György Konrád
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
György Konrád | |
---|---|
Born | Berettyóújfalu, Hungary | 2 April 1933
Died | 13 September 2019 Budapest, Hungary | (aged 86)
Notable works | The Case Worker (A látogató, 1969) |
Spouse |
|
Children | 5 |
President of PEN International | |
In office May 1990 – October 1993 | |
Preceded by | Per Wästberg |
Succeeded by | Ronald Harwood |
György (George) Konrád (2 April 1933 – 13 September 2019)
Life
George Konrad was born in Berettyóújfalu, near Debrecen, into a wealthy Jewish family. His father, József Konrád, ran a hardware business; his mother was Róza Klein, a member of a Nagyvárad Jewish middle-class family. His older sister Éva was born in 1930.
Konrad's parents were arrested and deported to Austria after the German invasion of Hungary, and the two children and two cousins travelled to relatives in Budapest, a day before all Jewish inhabitants of Berettyóújfalu were sent to the ghetto in
In February 1945, George and his sister went back to Berettyóújfalu, and in June their parents were released from Strasshof concentration camp[3][4] The Konrád family were the only family among the Jewish inhabitants of Berettyóújfalu to survive intact. Konrad started school in 1946 at the Main Reformed Gimnázium in Debrecen, moving on the following year to 1951, he attended the Madách Gimnázium in Budapest. He left in 1951 to study literature, sociology and psychology at the Lenin Institute of Eötvös Loránd University. In 1950, his father's business and their house at Berettyóújfalu were appropriated by the government.
Konrad completed his university education in the Department of Hungarian literature and language at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. In 1956 he was involved in the
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
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 it remains on university reading lists.
He was 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 from 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
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
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 the Academy of Arts, Berlin.[5] 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 Rooster’s 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 he had two children, Anna Dóra in 1965, and Miklós István in 1967. From 1979, Konrád lived with Judith Lakner, his third wife, and together they had three children, Áron (1986), József (1987), and Zsuzsanna (1994).
Death
György Konrád died at his home in Budapest. His family stated that he had been gravely ill.[2]
Awards and honors
- Herder Prize (1983)
- Charles Veillon Prize (1985)
- Manes-Sperber Prize (1990)
- Kossuth Prize (1990)
- Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (1991)
- Goethe Medal (2000)
- Internationaler Karlspreiszu Aachen (2001)
- Franz Werfel Human Rights Award (2007)
- National Jewish Book Award in the memoir category (2008)[6]
György Konrád received the highest state distinctions awarded by France, Hungary, and Germany: Officier de l’
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 (1984)
- 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
- “The Intelligentsia and Social Structure”. Telos[7] 38 (Winter 1978–79). New York: Telos Press.
References
- ^ Hungarian writer and dissident Gyorgy Konrad dies at 86[permanent dead link]
- ^ Seattle Times. Associated Press. Retrieved 13 September 2019.
- ^ Schwartz, Penny (18 June 2020). "Eva Konrad Hawkins, 90, Holocaust survivor who designed underwater museum exhibits". Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Retrieved 5 December 2020.
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 5 December 2020.
- ^ Than, Krisztina (13 September 2019). "Hungarian writer and former dissident Gyorgy Konrad dies at 86". Reuters. Retrieved 13 September 2019.
- ^ "National Jewish Book Award | Book awards | LibraryThing". www.librarything.com. Retrieved 18 January 2020.
- ^ Telospress.com
External links
- Homepage
- Biography
- "Chance Wanderings". an essay by Konrad on the 'revolutions' of 1989[permanent dead link]
- Petri Liukkonen. "György Konrád". Books and Writers.
- PEN International