George Konrád

• Born: April 2, 1933
• Birthplace: Debrecen, Hungary
• Died: September 13, 2019
• Place of death: Budapest, Hungary

Hungarian novelist

Biography

As a stylistic innovator and social critic, blending political vision and modernist technique, George (György) Konrád was one of the most important Hungarian writers of the late twentieth century. He was born in eastern Hungary, where his father was the owner of a farm machinery shop. During the Nazi occupation in 1944, his parents were arrested, along with other Jews. Fearing arrest, eleven-year-old Konrád found his father’s hidden money and escaped with his younger sister by bribing the local police to give them rail passes to Budapest, where their aunt lived. The day after they left, all the Jews were deported. The women and children were sent to concentration camps, while the men were sent to work as forced laborers on the Ukrainian front. In Budapest, Konrád and his sister were hidden from the Nazis, along with other Jewish children. When they returned home in 1945, they found the Jewish men of their village waiting futilely for their families to return.

After World War II, Konrád enrolled in Madách Gymnasium in Budapest. After graduating in 1951, he began advanced studies at Lenin Institute, but he later transferred to Eötvös Loránd University and completed a degree there as a literature teacher in 1956. He briefly taught at the Gymnasium in the industrial district of Csepel in Budapest, but by 1959 he had become a caseworker for juveniles and held a second position as an editor for the publishing firm Magyar Helikon. Beginning in 1965, he served as a sociologist at the Institute for Research and Planning for City-Building and worked for several years at the Hungarian Academy’s Institute for Literary Scholarship. After 1974, he supported himself on the foreign royalties from his books published abroad.

At first known as a social critic and literary scholar, Konrád published his first novel, The Case Worker, in 1969. His narrator, an anonymous, middle-aged bureaucrat named “T,” recounts a typical day’s experiences in trying to meet the needs of his clients—the indigent, elderly, alcoholic, abused, and abandoned. The narrator confesses that he can do little for his clients except “regulate the traffic of suffering.” Much of the novel focuses on the plight of Ferike Bandula, a five-year-old child whose parents have committed suicide. The narrator abandons his own family to assume responsibility for this unruly child. The Case Worker was an immediate success but attracted the ire of the communist regime, and a second edition would not be published in Hungary for two decades.

In 1977 Konrád published his second novel, The City Builder, another satire of social planners. A disillusioned middle-aged architect recounts four generations of his family’s history through a series of ten interior monologues. The panorama of Hungary’s recent history unfolds as the architect ruminates on his past within the confines of the city he has helped to build. As the narrator unfolds the political, social, and economic history of his unnamed central European city, it becomes apparent that the city itself is the protagonist—in all of its moods. One critic found the novel an outcry against the social and political contradictions of utopian planners.

In 1974, Konrád and Iván Szelényi wrote The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, a scathing social analysis of the privileges of the Communist Party bureaucrats. The police arrested both authors after confiscating a manuscript of the book, charging them with subversive agitation. Konrád and Szelényi were released after six days in jail, but their book was banned from publication. They were offered the chance to emigrate, but Konrád declined, stating that a writer must accept the risks of the profession.

Konrád remained in Budapest, publishing his third novel, The Loser, in 1980. The protagonist is a fifty-five-year-old intellectual, now confined in a psychiatric hospital, who reflects on his role in his country’s transformation into a communist state. He thinks back to the various betrayals, personal and political, in his past and to his role as a propagandist for the communist regime and his gradual disillusionment with that regime. For the protagonist, communism has been a metaphysical failure, one that mirrors his bitter recognition of the failures in his own life.

In 1982, Konrád published Antipolitics, a penetrating theoretical analysis of the East-West ideological conflict. Konrád rejects the East-West rivalry as the antiquated product of the Yalta Agreement during World War II. Written from a Central European perspective, Konrád’s work questions the role of intellectuals in supporting the status quo and attempts to look beyond Great Power politics to a world beyond ideology—one in which the power of the state will diminish. Its hope is that individuals will once again be able to influence events through networks of personal friendships and direct contact among citizens of competing nations.

Konrád was a prominent figure in Hungarian society following the collapse of communist rule. He was involved in politics, serving on the committee of the Alliance of Free Democrats group. However, unlike some fellow intellectuals who moved from the underground to become politicians, he did not pursue an official government position.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Konrád published A Feast in the Garden and Stonedial, two parts of a novel cycle called Agenda. The Invisible Voice: Meditations on Jewish Themes, which appeared in 1999, contains twenty essays written by Konrád between 1985 and 1997. Included are discussions of relations between Israel and Palestine, Diaspora Jews, personal responsibility, and assimilation. Meanwhile, from 1990 to 1993, he served as president of the PEN International organization, and from 1997 to 2003, he led the Academy of Arts in Berlin. Later works included the memoir A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life (2007)

Konrád received several awards and recognitions throughout his career, both for his literary work and his human rights activism. He received state honors from Germany and France as well as Hungary. In his review of The Case Worker, Irving Howe hailed Konrád as striding “to the forefront of contemporary European literature.” What transforms the sociological content of his novels is his precise evocation of physical objects, a style influenced by the French New Novel, combined with a passionate sense of social hypocrisy and injustice. Especially in his first two novels, Konrád employs a dense metaphoric style, with harsh, often grotesque urban imagery and startling comparisons (though in The Loser, his style is more subdued). Konrád’s literary achievements demonstrate that the art of the novel was very much alive among late twentieth-century Central European writers.

Konrád was married to Judit Lakner, with whom he had five children. After suffering from a grave illness, he died at the age of eighty-six on September 13, 2019, in Budapest.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

A látogató, 1969 (The Case Worker, 1974)

A városalapitó, 1977 (The City Builder, 1977)

A cinkos, 1980 (The Loser, 1982)

Kerti mulatság, 1989 (A Feast in the Garden, 1992)

Koóra, 1995 (Stonedial, 2000)

Nonfiction:

Az új lakótelepek szociológiai problémak, 1969 (with Iván Szelényi)

Az értelmiseg út ja az osztályhatalomhoz, 1974 (with Szelényi; The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, 1979)

Antipolitika, 1982 (Antipolitics, 1984)

Az ujjászületés melankóliája, 1992 (The Melancholy of Rebirth, 1995)

The Invisible Voice: Meditations on Jewish Themes, 1999

A Jugoszláviai háború: És ami utána jöhet, 1999

Mit tud a levelibéka? Válogatott esszék, naploórészletek, 1973-1996, 2000

A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life, 2007

Bibliography

Birnbaum, Marianna D. “An Armchair Picaresque: The Texture and Structure of George Konrád’s The Case Worker.” In Fiction and Drama in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, edited by Henrik Birnbaum and Thomas Eekman. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1980.

Birnbaum, Marianna D., and R. Trager-Verchovsky, eds. History, Another Text: Essays on the Fiction of Kazimierz Brandys, Danilo Kis, György Konrád, and Christa Wolf. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988.

“Gyorgy Konrád.” In World Authors: 1975-1980, edited by Vineta Colby. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1985.

"Gyorgy Konrad, Writer and Dissident in Communist Hungary, Dies at 86." The New York Times, 16 Sept. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/obituaries/gyorgy-konrad-writer-dissident-dead.html. Accessed 2 Oct. 2020.

Howe, Irving. Review of The Case Worker, by George Konrád. The New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1974.

“Konrád György író Weboldala.” Konrád György író Weboldala, www.konradgyorgy.hu/muvek.php. Accessed 21 Apr. 2023.

Sanders, Ivan. “Freedom’s Captives: Notes on George Konrád’s Novels.” World Literature Today 57, no. 2 (Spring, 1983): 210-214.

Solotaroff, Ted. “The Weight of History.” The New Republic 188, no. 6 (February 14, 1983): 28-29, 31-33.

Veres, András. “György Konrád.” In Twentieth-Century Eastern European Writers, Third Series, edited by Steven Serafin. Vol. 232 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001.