György Konrád

The native form of this personal name is Konrád György. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

György (George) Konrád

György (George) Konrád (born April 2, 1933) is a Hungarian novelist and essayist, known as an advocate of individual freedom.

Life

Konrad was born in Berettyóújfalu, near Debrecen into an affluent Jewish family. He graduated in 1951 from the Madách Secondary School in Budapest, entered the Lenin Institute and eventually studied literature, sociology and psychology at the Eötvös Loránd University. In 1956 he participated in the Hungarian Uprising against the Soviet occupation, but did not kill anybody, although he had a gun.

Career from the 1970s

Due to oppositional activities he was warned by the public prosecutor and was later fired from his work. In 1977 he received a DAAD- scholarship which enabled him to stay in West Berlin along with Iván Szelényi. He wrote The Intellectual on the Road to Class Power with Szelényi.

A police report of October 27, 1974 says he gave up his brother-in-law Ernő Sándor to the communist police for hiding the pamphlet together with the typewriters. Konrád did not asked Sándor to hide them but used his mother and his daughter to deliver the pamphlet and the typewriters to his sisters' household. On October 27 the police showed up at Sándor's together with Konrád who asked his bother-in-law to give the writings to the officers. The next day the prosecution was terminated and Konrád was free but his brother-in-law, an academic in Japanese linguistics was denied to travel to Japan although a Japanese scholarship for him was in process.

A report of the secret police department III/III-4-a made on February 3, 1975 states that agent Foktői (László Rigó, vice-principal of Theater 25.) contacted Sándor on December 9 who told him that Konrád met with György Aczél the director of the cultural life of Hungary in the communist era. Aczél told Konrád that they should not leave Hungary instead he should state their conditions required for them to stay. Konrád asked for passports and his works to be published. His letter to Aczél was published in 2003 in a Hungarian daily newspaper Magyar Nemzet and later used as an evidence in a lawsuit he started against journalist István Lovas which he lost. The Supreme Court's verdict said the following: ”Based on the argumentation and the hereby presented evidence it can be concluded that the claimant (György Konrád) in October 1974, after his arrest reported to the authorities that the wanted manuscript was to be found in Ernő Sándors residence, where the claimant urged Ernő Sándor to hand over the manuscript after which it was confiscated. (…)From this the conclusion can be made, that the name of the manuscripts keeper was revealed to the authorities by György Konrád, so by current standards this act qualifies him as a “snitcher”." This is further supported by the claimants own statements in the Hungarian newspaper 168 hours, he himsels said: “I’ve made a moral wrong”.

After the 3 years traveling ban had passed Konrád wrote a letter to János Kádár communist leader of Hungary for a passport which he was given and unlike most Hungarians he was let to travel to western countries. Despite these facts he is mistakenly claimed as a dissident in western countries.

A fellow Hungarian writer László Kolozsvári Papp wrote the following on Konrád's being a mighty figure of the opposition movement: "these guys in the 80s were only the big opposition with the passport of comrade Aczél in their pockets. They travelled to America, Switzerland and Berlin to unbend themselves from the weariness of opposition."

In 1987 and 1988 he taught world literature in Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

In 1988 he was the founder member of the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), his name was on the ballots in the following elections of 1990. In July 2009 after Attila Retkes was elected for president of SZDSZ he left the party with several founding members.

In 1990 he was elected president of PEN International, the worldwide association of writers and oldest human rights organisation, serving until 1993. In 1997 he was the first non-German to become president of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

He has published a number of essays on politics, literature and sociology, as well as fiction. One of Konrád's most significant novels is The Case Worker, a bleak portrait of human suffering in modern urban industrial society, written from the perspective of a social services functionary. A Feast in the Garden and The Stone Dial are the first two parts of a semi autobiographical fictional trilogy.

In 1985 he received the Prix européen de l'essai Charles Veillon for Antipolitik. Mitteleuropäische Meditationen.

In 2001 he received the Charlemagne Award of the city of Aachen.

In 2003 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Novi Sad.

In 2007 Konrád won the National Jewish Book Award in the Biography, Autobiography & Memoir category, for A Guest in my Own Country: A Hungarian Life.

He was a founder of the Hungarian liberal party the SZDSZ but left the party in 2009. He was a friend to the Polish intellectualist - writer Stanisław Lem and politician Władysław Bartoszewski. http://mno.hu/migr_1834/konrad-gyorgy-onsajnalata-a-radioban-423827

Partial list of works

Fiction

• The Case Worker
• The City Builder
• The Loser
• A Feast in the Garden
• The Stone Dial

Non-fiction

• The Intellectual on the Road to Class Power (1978), with Iván Szelényi
• Antipolitics
• The Melancholy of Rebirth (1995)
• The Invisible Voice: Meditations on Jewish Themes
• A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life (2003)

Articles

• “The Intelligentsia and Social Structure”. Telos 38 (Winter 1978-79). New York: Telos Press.

External links

• Homepage
• "Chance Wanderings," an essay by Konrad on the 'revolutions' of 1989
• A biographical essay, written in English

• PEN International