Bear with me a little longer. Yes, this post will again deal with the nowadays fashionable topic of the Orbán regime’s assault on the “liberal cultural elite.” What does “liberal” mean in the land of Fidesz? The adjective as currently used in Hungary has absolutely nothing to do with the original definition of the term and is widely applied to anyone who is critical of Viktor Orbán.
The latest development in the ongoing Kulturkampf is the publication of op-ed pieces that attempt to discredit individual members of this group. Just in the last two days two such attacks appeared in Magyar Idők, one against Sándor Radnóti, a literary critic and philosopher, written by János Dénes Orbán, and the other against György Konrád, the novelist and essayist and, as the English-language Wikipedia notes, somebody who is “known as an advocate of individual freedom.” I assume it is this attribute that makes Konrád a favorite target of the extreme right. As you will see later, I think it is important to state that both Radnóti and Konrád are Jewish.
Here I will dissect today’s product, an opinion piece written by Albert Beke titled “It is a mistake to idolize Konrád.” I must admit that the name Albert Beke at first meant nothing to me, but as I read through the available material on him on the internet, my memory was jiggled and led me to an encounter 23 years ago with his book Ady and His Friends in a New Light. There was one especially horrific page in that book to which I had attached a Post-it page marker, which was still affixed (kudos to 3M) when I found it in my library today.
According to Árpád Szakács, the author of more than 10 damning articles on the liberal cultural elite, one of the sins of Gergely Prőhle, director of the Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum, was that he allowed a birthday party to be held in the museum for Konrád, who celebrated his 85th birthday on April 2. Albert Beke, whom Magyar Idők identifies as a literary historian, finds Konrád a less than mediocre writer who might have done better if he hadn’t gotten involved in politics. I guess if Konrád had ended up on the “right” side of politics, Beke’s assessment of his literary talents would be much more positive. But Konrád ended up on the “wrong” side. He became involved with SZDSZ (Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége/Alliance of Free Democrats), a liberal party which after 1990 became the second largest party in the country. In the last eight years especially, SZDSZ has become the bogeyman of the Hungarian right. Moreover, according to Beke, Konrád is not only untalented as a writer, he wasn’t worth a nickel as a politician. “He wasn’t the real leader of SZDSZ but rather its instrument, who drifted with the current.” In the rest of the article Beke piles abuse upon abuse about Konrád’s lack of literary talent.
Who is this Beke? He graduated in 1956 from the University of Debrecen with a diploma that enabled him to teach Hungarian literature in high school. After graduation he worked for a few years at the library of the University of Debrecen, but in 1962 he moved to Budapest where he taught at “various high schools.” After he retired sometime after 1989, he was invited by the Gáspár Károli Reformed University (established in 1993) to teach Hungarian literary history of the second half of the nineteenth century. Beke’s academic output before 1990 was meager, but since then he publishes sometimes as many as three or four books a year. Almost all of his books are published by Szenci Molnár Társaság, about which I was unable to find any information.
But let’s return to Beke’s book on Ady and His Friends. Published in 1995, also by the Szenci Molnár Társaság, it seems to be a version of the text that subsequently earned Beke a Ph.D. in 1997, at the ripe age of 64. The slim volume, which by the way is crawling with typos, is divided into three parts. The first two focus on Endre Ady’s friendships: with Gyula Földessy (1874-1964) and with Baron Lajos Hatvany-Deutsch (1880-1961). In his introduction Beke finds it necessary to point out that Földessy came from a German family while Lajos Hatvany was Jewish.
Most of the text in the second section dwells on the complicated relationship between Hatvany, the rich patron who generously supported Endre Ady who seemed to be always in need of money, and the poet. Hatvany was much more than a patron; he was also a writer, critic, and literary historian. In 30 pages Beke plays a “love me, love me not” game in which he tries to figure out whether Ady really loved Hatvany as much as he claimed and whether Hatvany was as fond of him as he later remembered. Beke’s final verdict seems to be that they were not such great friends after all.
Moreover, this friendship, in Beke’s estimation, had a dark side. Through Hatvany Ady was dragged into the company of young radical Jewish intellectuals “whose identification with the Hungarian nation was obviously not as deep as Ady’s…. The Hungarian [i.e. not Jewish] intellectuals and members of the Hungarian gentry, of which he considered himself a part, cast him off and accused him of selling himself to the Jews. This charge was unfounded, but the leading lights of Nyugat [the leading literary publication of the time] who used Ady as their banner still came from the freshly assimilated Jewry, whose worst representatives introduced bloody terror in 1919 against Hungarians and demonstrated thousands of times since then their separateness from Hungarians. First in 1945 and the second time continuously since 1990.” (p. 80)
It was that page that took my breath away in 1995. After refreshing my memory, I am not at all surprised that Beke finds the Jewish Konrád untalented and his political views abhorrent. Because I suspect that Beke’s scornful judgment of his politics derives primarily from his belief that SZDSZ was a Jewish cabal that acted against the interests of good Hungarians, who gathered under the banner of the Magyar Demokratikus Fórum (MDF). I don’t know how Beke can ignore the fact that the people who later became the leaders of SZDSZ were the only ones in the whole country who openly resisted the dictatorship of the Kádár regime. Of course, he ignores Konrád’s heroic resistance to the regime and the consequences he had to endure: joblessness, a ban on foreign travel, and the constant fear of imprisonment.
Old friends from the “dissident” days: Ferenc Kőszeg, György Konrád, and Gábor Demszky
Despite the friendship between Viktor Orbán and Benjamin Netanyahu and the Hungarian government’s philo-Semitic utterances and pro-Israeli policies, many people question whether the Orbán regime fully accepts Jews, especially liberal Jews, as members of a Christian democratic Hungarian nation. That the Orbán government uses anti-Semites like Albert Beke to attack Hungarian Jewish writers as prominent as György Konrád in semi-official government propaganda publications lends credence to the skeptics’ position.
