After outlasting Nazism and Soviet domination, Hungarian writer George Konrád feels the survivor's responsibility to keep speaking out against oppression, writes SORCHA HAMILTON
Riding a bicycle is the ultimate expression of freedom, George (György) Konrád believes. "The bicycle," he once wrote, "is the only vehicle still in harmony with human dignity." For the Hungarian author, a survivor of the Holocaust whose work was banned under the Soviet regime, moments of freedom, however small, have always been something to celebrate. Now in his 70s, he doesn't cycle much any more, but his dedication to freedom of expression is as strong as ever.
"I walk more now," he says, slowly sipping from a cup of coffee.
Konrád has been hailed as one of eastern Europe's finest writers. His provocative essays on the East-West conflict and the Iron Curtain and his novels about socialist disillusionment were applauded abroad but led to a publication ban on his work in Hungary for most of the 1970s and early 1980s. Like the Czechoslovakian author (and later president), Václav Havel, Konrád was part of the dissident movement against the Soviet regime.
For a moment it's hard to believe that this small, quietly-spoken man fought in the Hungarian uprising in 1956, narrowly escaped the concentration camps in 1944, and put his life and career at risk by speaking out against the Soviet regime. This is his first visit to Ireland - invited to read at the University of Ulster in Coleraine - and his first impressions are good. He admires the friendly people and "the good quality of wood" used in the furniture of the hotel.
Konrád is a child of old Europe, a far cry from the EU community as we have come to know it. So what does he think of the new Europe now? "This is what we wanted," he says with a shrug. The divide between eastern and western Europe still exists, he believes, but mostly for economic reasons. "There is quite a big difference between Ireland and Eastern European countries - like the danger of poverty. This type of fear is real in my country. The people experience and see poverty. They know what will happen to the schoolboy if his father loses his job."
Years ago, Konrád was asked, while on holiday in The Netherlands, what kind of a country he would like. "I would like to have such a dull country as yours," he replied. "I don't like dangers."
UNLIKE HIS FELLOW countryman and Nobel Prize-winning author, Imre Kertész, Konrád did not experience the Nazi concentration camps. Born into a Jewish family in Berettyóújfalu, near Debrecen, Konrad was 11 when his parents were arrested in 1944. He and his sister escaped to Budapest, where they lived with an aunt. In Konrád's autobiographical novel, Feast in the Garden, he describes the small but sinister changes that occurred in his home town during the German occupation. He remembers the summer day when the Jews closed their stores and hung up "back soon" signs.
"My father was first arrested, and when my mother protested she was asked: 'Would you like to be with your husband?' She said yes. But she saved him because she was a very strong person."
Konrád remembers seeing his parents, looking thin and scrawny and with bent backs, as they returned, miraculously, from the camps. "It was just an accident that I remained alive," he says. "All of my schoolmates, boys and girls, were killed. I remember all of them."
Konrád describes now how he saw, as a young boy, the tears in the eyes of men who looked at him and thought of their own children who had been taken away.
"Now you are living instead of them," one man said to him. This phrase has lingered long in Konrád's mind, while the responsibility of a survivor to tell the story and to speak out against injustice is a recurring theme in his work. "It is kind of a duty," he says. "It stays with you your whole life."
After the war, Konrád and his family returned to their home town, but his father's farm-machinery shop was collectivised and they were forced to leave. "Then came a new regime," Konrád says. "I went into high school, but as a son of a middle-class person I was excluded from the university . . . I really felt the world around me was not especially kind."
Konrád ran into trouble with the Soviet regime when he participated in the Hungarian uprising in 1956. He later became a teacher, then a social worker, and again attracted criticism while he worked at the Hungarian Academy's Institute for Literary Scholarship.
"You couldn't publish anything. There was no publishing house that would dare to make a contract with you because you were a non-person, you wrote something that was very unpleasant for the state and the ruling party," he says. "How did I feel then? [The publication ban] was not a surprise for me. I had two options: to get away from there or to do something against it."
KONRÁD CONTINUED TO write, quickly gaining international recognition. In 1978 he co-authored a collection of essays called The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, which questioned the Marxist concept of class, Stalin's revolution and the role of the intelligentsia. This was not published in Hungary, although some of the essays were circulated underground.
In Antipolitics, Konrád examined peaceful solutions to Europe's East-West divide and questioned the irrationality of the Soviet regime. This book could not be published in Hungary, but was was hailed as a brilliant and refreshing polemic on its release in the US and UK.
His best-known novel, The Case Worker, is a bleak but fascinating insight into human suffering and was highly regarded internationally. Konrád moved to Berlin in 1982, where he later acted as the president of the Berlin Academy of Arts for six years.
Even after his own publication ban was lifted, Konrád continued to speak out against censorship around the world. In 1990 he became president of International Pen, the association of writers, founded in London, which has long championed the cause for freedom of speech.
"There are many people in the world who are afraid because of the ideas they express. It is still possible now that you can be killed for what you write," Konrád says. Censorship, he adds, "exists in more than 60 per cent of countries, meaning less than 40 per cent of people live in relatively free conditions".
"In so-called democracies like Russia, if you are an investigating journalist you will get a bullet in your head. [Murdered Russian journalist Anna] Politkovskaya, is the most well-known - but there are others, less well-known people, who disappear as well."
He also mentions the Turkish author, Orhan Pamuk, who was put on trial in Turkey for writing about the Armenian genocide, and Iran, where censorship is still rife.
But is censorship ever a good thing? "Only for material that goes against the fundamental principles of human rights," Konrad says. As examples, he cites child pornography or work that is an incitement to hatred against minorities, or ethnic and religious groups.
KONRÁD WAS ONE of the few European intellectuals who backed George Bush's war in Iraq, but he is slow to be drawn into a conversation about this now.
"I am glad Saddam Hussein was removed from power," he says. "Every fall of a dictatorship is a good thing - I wrote about it just before the war . . . I accept intervention, but I'm not a military strategist."
He now lives in Budapest, where he still writes almost every day. Unlike his early days as a writer, he is now well-respected in Hungary, "except in the right-wing press", he says with a smile.
After we finish up, Konrád wanders off into the bustle and traffic of O'Connell Street. He is a walking cross-section of old and new Europe, a witness to everything from Nazism and the fall of the Iron Curtain to Hungary's entry into the EU.
"For many people it's history," he says. "But for me it's still memory."
