: he overcame a number of obstacles to complete his education, escaped arrest after joining the 1956 anti-Communist uprising and successfully negotiated life as a dissident writer in Communist Hungary with just one short spell of detention.

Konrád’s work may have been mostly banned at home but abroad he was recognised and even feted. Yet, even when given a chance to emigrate, he decided against it: “Since I had started out as a Hungarian writer I might as well finish as one,” he explained.

Gyorgy Konrád was the son of József, who ran a successful hardware business in Berettyóújfalu, eastern Hungary, and Róza Klein who came from a prosperous bourgeois family. Life for Gyorgy and his sister Eva suddenly changed in 1944 when the Nazis occupied Hungary and their parents were deported to Austria. Luckily the children succeeded in getting travel permits to visit relatives in Budapest.

It saved their lives: the next day the whole Jewish population of Berettyóújfalu was rounded up and deported to the ghetto of Nagyvárad and then to Auschwitz, but the Konrád children survived by remaining in hiding till the end of the war.

In 1945, reunited with his parents back in Berettyóújfalu, Konrád was aching for normality. He went back to college and his father returned to his hardware business but it didn’t last long. Under the new Communist regime, owning a store was ‘bourgeois’ and in 1950 the state confiscated both the Konrád family home and the hardware business.

The stigma that came with his ‘bourgeois’ background caused Konrád to be expelled from university and even after he graduated (in Hungarian literature) in1956, it made it difficult for him to find work. As a result, besides writing for underground publications, Konrád was variously a tutor, translator, report writer, factory hand and from 1959 a children’s welfare supervisor, a job he held for seven years.

That experience would form the basis of his first novel, The Case Worker (1969), which was praised for lifting the veil on life in Hungarian mental institutions but also for its exceptional stylistic achievements. The state didn’t like it but the public did and it sold out within days.

After a spell as editor at a publishing house in the 1960s, Konrád started working for the Urban Science and Planning Institute, doing research with the urban sociologist Ivan Szelényi. Their collaboration on the book On the Sociological Problems of the New Housing Developments (1969) cost Konrád his job and he ended up working for a while as a nursing assistant in a mental institution.

But it was their next book, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (1974), which denounced the collusion of intellectuals with the Communist regime, that saw both men jailed, albeit briefly. On release they were offered the opportunity to leave the country with their families. Szelényi took it but Konrád declined because, as he explained, “a writer should not emigrate. He should not turn away from the risks of his profession.”

His next two novels, The City Builder (1977) and The Loser (1982) continued to explore the themes of freedom (or lack of it) under Communism. As a banned author in Hungary, Konrád was essentially surviving on foreign royalties.

When Communism eventually collapsed, Konrád took an active part in public life and was one of the founding members of the Alliance of Free Democrats party. In 1990 he was elected president of the writers association, PEN International, campaigning actively on behalf of persecuted writers.

His autobiography, A Guest in My Own Country (originally published as two separate books, Departure and Return and Up on the Hill During a Solar Eclipse), won the 2007 National Jewish Book Award in the memoir category. Konrád was also the first foreigner to be elected President of Berlin’s Akademia der Künste (Academy of Arts).

Ten years ago he foresaw that Europe would have to fight for its survival. In early 2019 he was one of 30 European intellectuals who put their name to a manifesto warning of the risks Europe was facing “three quarters of a century after the defeat of fascism and 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall”.

Konrád is survived by his third wife, Judith Lakner, and their three children, Áron, József and Zsuzsanna and by two children, Anna and Miklós from his second marriage to Júlia Langh, which ended in divorce.

Gyorgy Konrád, born April 2, 1933. Died September 13, 2019.