György Konrád

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 Nagyvárad, and on to Auschwitz.

Most of Konrád's classmates died in Birkenau.

György (George) Konrád (2 April 1933 – 13 September 2019) was a Hungarian novelist, pundit, essayist and sociologist known as an advocate of individual freedom.

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.

In February 1945, George and his sister went back to Berettyóújfalu, and in June their parents were released from Strasshof concentration camp 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.

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.

He left in 1951 to study literature, sociology and psychology at the Lenin Institute of Eötvös Loránd University.

In 1956 he was involved in the Hungarian Uprising, and served in the National Guard, made up mostly of university students.

Most of his family left for the west, but Konrád decided to remain in Hungary.

The story of Konrád's survival as a child is told in his autobiographical novel Departure and Return.

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.

Between 1960 and 1965 Konrad was employed as a reader at the Magyar Helikon publishing house, where he was chief editor of works by Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Babel, and Balzac.

In 1965, he joined the Urban Science and Planning Institute, there undertaking research in urban sociology with the sociological research group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

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.

He was working closely with urban sociologist Iván Szelényi with whom he wrote a book, On the Sociological Problems of the New Housing Developments (1969), and two extensive works on the management of the country's regional zones, as well as on urbanistic and ecological trends in Hungary.

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.

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.

When the restriction of travel expired 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.

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.

Between 1977 and 1982, two volumes of Konrád's essays appeared: The Temptation of Autonomy (not translated into English) and Antipolitics.

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.