Árpád Göncz

The native form of this personal name is Göncz Árpád. This article uses the Western name order.

Árpád Göncz
President of Hungary 1st President of the Third Republic of Hungary
In office August 4, 1990 – August 4, 2000 Acting: May 2, 1990 – August 3, 1990
Prime Minister	József Antall Péter Boross Gyula Horn Viktor Orbán
Preceded by	Mátyás Szűrös
Succeeded by	Ferenc Mádl
Personal details
Born	February 10, 1922 (1922-02-10) Budapest, Hungary
Nationality	Hungarian
Political party	SZDSZ (Alliance of Free Democrats)
Spouse(s)	Zsuzsanna Göntér
Children	4 (Kinga Göncz)
Signature

Árpád Göncz (Göncz Árpád, Hungarian pronunciation: [ɡønts aːrpaːd]; born February 10, 1922 in Budapest) is a Hungarian liberal politician and former President of Hungary (May 2, 1990–August 4, 2000). Göncz played a role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He was also founding member and Vice Chairman of SZDSZ and Speaker of the National Assembly of Hungary before becoming President.

He is currently a member of the international advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Early life

He graduated in law from the Budapest Pázmány Péter University of Arts and Sciences in 1944. He has also worked as a writer and has published several novels, plays and essays, and also translated a great number of prose works from English to Hungarian.

In the Second World War he was conscripted and ordered to Germany; however, he deserted and joined the resistance movement.

After the war, in 1945 he joined the Independent Smallholders' Party and was the leader of the party's youth organization for Budapest as well as personal secretary to the general secretary. After the party was dissolved at the communist takeover, he worked as a manual labourer.

Árpád Göncz in 2005.

In the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 he worked in the newly recreated Hungarian Peasant Alliance. After the Soviet intervention on 4 November 1956, he participated in the writing of several memoranda and helped to transfer a manuscript of Imre Nagy abroad. He was arrested in May 1957 and sentenced to life imprisonment on 2 August of the same year, without the possibility of appeal. In 1960 he participated in the hunger strike of Vác. Along with more than 4,000 other revolutionaries and freedom fighters, he was released from prison under amnesty in 1963.

In the following decades, he worked as a specialized translator, translator of over a hundred literary works, and writer. Some of his notable translations include Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River, William Faulkner's Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and A Fable, Ernest Hemingway's Islands in the Streams, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness and The Confessions of Nat Turner, John Ball's In the Heat of the Night, Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds, Yasunari Kawabata's The Lake, John Updike's Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich, and The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, The Spire, The Pyramid and Rites of Passage by William Golding. His own works include both novels and dramas; Sarusok (1974), Magyar Médeia (1976), Rácsok (1979) and Találkozások (1980) are worth mentioning.

Political Career and President of Hungary

He was a founding member of the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) in 1988. In 1989 became President of the Hungarian Human Rights League. From 1989 to 1990 he was President and later Honorary President of the Hungarian Writers' Association. In May 1990 he was elected Member of Parliament. Göncz served as Speaker of the National Assembly of Hungary between May and August 1990, and subsequently was elected provisional President of the Republic after Mátyás Szűrös on May 2 and President of the Republic on August 4 by the National Assembly. He was reelected in 1995 for another five-year term which he completed on August 4, 2000. In 2000, he was honored with the Vision for Europe Award for his efforts in creating a unified Europe. In these periods he was very well-received by the public as he succeeded to remain free from politics which helped him gain a wide acceptance.

He is married to Mária Zsuzsanna Göntér and has four children. Kinga Göncz, former foreign minister of Hungary, is his daughter.

Awards and honours

• 1991: Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
• 1994: Order of the White Eagle (Poland, 1994)
• 2000: Special Class of the Grand Cross of the Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• 2000: Order of the White Double Cross, First Class (Slovakia, 2000)
• 2003: Award of the Budapest Corvinus Europe Institute
• 2009: International Adalbert Prize for Peace, Freedom and Cooperation in Europe of Adalbert Foundation Krefeld
• Collar of the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana (Estonia)
• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav (Norway)
• Order of the White Lion (Czech Republic)

External links

• His biography on the Office of the President of the Republic of Hungary site

Political offices
Preceded by Mátyás Szűrös	President of Hungary 1990 – 2000	Succeeded by Ferenc Mádl
Preceded by István Fodor	Speaker of the National Assembly 1990	Succeeded by György Szabad