George Konrád's A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life and The City Builder
Marcus, David
A GUEST IN MY OWN COUNTRY: A HUNGARIAN LIFE by George Konrcid, trans. Jim Tucker The Other Press, 2007 352 pp $15.95 THE CITY BUILDER by George Konrcid, trans. Ivan Sanders Dalkey Archive...
...Documents meant nothing: only drunkenness and fear had meaning—and the sympathy or antipathy of the moment...
...What ails a polity, however, can also cure it, and the late-twentieth-century's civil resistance to totalitarianism was not only against the state's nefarious reach into the present but also the past...
...However, Konrad's anecdotal miscellany does not construct a collective portrait from the brick and mortar of the personal...
...Antipolitics is "loose, individual, biological...
...Soon after their arrival, Horthy was deposed by the Nazis...
...Instead of engaging state culture and politics, he or she helps forge a counter society in which all intellectual and cultural spheres are depoliticized and nonideological.* "Let the government stay on top," Konrad wrote in Antipolitics, "we will live our own lives underneath it...
...Both Konrad and Szelenyi were briefly jailed for the book, and after their release both were granted an exit visa...
...There was no real dictator, only a long line of downtrodden individuals, each imagining that everyone in front of them was an informer and everyone behind them a reckless anarchist...
...it can wait a long time, then suddenly spring...
...This first book, though despairing, ends with revival...
...With the exception of an elder cousin and a set of twins who endured testicular experiments, the Konrad children were the only Jewish children from Berettythijfalu to have survived the Second World War...
...Though seamlessly abridged into a single volume, the English language rendition does not permit the structural separation Konrad intended to divide such disparate experiences.* Departure and Return, like Imre Kertesz's Fatelessness, is an evocative description of a child's departure from the civil world and his eventual return...
...A murderous cadre of Arrow Cross took over, and marauding gangs roamed the streets shooting Jews at will...
...Because I am skeptical about everything human, about our collective self...
...Their quilted pastiche of genres and story lines mimics the manifolds of memory—not only the compulsion to remember...
...The opportunity and responsibility of exercising power is theirs...
...resistance is fomented through deconstructive efforts...
...life, no longer vessel for ideology...
...we know the answer...
...It is no surprise, then, that George Konrdd's long-awaited memoir returns to this tactic...
...In Konrad's experience, "the official culture around me has always been deceitful and, except for a few exceptional years, hostile...
...As its title suggests, Up on the Hill During *The English translation of A Guest in My Own Country was edited by Michael Henry Heim...
...Even fellow antipolitics writer Czeslaw Milosz prefaced A Native Realm by pointing to the impersonal value of memory...
...His 122 n DISSENT / Winter 2008 BOOKS aim was the depoliticization of human existence, an ultimately political aspiration that culminated in the 'Gentle Revolutions' of 1989...
...Art is no longer propaganda...
...As with Proust, the external world for Konrdd is mere foil and metaphor for the memories that lie within...
...Solzhenitsyn called his epic Gulag Archipelago, which gathered testimonies from 227 prisoners, "our common, collective monument to all those who were tortured and murdered...
...In all three, a rueful narrator mines a troubled past in search of a more reconcilable present...
...After all, this is his sixth book on his favorite trope—iterative autobiography— and we only need a life in anecdotes...
...Both characters are thinly disguised iterations of Konrad, and the novels open with eponymous George Konrad the Novelist ("I am writing a novel about a fictitious novel") introducing us to his fictional alter egos, David Kobra, the plaintive, long-suffering dissident, and Janos Dragoman the philandering raconteur...
...Writing turns observation into physical action," he wrote in A Feast in the Garden and his antipolitical activism expressed itself in a pacific, literary form of rebellion...
...In The Intel lectuals on the Road to Class Power, he and co-author Ivan Szelenyi explore the complacency of Hungarian intellectuals...
...By the end of these early novels, psychological realism is replaced with garrulous stream of consciousness...
...His novels are all semiautobiographical and draw heavily from his memories as Jew and dissident in ArrowCross- and communist-controlled Hungary...
...Turning to the past, I reach the future, I recall people I never knew...
...THE POWER of antipolitics comes from the intellectual's stoic refusal to participate in the present political system...
...A burgeoning freemarket economics has replaced communism...
...His memories are sparse and have a quality of the rehearsed...
...The mind, too, *Like the nineteenth-century Russians, Konrad believed that the primary societal function of the intelligentsia was dissent—" self-criticism in the first-person plural...
...This method of politics functions in the negative...
...Having survived in Austrian internment camps, they returned to Hungary after the war and reopened their hardware store...
...However, when faced with the opportunity to use his weapon, he demurred: "I did nothing to appease the popular demand for murder...
...Memory is home...
...Living in Eastern Europe," Konrad writes, "meant being constantly prepared for defeat and backwardness but also to question what it is to be human...
...Konrdd gave name and idea to the antipolitics movement, and though resistance is no longer a persistent lodestar, his ruminative retelling quivers with the politics of the past...
...There are no happy or unhappy people...
...Its liberalism and democratic spirit exist not as dogma but as pervasive style...
...It is remarkable that the Konrad children survived such murderous pandemonium...
...The Agenda novels take this narrative technique even farther...
...Konrdd's early novels form a loose triptych of his professions...
...DISSENT / Winter 2008 • 121 BOOKS a Solar Eclipse deals with a totalitarianism in which the physical ability to see is countered by a comprehensive desire to manufacture what is seen...
...The arrest, however, "bestowed a great fortune upon us"— for after his parents' imprisonment, Konrad paid 30,000 pengos to help himself, his sister, and two cousins escape to Budapest, where Jews were still under the protection of Regent Horthy...
...As Jews during the Second World War and political dissidents during the cold war, their itinerant lives are marred "by a fruitless search for a truly safe hiding place...
...Even as the Russians approached on the eastern front, the Arrow Cross's "mood for murder flared up and flagged by turns" and they continued "filling the ice-flow-congested Danube with old ladies and young girls...
...there is really nothing and no one at all...
...He last wrote on Martin Amis...
...History books are burned...
...The event, relived, grows more and more enigmatic, and richer and richer in meaning...
...Central and Eastern Europe no longer exist under oppressive regimes...
...Retrospection—in its refusal to participate in the present—became the ultimate technique of antipolitics...
...His later novels, which make up the uncompleted trilogy Agenda, are his most overtly autobiographical...
...As a memoirist, Konrad resists transforming personal memory into collective remembrance...
...All the others," Konrad writes, "ended up as ashes...
...Civil society is open and culturally vibrant...
...IF Departure and Return is historical testament in the face of physical erasure, Up on a Hill During a Solar Eclipse depicts a struggle against a more insidious reality, and the form of its disobedience, one of methodical, antipolitical cogitation, articulates a much more politically instructive message for today's society...
...124 n DISSENT / Winter 2008...
...they became vast cataloguers of personal history, practitioners of what can be called the "semi-autobiography...
...Like many Central European novelists, Konrad tells his stories through structure as much as plot...
...Primo Levi's magisterial Survival in Auschwitz was written to satisfy "the immediate and violent impulse" to "tell our story to `the rest,' to make 'the rest' participate in it...
...In this antipolitical scheme of liberalism, novelized memory is of particular value...
...Civil society continues, however insipid and disfigured...
...In their refusal to conform to a single, realist form, The Agenda novels not only mirror Konrad's lifelong sense of displacement but are also emblematic of his antipolitics...
...Instead of thrusting the individual into the foreground, one can focus attention on the background, looking upon oneself as a sociological phenomenon...
...Their novels served as covert antihistories that, in their non-linearity and depoliticization of memory, refused to accept the pervasive oneness of state history...
...is fortified because we have dared the watchtowers and watchdogs...
...Under these conditions, antipolitics can easily become an excuse for laissez-faire governance— or, worse, political apathy—and after 1989, Konrad was quick to concede that his method of sedition, as a political force, was outmoded...
...The self, with its own unsurpassable truth, is king in only one place: in literature...
...the past, no longer state history...
...You become an adult the moment you face your own death," Konrad writes, "which means I have been an adult from the age of eleven...
...The City Builder, a firstperson history of failed urban planning and utopianism, recalls his work at the Budapest Institute of Urban Planning...
...His early work closely charts the inner deterioration of their protagonists with an ever increasing narrative evasiveness...
...EAR THE END of A Guest in My Own Country, Konrad puts forth a final political use of memory...
...The idealistic ending of Departure and Return is quickly usurped by Soviet authoritarianism, and this second volume charts the slower, more internal deterioration caused by civil totalitarianism...
...When considered against history's many brutal tyrants, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, and Stalin stand out as pathological rewriters of personal and state history...
...Central to his memoir, as well as his Agenda novels, is the fraught relationship between individual and homeland, citizen and state...
...Memory, in its meandering unreliability, serves as a metaphor for this sense of "internal migration...
...Konrad asked in these pages...
...Now, Konrad the Adult is a lead actor, first as a gun-wielding rebel in the 1956 Hungarian uprising, then as a novelist and political dissident...
...Liberalism is not a political or ideological construct but an individualist posture—one built on its anti-ideological, almost misanthropic distrust...
...They have overcome the censorship of the communist bureaucracy, created their own institutions, moving in on the state and the media...
...The library of memories," Konrad writes in A Feast in the Garden, "is neither the truth nor a pack of lies...
...No single story line survives the duplicitous folds of the remembered past...
...As a Jewish story, Konrad's tale is one of remembered fortuity...
...Despite this, Konrad stayed...
...It is primarily a study of the militarized and murderous mode of historical revision favored by the Nazis...
...Plot and character unravel through revealed past...
...Underlying the memoir is the question of Konrad's "wounded patriotism," and the memoir is ultimately an DISSENT / Winter 2008...
...They don't execute opposition, because there is no more opposition...
...AN EASY temptation when reading A Guest in My Own Country is to understand it in the context of other great survivor memoirs in which the protagonist spends a lifetime surviving the relentless advances of fascism and communism...
...After he spends almost two years starving and running, the fascists are defeated, civil society returns, and a thirteen-year-old Konrad, once again acquainted with his parents, begins life anew...
...The struggle against power," Kundera wrote in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, "is the struggle of memory against forgetting," and through the cloaked ambivalences of memory, the Iron Curtain dissidents critiqued the present—and, occasionally, escaped censorship...
...Konrad writes in A Feast in the Garden: Reliving the past that is the most fantastic adventure of all...
...For the Jews of Europe, life was an arduous struggle to escape historical and physical erasure...
...For Konrad, who was eleven when Hungary signed a treaty with the Nazis, the rise of fascist totalitarianism meant that all semblances of childhood evaporated...
...However, the recollected past has also been Konrad's literary and political modus operandi for over a half century and when, at the end of the memoir, Konrad asks, "Where is home...
...There is no denying that lately intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe have achieved extraordinary powers," Konrad wrote in 1990...
...DAVID MARCUS is online editor of Dissent...
...Soviet-bloc novelists Milan Kundera, Ivan Klima, Joseph Skvorecky, Czeslaw Milosz, Danilo Kig, and George Konrdd not only resisted the reigning culture of kitsch...
...Authorial thinking begins where public thinking leaves off...
...Its antipolitical resistance is against ideological and political collectivization—not political cohabitation...
...123 BOOKS embittered account of the tepid relationship between an individual and his homeland—not Europe and its Jews or the Communists and their subjects...
...it is fable...
...A Guest in My Own Country is a slow, cogitative look at a life lived under various totalitarian regimes...
...because for me there are no institutions, persons, or concepts that are sacrosanct or above criticism...
...Instead, he "stuck to formulating and distributing antipolitical texts," a more subversive— and eventually more successful— method of agitation...
...It is symbolic that Konrad does not continue this mode of experimental retrospection in A Guest in My Own Country...
...Konrad never picked up a gun again...
...The day after they left, the Jews of Beretty6tijfalu were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz...
...Too lazy and inept to handle the organization that went with oppositional activities, I did not get much involved, especially since political activism started early in the morning—my best time of the day...
...Memory, for Konrad, is political precisely because it ameliorates the confines of historical collectivity, and what ultimately enlivens A Guest in My Own Country, a life story now in its sixth iteration, is its invigorating depiction of the solitary and itinerant outsider...
...To remember, in a police state, is one of the last acts left to the citizen, and the retrospective novel gives Konrad's deconstructive antipolitics a creative, intellectual base...
...But antipolitics is much more than political protest...
...However, A Guest in My Own Country is more than historical testament to the peripatetic life of Jews and political dissidents in twentieth-century Europe...
...Liberalism is, first of all, a style: worldly, civilized, personal, ironic...
...In its refusal to participate in the present, as well as its playful depoliticization of the past, it reasserts individual autonomy...
...It moves relentlessly, mysteriously, tortuously...
...Underlying these early novels is the guilt brought on by a past fraught with complicity—after all, his protagonists are state employees and their retrospective narratives serve to allevi120 n DISSENT / Winter 2008 BOOKS ate this guilt of collaboration...
...Cities become battlegrounds...
...When he was eleven, his parents were taken by the Gestapo and sent to an Austrian internment camp...
...and The Loser, written while the blacklisted Konrdd worked at a state-run sanitarium, retraces the life of an institutionalized academic...
...In his memoir, we get the relaxed storytelling of a master litterateur—one who is now free to write as he pleases—and his narrative is forthright and realist...
...During the 1956 uprising, Konrad patrolled Budapest's public squares and university quads, a "humanist with a machine gun...
...In this part of the world, people eat and drink, buy ugly clothes off the rack, and watch television nonstop...
...the dance of unreliable fingers on a switchboard...
...Coming back from that journey we find the police less terrifying...
...The first two, A Feast in the Garden and Stonedial, tell the interconnected stories of two prodigal Budapest novelists who have returned to their semi-rural cities of birth...
...Why am I a liberal...
...In each novel he is careful to build a proper formalistic edifice to match its internal contents...
...The Case Worker, his first, captures his gritty encounters as a young, idealistic social worker...
...Having spent his childhood outside of civil society, Konrad now is a well-known member, and the tepid relationship between citizen and state, once entirely fissured, now becomes an entrenched struggle...
...Early in this second volume, we encounter an anecdote emblematic of Konrad's method of resistance...
...Konrad's antipolitical deconstructions are argued to revive the individual in civil society and after historical distillation, antipolitics is ultimately an ethos of civil culture...
...Ivan Sanders Dalkey Archive Press, 2007 184 pp $12.50 PERHAPS THE most idiosyncratic characteristic of twentieth-century despotism was its obsession with historical revision...
...In Budapest, the day-to-day task of survival continued...
...More than half of Hungary's Jews were killed during the Second World War...
...If, as Stalin said, a totalitarian regime imposed ideological consent through the engineering of human souls, then much of this effort was spent creating and enforcing elaborate counter-histories...
...Forests become improvised death camps...
...Life in communist Hungary is one of ultimate flatness...
...It grows in the direction of the possible: it feels its way along the path of least resistance...
...THE HUNGARIAN version of A Guest in My Own Country came out in two volumes: Departure and Return, a devastating account of childhood (if one can call it that) in Nazi-overrun Hungary, and Up on the Hill During a Solar Eclipse, a vigorous and reprobative critique of adulthood in communist Hungary...
...KONRAD HAS made a career out of the remembered past...
...Konrad's parents were equally lucky...
...Day by day and almost minute by minute," George Orwell wrote in 1984, "the past was brought up to date...
...In their discursive nonlinearity, these novels attack the politicized unity of totalitarian life...
...But what does antipolitics mean today...
...In the time/ space continuum of consciousness, Was and Will Be occupy the same point...
...They switch between essay and novel, first-person recollections and omniscient, third-person narrative...
...The intellectuals of our region have outgrown their minority...
Vol. 55 • January 2008 • No. 1
