György Konrád as a Post-Dissident Public Intellectual Biography,Interventions,Reception

Introduction

György Konrád, a young survivor of the Holocaust in Hungary in 1944–1945, was repeatedly discriminated against and practically banned from publishing during the 1970s and 1980s under Hungary’s Kádár regime. During the latter decades, Konrád emerged as one of the most discussed Hungarian “dissident thinkers” internationally whose key ideas—antipolitical, anti-nationalistic, pacifistic, questioning the status quo, favoring pluralism and decentralization—resonated in the East as well as the West. Shortly after 1989, his name was among the few who were recurrently credited internationally, and indeed often celebrated, for having “masterminded” the peaceful democratic transformation of central and eastern Europe—an exaggeration fed by a rather mythical understanding of the role dissidents played in “the making of 1989.”

Konrád’s international career as a public intellectual can be said to have begun in the second half of the 1970s with the reception of Western fellowships, first in West Berlin and later also in Paris, Vienna, and New York. ¹ As a clear sign of his growing recognition, he received a host of prestigious international awards starting in the 1980s, such as the Herder Prize in 1983 (in Austria), the Charles Villon European Essay Prize in 1986 (in Switzerland), the Peace Award of the German Book Traders Association in 1991, the Goethe Medal in 2000, the Charlemagne Prize of the City of Aachen in 2003 (all three in Germany), and a National Jewish Book Award in 2008 (in the United States). Right upon the end of Soviet-type rule in Hungary and across the Eastern bloc, Konrád was elected President of PEN International, a position he held for some three years in the early 1990s. Between 1997 and 2003, he was the director of the Academy of Arts in Berlin—and he was the first non-German person to assume this distinguished role.

György Konrád’s adult trajectory thus led from being a rather marginalized intellectual and then a reputed, if also vilified, dissident in a Soviet-type dictatorship to being a prominent member in the post–Cold War cultural and intellectual establishment of an enlarging West. The authority he possessed after 1989, indeed his position as a leading voice among European writers and thinkers, was to a large extent derived from the international appreciation of the ideas he formulated and the courageous dissident activities he undertook prior to the end of Soviet-type regimes in Europe. His fame and impact as a public intellectual after 1989 were key legacies of his pre-1989 dissident days, when Konrád arguably emerged as the single most visible post-dissident public intellectual from Hungary. (Note that this paper consistently uses the term “dissident” when focusing on Konrád’s activities in the years prior to 1989 and “post-dissident” when discussing his activities beyond that date.)

However, how Konrád wielded his post-dissident moral and political authority, and with what effects, have never been studied in detail—a gap this paper aims to fill. It will try to do so through a focus on two pillars of the legacies of Communist-era dissent as defined in the introduction to this thematic bloc: I will study both his prominent role as a post-dissident actor via his key public interventions after 1989 and the influence of his ideas via his scholarly reception. I shall begin by sketching Konrád’s biography, which extended from the periphery of interwar Hungary to post–Cold War international fame, via a comparison with Ágnes Heller, a female intellectual counterpart from the same Hungarian Jewish generation. I shall subsequently highlight some of Konrád’s key contributions as a celebrated, but also contested, public intellectual in post-Communist Hungary. Third, I will analyze Konrád’s high-profile involvement in international discourses in the post–Cold War period via prominent examples of interviews, debate participations, and appearances in various documentaries. Fourth, I shall explore the scholarly reception of Konrád’s most influential ideas concerning intellectuals, antipolitics, and central Europe. Analyzing the post-1989 contributions and reception of one of the most iconic public intellectuals on both the national and transnational levels, this paper ultimately asks the following main research question: “How did György Konrád wield his post-dissident moral and political authority, and with what effects?”

Parallel Biographies: György Konrád and Ágnes Heller

György Konrád passed away after a prolonged illness on 13 September 2019, at the age of 86, merely two days after the architect László Rajk Jr. (who had just turned 70) and less than two months after the philosopher Ágnes Heller at the age of 90. ² The departure in quick succession of three such widely recognized and appreciated public intellectuals—just a few years after those of Imre Kertész (1929–2016) and Péter Esterházy (1950–2016)—led commentators to mark the passing of a defining cohort of Hungarian intellectuals or even to conceptualize the end of an era in Hungarian intellectual life shaped to a significant extent by teenage witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust such as, perhaps most famously, Heller, Kertész, and Konrád. ³

Kertész, Konrád, and Heller all belonged to that most unfortunate generation of central and eastern European Jews who were born into the “lands in between” during the Great Depression at the time of the rise of Nazism in Germany and of Stalinist mass crimes in the Soviet Union. ⁴ Along with the novelist István Eörsi (1931–2005), the philosophers Ferenc Fehér (1933–1994) and György Márkus (1934–2016), the historians György Ránki (1930–1988) and Iván T. Berend, the economist János Kornai (1928–2021), and several notable others, the three of them were arguably members of the intellectually most exciting generational cohort of Jews in twentieth-century Hungary—the most internationally renowned such group in all of modern Hungary, with the possible exception of the towering figures of György Lukács, Karl Polányi, and Karl Mannheim, all of whom were born in Budapest between 1886 and 1893. ⁵

Briefly sketching the parallel and in some sense contrasting biographies of György Konrád and Ágnes Heller may help us grasp what was typical and what was highly specific about Konrád’s personal trajectory. ⁶ Konrád was raised in Berettyóújfalu, on the eastern fringes of interwar Hungary, where his father owned a hardware store and qualified as the highest-paying taxpayer of the village prior to the family’s antisemitic persecution. In 1944 the wave of mass deportations from Hungary cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Upon the arrest and later the deportation of his parents, Konrád, eleven years old at the time, made—together with his sister—a narrow and unlikely escape to Budapest. Under nominal Swiss protection in a so-called safe house in the capital city (which was in fact very far from safe), he experienced the brutality of the Arrow Cross’ chaotic and murderous rule in late 1944 and early 1945. Upon his liberation, he came to belong among the rare and often profoundly traumatized cohort of Jewish survivors from the Hungarian countryside. Only seven of the two hundred children in his Berettyóújfalu school survived the anti-Jewish genocide. His nuclear family (his parents and their two children) was in fact the only intact Hungarian Jewish one in a village where about a thousand Hungarian Jews had resided just a few years earlier.

At this point, let me briefly evoke the biography of Ágnes Heller to try thereby to elucidate briefly some more general patterns and specific features in Konrád’s biography. Konrád was still only a teenager when he experienced the imposition of Hungary’s Stalinist regime. Ágnes Heller, four years Konrád’s senior, who similarly survived the Holocaust in Budapest as a teenager, became, alongside a whole talented cohort among the philosophically minded, a disciple of the oddly dissenting staunch believer György Lukács. Enrolling at the Eötvös University of Budapest to study literature and Russian in 1951, Konrád, too, was impressed by Lukács’s intellect during his studies, but he was personally not particularly attracted to Marxism and certainly never got fixated on what was in many ways the defining intellectual-political horizon of the mid-twentieth century. ⁷ The renewed discrimination Konrád had to face when attempting to pursue his studies under the Hungarian Stalinist regime, this time due to his “bourgeois origins,” was certainly connected to his reluctance to commit.

Starting to “scribble” as part of a therapeutic agenda first suggested to him by an adult in that protected “Swiss house” in the cruel winter months of 1944–1945, and aspiring to become in his early adult years what he later called an “essayistic philosopher,” Konrád was about to launch his literary career in the palpable “mood of reform” in 1956. He participated in the short-lived Hungarian Revolution in the fall of that year. According to his own later admission, this was the sole time in his life when he chose to carry a weapon, though he consciously refrained from using it.

Nearly two decades into the long reign of János Kádár, Konrád was punished for expressing some “heretical ideas,” most notably in The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, co-authored with Iván Szelényi in 1973–1974—which, as will be discussed below, has remained his most well-known and influential work of scholarship. ⁸ Though never imprisoned, Konrád had to endure a long period of mandated unemployment during the 1970s and 1980s, when, with the exception of the release of a censored version of his novel A cinkos (in English translation The Loser) and a single article, he could publish only in samizdat or abroad. ⁹ These were the decades when Ágnes Heller, a target of the same anti-intellectual campaigns that followed the Hungarian thaw, largely spent in emigration with her husband Ferenc Fehér, first in Australia and then in the United States—decades that greatly facilitated her impressive international academic career.

Unlike his co-author, Iván Szelényi, Konrád chose not to emigrate—and arguably he refrained from doing so for a third time, since many Holocaust survivors from the countryside left the country shortly after 1944–1945, and Konrád might have emigrated upon the suppression of the 1956 revolution, too (when, among hundreds of thousands, his only sister did as well). Konrád would nonetheless spend significant stretches of time as an invited guest in Western countries during those decades. Those stays helped him establish close friendships and collaborations with key Western, particularly West German and American, intellectuals. ¹⁰ Simply put, the samizdat publishing that flourished in Hungary in the 1980s gave him access to a reading public in his odd home country, while Western translations of his writings—with Hans-Henning Paetzke being responsible for a whole host of translations into German over the decades—already enabled him to make a decent living prior to 1989.

Despite the above-discussed divergences, the biographies of Konrád and Heller came to converge in notable ways around this time: both achieved international recognition before 1989 and true national fame afterwards. They provide key examples of the transnational making of Cold War–era dissidents as well as of the intellectual and cultural authority select “post-dissidents” would come to enjoy after the fall of the Soviet-type regimes. ¹¹ Though not religious in any conventional sense, Konrád and Heller both began to address Jewish themes more explicitly in the last decades of the twentieth century; their “Jewishness” with all its traumatic implications had become an integral part of their public personae around the same time. Their turn to memory and Jewishness was, of course, inseparable from a massive cultural shift unfolding on both sides of the Atlantic that placed Holocaust remembrance into the symbolic center of European history in the twentieth century. ¹²

Heller and Konrád eventually became intellectual celebrities of sorts in Hungary and across large parts of the Western world—as well as the targets of renewed political attacks near the end of their long lives. Beyond aiming to delegitimize a tradition of intellectual dissent by targeting leading post-dissidents, such attacks on their persons also indicated the troubled and morally disturbing reception of internationally reputed Hungarian Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in a country that has shifted ever further to the right and a state that has continued to be largely unwilling to face its historical responsibilities. ¹³

In short, Konrád’s and Heller’s journeys from persecution and oppression to democratization were broadly comparable. These journeys started out as profoundly traumatic, were guided by a spirit of intellectual independence and moral courage, led to impressive achievements and major forms of recognition, and had depressing codas in the new age of “hybrid regimes” (when the quality of democracy sharply declined in Hungary, with its major features—such as free and fair elections, the rule of law, free media, etc.—being gravely weakened). Konrád’s and Heller’s respective trajectories thus display remarkable parallels but were far from identical—and some of those contrasts may be as revealing as the broad similarities. Whereas Heller grew up relatively affluent in the only Hungarian metropolis and had close family ties to Vienna, too, Konrád—who also came from a relatively affluent family, at least for local circumstances—was raised in a provincial region of eastern Hungary and had close family connections to Nagyvárad/Oradea (where his mother was born before the city was assigned to Romania at the end of World War I). Unlike Heller, Konrád was never a committed Marxist, nor did he choose to emigrate prior to 1989. Whereas Heller was a philosopher who devoted extensive attention to political theory, questions of modernity, and issues in ethics, and who recurrently discussed topics in literature, history, and politics as well, Konrád was a social scientist (an urban sociologist, to be more precise), fiction writer, and political-philosophical thinker.

It is important analytically to distinguish between these three interconnected roles of his, because Konrád could paint rather different pictures in various genres. He dwelled quite extensively, if in a rather detached manner, on his personal traumas in his autobiographical writings; he exposed profound injustices and social misery in his more sociologically oriented (if partly also fictional) work (see, most importantly, The Case Worker), and recurrently he sketched alternative or even utopian visions in his political essays. It was arguably through his unusually successful combination of these genres and intellectual offers that Konrád came to enjoy such an elevated status among public intellectuals. His political essays had literary flair, some of his novels drew directly on his sociological insights, his scholarship developed a new narrative of historical and political development, and so on. The downside of this versatility was that while Konrád’s name often appears even in the narrowest canons of East European dissidents (as in “Havel, Michnik, Konrád”), he was only rarely thought of as the very finest among representatives of any of the above-mentioned three roles (social scientist, fiction writer, political-philosophical thinker) in his homeland. ¹⁴ As a post-dissident, Konrád arguably had a more admirable reputation outside than inside Hungary, which in turn enabled him to play an especially prominent role internationally—a subject that will be analyzed below.

On Konrád’s Position as a Public Intellectual in Hungary after 1989

György Konrád’s specific position and status in post-Communist Hungary had much to do with generational issues and differences. The period around and shortly after 1989 was a historical moment in Hungary when intellectuals had real influence on politics, and liberals were arguably predominant among them. ¹⁵ Members of the most important liberal generational cohort—such as Tamás Bauer, Miklós Haraszti, János Kis, Bálint Magyar, György Petri (1943–2000), László Rajk Jr. (1949–2019), Ottilia Solt (1944–1997), and Gáspár Miklós Tamás (1948–2023)—who did so much to define the political orientation and discourses of the Alliance of Free Democrats, were younger than Konrád by a decade or two. ¹⁶ Similarly, the most discussed and appreciated fiction writers in Hungary since the 1980s—such as Péter Esterházy and Péter Nádas, increasingly also László Krasznahorkai—were born between 1942 and 1954, while some of the most respected literary critics—such as Péter Balassa (1947–2003) and Sándor Radnóti—who did much to theorize their innovations and canonize their accomplishments, were born shortly after the Second World War. All these broadly liberal public intellectuals and writers belonged to the defining middle generation around the time of the “regime change” of 1989, whereas Konrád was already approaching sixty at the time. He was arguably always more likely to play the role of “wise old man” than that of a slightly older brother in the circles of such liberal elite intellectuals.

It was perhaps partly due to this age difference, combined with Konrád’s quiet and benevolent radicalism, as well as his bridge-building ability in an increasingly polarized environment, that allowed him to avoid passionate personal animosities and retain large parts of his authority. Konrád’s was indeed a rather unusual case in that he was closely affiliated with a liberal intellectual milieu, often called urbánus in Hungarian, which consisted mostly of people from Hungary’s only metropolis (and many of whom had Hungarian Jewish family backgrounds), yet he also remained a man from the eastern edges of the country and a slower-paced age, and someone who enjoyed spending time in the village house he owned in Hegymagas in the hills north of Lake Balaton.

As Zoltán Gábor Szűcs has noted, while the leading liberal intellectuals of post-1989 Hungary tended to be well versed in the social sciences and to think of political issues in terms of “social scientific solutions,” their major opponents, the népi (populist, literally: “of the people”) writers were primarily concerned with what they saw as existential questions for the (ethnically defined) community of Hungarians. ¹⁷ Being both a social scientist and a writer, Konrád was intimately acquainted with members of both groups. He was indeed among the very few people recurrently categorized as urbánus and a key participant in the democratic opposition who was nonetheless personally invited by the népiek as late as their Lakitelek meeting of 1987 (a meeting that contributed to the establishment of the Hungarian Democratic Forum the year after, the main rival of Konrád’s liberal Alliance of Free Democrats in the years to come).

Key Interventions of a Post-Dissident Public Intellectual

György Konrád’s personal philosophy, which he developed in response to the profound suffering in his youth and the political discrimination he experienced in later years, was helpful when it came to his ability to be empathic and pursue acts of mediation. He profoundly distrusted state authority ever since his traumatic youthful experiences, but he apparently continued to believe firmly in the potential for goodness in individual human beings. Principled in his rejection of collectivism, Konrád the dissident consistently promoted human autonomy and hoped for a gradual revolution by its growing reassertion. There was indeed something skeptical and utopian in his famed antipolitical stance: skeptical of large ideological projects and grand gestures but utopian in sketching the contours of a different, much preferable world beyond power politics.

However, Konrád’s brand of skeptical utopianism also had a rather under-defined relationship to liberal democratic politics after 1989. What was antipolitics supposed to mean from a moral and a political point of view at a time when party competition was open and free? How were antipolitical attitudes supposed to interact and be reconciled with support for liberalism as a political platform and a party program? Konrád did not offer theory-based answers to such complex questions. Rather, as I have argued elsewhere, he explicitly contributed to key political goals of the Alliance of Free Democrats in the years following 1989 while aiming to maintain his antipolitical stance. He did so partly by reflecting on matters of principle and style rather than actual policy choices. Yet his speeches and essays after 1989 tended to employ several dichotomies from the liberal oppositional vocabulary of those days that were often used sharply to critique the government and the coalition parties supporting it. ¹⁸

While never a professional politician, by 1991 Konrád not only enjoyed a high profile in Hungarian public life but became one of the main initiators and spokespersons for the Democratic Charter. ¹⁹ He thereby led a major campaign to defend liberal democracy against what was perceived as the threat posed by the autocratically inclined government headed by József Antall (who was elected prime minister as a result of the first free elections in 1990). While this civic-political engagement only solidified Konrád’s status as an intellectual-political hero in the eyes of some, it made others wonder whether he could still justifiably call himself a “mere civilian.” His engagement also exposed him, a renowned Holocaust survivor, to open antisemitic abuse. Trying to maintain his antipolitical credentials while already being widely recognized as a prominent liberal public intellectual was at the heart of the debate surrounding his activities in the increasingly charged environment of the early 1990s—arguably next to his perceived Jewishness in a country that seemed nearly obsessed with “the Jewish question” and the problem of antisemitism at the time.

Later on, Konrád’s opposition to the 1999 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing campaign against (rump) Yugoslavia, which he soon combined—rather paradoxically—with an endorsement of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, sparked further controversies. These cases are worth highlighting here since they constituted the most significant U.S.-led, Western decisions to go to war after the end of the Cold War. Regarding NATO’s bombing of Hungary’s neighbor at a time when the country had just joined the alliance, Konrád—whom György Szerbhorváth rightly called a leading voice among Hungarian opponents of NATO’s intervention—essentially made three arguments. ²⁰ First, Yugoslavia had not attacked anyone, and therefore invading it was unjustifiable. Second, the intervention took sides between otherwise closely comparable “ethnic warriors” to endorse the questionable demands of Kosovo Albanian rebels. Third, the bombing was downright counterproductive in terms of removing Slobodan Milošević and his regime. ²¹ The first and last of these three points and also the second part of the middle one probably sounded more acceptable to those who ultimately disagreed with Konrád’s stance.

Yet his critics did not fail to point out that his 1999 articles on Yugoslavia failed to offer an impartial perspective on the escalation of violence during the Yugoslav collapse and that he practically ignored the heavily repressive nature of the Yugoslav (later Serbian) regime in Kosovo. Critics charged that by foregrounding the Kosovo Albanians’ violent uprising and the supposedly reactive nature of Yugoslav state repression (by both the “second” and the “third” Yugoslavias), Konrád had partly ignored and partly twisted the historical evidence to provide an apologia of sorts.

Konrád’s criticism of Serb-inflicted violence at the time was indeed overly reserved, and in many ways insufficient. In his 1999 writings, which were released in book form, too, and soon appeared in Serbian translation in Belgrade, he called Slobodan Milošević’s major sin, more than a little euphemistically, one of “oversight.” At one point, he even referred to Bosniaks as “Muslim Serbs.” ²² Irrespective of their factual basis (or rather the lack thereof), Konrád’s arguments were at least based on principles of the international order and legitimate political action—unlike, for example, those of the recent Nobel laureate for literature Peter Handke.

Four years later, Konrád openly endorsed what he saw as the removal of Saddam Hussein. He regarded Hussein as a genocidal and unpredictable tyrant worse than Milošević, whose necessary ousting, unlike that of Milošević, could only ever take place through external force. ²³ By explicitly recalling the military victory needed to end the Nazi regime in his youth and also pointing to his subsequent grave experiences under dictatorial rule, Konrád highlighted the urgent need to reduce the number of dangerous autocracies in the world just when the Iraq War was being prepared. Having framed what needed to be avoided thus, Konrád failed to address the question: How could the democratization of Iraq have followed the invasion without there being sufficiently strong internal sources for it?

Konrád’s political-moral reasoning had respectable intellectual origins in this case, too. However, his grasp of complex historical-political processes remained rather limited and the conclusions he drew could thus be reductionist, at times even simplistic. As Victoria Harms has emphasized, leading New York–based intellectuals drew opposite conclusions from similar premises in this crucial moment—and this disagreement between them and their Hungarian post-dissident friends and allies, such as Konrád, in many ways broke their long-standing personal-political alliance. ²⁴

Konrád’s decision to quit the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats in 2009 proved to be rather anti-climactic, since the party—though it remained in power in coalition with the Hungarian Socialist Party until 2008—was already on the cusp of becoming irrelevant, having performed miserably in the European elections of June 2009. It was not until 2015, though, that Konrád managed directly to contradict and truly upset liberal and progressive intellectual opinion on a momentous issue. ²⁵ In the name of salvaging liberal democracy and secular humanism in Europe, he unexpectedly came out largely in favor of the rejectionist stance on immigration advocated by Viktor Orbán—the right-wing nationalist and autocratic prime minister Konrád otherwise explicitly opposed. ²⁶ In an infamous conversation published in the Italian daily La Repubblica, Konrád spoke of a migrant “tsunami” hitting Europe, and he tried to explain that the Hungarian economy, unlike the German one, could not meaningfully accommodate masses of “qualified” (sic) new arrivals. ²⁷ He even aimed to normalize the Hungarian government’s construction of a border fence by pointing, in clearly non-normative fashion, to the existence of many such physical barriers around the world. Rejecting any comparison of the new Hungarian fence with the Berlin Wall on what were supposedly moral grounds, Konrád’s main problem with Orbán’s barrier seemed to have been practical—he thought that it could not serve as an effective deterrent.

Like that of so many other former dissident heroes in central and eastern Europe, Konrád’s path thus led, metaphorically speaking, from the pan-European picnic of 1989 to what Slavoj Žižek called the “desert of the real” around Baghdad. ²⁸ It then led on to the village of Röszke (a locality Konrád likely never visited) on the Hungarian-Serbian border, where a makeshift refugee camp had sprung up right behind the infamous border fence. In his case, the often splendidly expressed desire to overcome the East-West divide during the Cold War thus allowed for rather crude pro-Western and Eurocentric visions afterwards. ²⁹

Konrád took what might well have been his most controversial stance exactly around the time when the key liberal journals that had largely defined the intellectual discourses of post-1989 Hungary began to cease publication one after the other. The post-samizdat Beszélő, informally associated with the Alliance of Free Democrats, folded at the end of 2013; the quality periodical Holmi closed shop, after a quarter of a century, in 2014, whereas its counterpart (and rival) 2000 halted publication (as it turned out, temporarily) in 2016. Konrád’s 2015 commentary thus almost sounded as if he personally wished to bid farewell to an era of intellectual liberality and political openness. ³⁰

While a few remarks in a daily paper, however problematic they might be, do not come close to equaling the oeuvre of a lifetime, by uttering them, Konrád also unwittingly confirmed that defensive pessimism had become part of the new European mainstream. Ultimately, the question remains open whether, when upsetting his liberal and progressive friends and intellectual-political allies at such a key moment of political-moral crisis, he was trying to reaffirm his cherished independence of mind, consciously disassociating himself from much weakened Hungarian liberalism, or merely admitting his fears in old age.

What should also have become clear from this brief exposé is that several of Konrád’s key interventions as a post-dissident public intellectual in Hungary regarding questions of international politics were rather contrarian and certainly not uncontroversial. While it would be unfair to expect perfect intellectual consistency across decades, the recognition of this contrarianism only makes it more conspicuous how an opposition to Muslims and Islam—which, as we shall see below, Konrád was not always careful enough to distinguish from Islamism—connected his above-discussed three stances.

Konrád as Member of the Western Intellectual Establishment

This finding in turn raises another question: In what ways did Konrád wield his post-dissident authority as a member of the European and Western intellectual establishment? Based on extended interviews and conversations with him, discussions and debates in which he participated, and various documentaries in which he appeared, whether in Canada, Germany, or the Netherlands, this section explores how he contributed to prominent post–Cold War era public discourses internationally. Unlike in the previous section, I shall not proceed chronologically in my analysis of the above-mentioned sources. After all, Konrád’s interventions outside Hungary—unlike those in Hungary, where he resided most of the time—were not a continuous story but a series of occasions. My main aim will thus be to interpret Konrád’s major interventions and to connect and contrast them to each other.

As we have seen, Konrád enjoyed various forms of Western recognition before 1989. He was the recipient of multiple awards and fellowships. Antipolitics, his intellectual contribution most discussed in scholarship (the reception of which I shall cover below), was also a product of the last decade of Soviet rule in Europe. Still, 1989 clearly opened entirely new international possibilities for him. The end of Soviet-type rule in Hungary and the accompanying ambition to overcome Europe’s East-West divide in fact quickly turned Konrád into the head of prestigious cultural and literary institutions in the enlarged Federal Republic of Germany. He suddenly enjoyed a privileged position from which to address a host of issues, including but not restricted to issues related to the post-Communist transformation and democratization of eastern Europe. While becoming a prominent member of a transnational cultural and intellectual establishment, Konrád’s reputation was especially stellar in Germany, where his special combination of being a Holocaust survivor from Eastern Europe who spoke German well, a famed post-dissent liberal democrat with original ideas and moral capital, and—we might add—someone who did not express any reservations toward German reunification in 1990, catapulted him into what was arguably the very heart of the country’s post-1990 public life. ³¹

What ideas did Konrád communicate in some of his most prominent appearances outside Hungary to wield his authority? In 2005, Eleanor Wachtel hosted him as the first guest in a series broadcast on CBC/Radio-Canada titled Memory and Myths. The Rebirth of Central Europe. Referring to him as Hungary’s “literary lion” and as the “conscience” of his nation, even calling him “one of the most respected European writers” in her introduction, Wachtel claimed that Konrád’s life embodied virtually all she considered crucial regarding central Europe—an overly explicit act of canonization. ³²

Their extended conversation focused primarily on Konrád’s life story, not least in its Jewish contexts, with Wachtel posing “the big question” whether and how a life can make sense as part of a history that just does not. Talking to such a popular Canadian interviewer, Konrád described the interwar Jewish milieu of his youth in Berettyóújfalu as an embourgeoised, modernizing one that remained peacefully segregated, against which non-Jewish social discontent could be violently mobilized. Konrád also added how surviving the Holocaust in his youth made it easy for him to see what was good and what was bad in adult behavior, and it taught him that human gestures were significant and consequential. Moreover, he claimed that his literary works focused on alternatives and his aim as a writer was to reflect on philosophical questions as embodied in people’s choices.

Beyond sketching this self-portrait of the making and agenda of an artist, Konrád also addressed the evolution of his memories on CBC/Radio-Canada. He explained that, at first, he did not consider the fact that he and his family almost got killed anything “abnormal.” His memories of 1944–45 became colored by stronger emotions only over time, he added, as he reconstructed more realistic memories of those traumatic events—a gradual process stretching across decades that eventually led him to compose a series of autobiographical works. At the same time, he emphasized that being an internal émigré under Hungary’s Kádár regime also meant that he was less anxious and generally in a better mood than most of his fellow countrymen.

During his conversation with Wachtel, Konrád also contrasted the majority, who belonged to the working classes and for whom state socialism was a relatively good period that enabled them to live “simple lives” and dream “small dreams,” and those with “more fantasy,” for whom life under such a repressive regime appeared gray indeed. In accordance with such a diagnosis, through which he consciously placed himself in a minority, Konrád asserted that there was no reason to be delighted about the post-Communist transformation but also no reason to feel ashamed. In implicit agreement with Francis Fukuyama’s famed thesis on the melancholic end of human history’s evolution, he closed his reflections in a finely ironic manner, stating that he considered Hungary an “acceptable” small country that had a rather impressive cultural scene and was approaching the desirable state of being as “dull” as the Netherlands.

If the Wachtel interview in Canada allowed Konrád to develop his personal narrative as a Holocaust survivor and memoirist and to offer reflections on the post-Communist transformation of his country, in an extended group conversation titled Beauty and Consolidation, held in Amsterdam just a few years earlier (in 2000, to be precise), he articulated what was in many ways the exact opposite of what members of European society might think in connection with, or even expect from, a “Holocaust survivor”—an individual typically depicted as profoundly traumatized and in special need of consolation. In the 150-minute-long report prepared by Wim Kayzer and broadcast on the Dutch channel VPRO, Konrád can be seen in discussion with thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, Simon Schama, George Steiner, and Dubravka Ugrešić. He used the occasion to express his rather contrarian view that suffering is simply inherent to life and that there is no need for consolation or the making of special “corrections.” ³³ Konrád thus questioned comfortable “mythologies of compensation” from the position of a critical intellectual—and he also challenged the more implicit but perhaps no less important presupposition of him being a Holocaust survivor in profound need of consolation.

As part of another extended interview, this time on Deutsche Welle (and in the German language), from 2007, Konrád was introduced as a “strongly ironic” author who thereby supposedly belonged to a specifically east European tradition, as someone who, in his own words, combined literary loneliness, the German public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) and Hungarian openness (Offenheit). On this occasion, Konrád reflected on his life trajectory in a quite different way from on Canadian radio just two years earlier. He explained that “to stay or to go” was the defining question for members of his generation, and that he was personally convinced that he had the right to live where his native tongue was spoken and did not wish to rely on the “graciousness” (Gnade) of another society.

In the course of this extended interview, Konrád added that he was against moralizing, as no human could ever act perfectly. He explained that he was not disappointed by post-Communist developments in Hungary and eastern Europe, as he believed the new regimes were “reflective” of the diverse people there. He also noted in this context that he had merely wished that people could show what they were truly capable of and be finally “responsible for their own stupidity”—and, according to him, this had indeed been the case since 1989. ³⁴

His words on Deutsche Welle lead me to conclude that Konrád pursued freedom for himself and his fellow citizens because he considered it an inherent good—rather than in the interest of any more substantial conception of the good. Through these striking, jocular, and rather excessively liberal formulations, Konrád also clearly distanced himself from more normative understandings of post-dissident political and moral authority.

In a 2011 interview with the Netherlands’ Lezen TV regarding the publication in Dutch translation of Inga (Slingerbeweging in Dutch, Pendulum in English), Konrád jokingly characterized himself as a “comprehensionist” and a rather monkish person who was, however, loyal to the “laws of life” and thus in favor of family life. ³⁵ Giving this interview shortly after Fidesz’s 2010 election victory, which resulted in a supermajority that in turn enabled Viktor Orbán’s party to begin to implement systemic changes, the vision of history and politics Konrád uttered was far less complacent and jocular than just a few years earlier. His vision was also rather resigned, almost fatalistic. He claimed, for instance, that the “substance of dictatorship” was that the leader had the right “to put his hand on the mouth of the people.” ³⁶ Such dictators may be chased away on certain days but someone else will be tempted to try the same again and will attempt to “climb into the same position,” he now argued. The current authoritarian temptation in Hungary was thus meant to be the result of another pendulum swing some two decades after 1989—a view opposite to there being a liberal teleology of history, which he had articulated in earlier years.

Beyond such conversations when Konrád’s views and autobiographical reflections were at the center of attention, he also participated in prominent discussion shows—occasions when his views were more directly connected to and framed by those of others. For instance, in the year 2004, he was invited to Das Philosophische Quartett, a discussion program on ZDF (the second channel of German national television) hosted by the philosophers Rüdiger Safranski and Peter Sloterdijk, to debate the question of where Europe ends (wo Europa endet). ³⁷ Not least because the fourth member of the panel was the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler (1931–2014), who was known, among others, as a prominent critic of the possibility of Turkey’s European Union accession at the time, the discussion focused extensively on the relations between Turkey, on one hand, and Europe and the EU, on the other.

Sitting on the comfortable couches of the TV studio, Konrád contributed relatively infrequently to what, for extended periods of time, were exchanges between three high-profile, elderly, male scholars. He did not question or respond in any direct way to Wehler’s articulation of a fairly culturalist-essentialist notion of Europe. He instead pleaded for a pluralization of the discussion about the future that went beyond the dichotomy of EU members versus non-members to explicitly argue that there were other and potentially more fruitful avenues through which the EU could exert its influence over Turkey or Russia. In other words, while Konrád did not openly endorse the possibility of Turkish EU membership in this prominent German public debate (which would have been the most logical counterpoint to Wehler’s rejectionist stance), he shifted the discussion away from the binary question that animated Wehler and others. He also politely reminded listeners that their broader continent was Eurasia and that there was a need for Europeans to think less provincially about their place and role in the world.

Ultimately, Konrád emphasized that Europe ended where human rights and the rule of law (Rechtsstaat) ceased to be upheld. He thereby articulated a political-legal rather than culturalist-essentialist notion of Europe. This notion was, at least potentially, universally applicable—even though he refrained from endorsing more ambitious plans of European enlargement and inclusion. Such a gap between broad theoretical openness and pragmatic-implicit reservations toward more daring reforms and experiments arguably also characterized much of mainstream German political culture around the time. If so, Konrád’s soft ambiguities—expressed in this particular case toward Turkey’s EU application—probably helped make his into such a mainstream voice.

Last but not least, Konrád also appeared in Made in Europe, a 2017 series of Dutch-language documentaries hosted by the Belgian writer Dimitri Verhulst. Konrád was asked to contribute, alongside the French actress Juliette Binoche and the Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg, to part eight of the series, devoted to the topic of ideals (Idealen). ³⁸ The episode centered around the metaphor of climbing Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Konrád appeared in the role of the elderly man who already knows where the rhetoric of Leo Naphta can lead (Naphta being the Jewish Jesuit character in Mann’s novel in favor of totalitarianism and apparently modeled on a caricatured version of György Lukács).

During his appearances in the documentary, Konrád made two remarkable contributions. The first was to recall how a man was killed right next to him in the winter of 1944, when he was merely eleven years old, and how a gun was pointed at his own head, too—a moment of evident fright that, according to his recollection, he observed with calm and curiosity. Having finished his dinner with Verhulst in a restaurant just across from the scene of the wartime murder being recalled, the sequence concluded with Konrád cleverly remarking that he felt at home in Budapest, where the dead were his “relatives” and “maybe the killers too”—a gently subversive remark that might be interpreted as opposing facile ideas regarding a community of fate (Schicksalsgemeinschaft, sorsközösség) and popular myths of historical innocence.

If this was a subtle and especially well-crafted scene, Konrád re-appeared to discuss how there were two total movements in twentieth-century Europe and how Islamism follows in their footsteps in the twenty-first. This condemnation of “Islamism” was directly connected to Konrád’s simplified—and indeed offensive—idea that “Muslims” as such created an “extreme right-wing atmosphere” and that while “some of them” should be allowed to enter the EU, European self-defense was called for against the nefarious threat they supposedly posed. In other words, if the former scene arguably showed Konrád at his subtly ironic best, the latter revealed him to be a public intellectual unable, or simply unwilling, to draw basic distinctions.

To conclude, the above analysis of György Konrád’s prominent international appearances after 1989 has shown how he assumed the role of a reminiscing Holocaust survivor but could also directly question some of the basic premises of contemporary Holocaust culture focused on trauma and the idea of symbolic compensation. ³⁹ It has shown how he at first thought that history may have reached its final station and Hungary was on its way to becoming a “normal Western country,” but came to believe that dictatorial attempts nonetheless remained a standard part of its “historical reality.” Finally, it has shown how he could sound principled when pursuing a discourse on human rights and the rule of law when it came to Europe while offering, on another notable occasion, a broad-brush and problematic critique of Muslims in the name of fighting a third “total movement.” In sum, being placed in the role of Holocaust survivor, the symbolic foundations of which he opposed, articulating a liberal teleology he was then quick to discard, and sounding normative about the boundaries of his political community while being visibly opposed to the Muslim “Other” all reflect key ambiguities in Konrád’s thinking. To return to our main question, such ambiguities show how he wielded his post-dissident authority in contradictory ways.

György Konrád’s Scholarly Reception

Having depicted how György Konrád wielded his post-dissident moral and political authority, let me turn to the second part of my main research question: the issue of effects. More specifically, this part shall focus on the area where the impact of his ideas can be studied most directly: his scholarly reception. This part of the analysis has been conducted via the help of Google Scholar. A simple search (originally conducted in December 2021) has shown that Konrád has co-authored with Iván Szelényi three out of four of his most cited publications in academic outlets. The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, published in English in 1979, remains his most impactful release, with over 1,300 scholarly citations of its English editions alone (and according to the same—doubtlessly incomplete—database, over 200 more of the Hungarian original and its German translation combined). ⁴⁰ A closely connected 1991 article the two co-authored under the title “Intellectuals and Domination in Post-Communist Societies” and another study of theirs from the 1970s on what they innovatively termed “underurbanization,” with dozens and dozens of citations each, reveals that it was clearly Konrád’s close collaboration with Szelényi—who became a world-famous sociologist and a leading American professor after his emigration from Hungary in the 1970s—that assured the broadest reception of his ideas among scholars. ⁴¹ The most significant exception to this rule is the volume Antipolitics, with well over 500 scholarly citations of the English version alone (and many more of the Hungarian original as well as its German, French, and several other translations). ⁴²

Before I come to analyze the varied reception of Konrád’s most cited single-author publication, let me focus on the reception of his other two most influential interventions: the new class theory he formulated together with Iván Szelényi and his seminal contribution to the Central Europe debate in the 1980s. In other words, even though a chronological approach to his reception could indubitably yield valuable insights, for the sake of clarity I prefer to organize this section thematically.

The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, from 1979, has recurrently been presented as a major instance of the new class theory. It stands as a classic of that type of argument as applied to Soviet-type regimes. In their discussion of this theory, David Stark and László Bruszt emphasized that “claims to knowledge” were central to Konrád and Szelényi’s overall conception. They argued that claims to legitimacy based on teleological knowledge in particular were central to their interpretation of state socialism. ⁴³ In his “Rethinking, Once Again, the Concept of Class Structure,” the recently deceased American sociologist and social stratification expert Erik Olin Wright approached the book the other way around. He argued that the potential of intellectuals to become the new ruling class in the Soviet system, as discussed by Konrád and Szelényi, served as a key argument for them to treat intellectuals as a class in the first place. ⁴⁴ In other words, while Stark and Bruszt addressed questions in epistemology and the making of a specific regime, Wright pursued a more general discussion of class and power, seeing in the Konrád-Szelényi book not only a major contribution to the historical study of Soviet regimes but also an original argument about the formation of class in modern society as such.

Perhaps the most impressive creative adaptation of the Konrád-Szelényi thesis can be found in Joel Andreas’s Rise of the Red Engineers, which provides a seminal example of the global potential of Konrád and Szelényi’s “heretical” ideas. ⁴⁵ Andreas, currently a professor at Johns Hopkins University and a sociology graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles (where, it ought to be noted, Szelényi was a professor between 1988 and 1999), argued that Konrád and Szelényi made the most cogent case for how victorious Communist parties, despite their class-leveling rhetoric, always intended to build a technocratic society—that is, why the premises of socialist planning would lead to the “triumph of cultural capital” and those who possessed it. Andreas’ multifaceted thesis was that the technocratic character of China’s new class after Mao’s Cultural Revolution did indeed fit Konrád and Szelényi’s thesis; however, the way this new class emerged did not. That should, of course, make us question the intentionality of the process, he underlined; why such an unintended outcome was reached in China, too, was the puzzle The Rise of the Red Engineers addressed.

Drawing in particular on Konrád and Szelényi’s “Intellectuals and Domination in Post-Communist Societies,” a sort of updated version of the two co-authors’ 1979 English-language book, Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel pursued a different path to embed the case of Hungary globally. They highlighted close parallels between Hungary and Taiwan to argue that the expansion of university and professional qualifications to meet the demands of a knowledge-based society yielded democratic reforms in both countries even in the absence of strong democratic oppositions. This was certainly an intriguing way to highlight Konrád and Szelényi’s intellectual contribution while underplaying the political-historical role of the dissident ideas for which they became famous in the first place. ⁴⁶

Second, regarding the scholarly reception of Konrád’s reflections on central Europe, the U.S.-based Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova has emerged as perhaps the most prominent critic of the concept and the late Cold War–era discourses surrounding it. In her influential Imagining the Balkans, Todorova was ready to admit that György Konrád’s musings on the transitory, provisional nature of central Europe and his assertion that central Europe was neither Eastern, nor Western, but contained a bit of both, had close parallels in affirmative discourses regarding the Balkans. ⁴⁷ However, she was also rather dismissive of what she called Konrád’s “ardent supplication,” which, in her assessment, could have amounted to a happy combination of analytical vigor with emotive power; however, Konrád supposedly “exhibited only the latter.” ⁴⁸

Among the scholarly discussions regarding Konrád’s idea of central Europe, Paul Blokker’s reflections stand out by the fine balance the author strikes. While Blokker admitted that Konrád’s argument on central Europe at least implicitly excluded other parts of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe from the European heritage, he added that such exclusionary arguments “did not exhaust the meaning of Central Europe” and that Konrád’s conception in fact also offered an alternative to the understanding of Europe as a singular set of west European values. ⁴⁹ In other words, from what we might call Blokker’s western-critical perspective, Konrád’s central Europeanist ambition to pluralize European traditions was as noteworthy as the questionable implications of this discourse that Todorova critiqued. In his Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe, Stefan Auer went beyond Blokker in his polemical engagement to develop a valuation that was in some sense diametrically opposed to that of Todorova. Auer did not contest that there were marked elements of cultural determinism in Konrád’s vision of central Europe, but he argued that such a “confident cultural determinism,” even if questionable in terms of its historical accuracy, might play a positive role if used to promote democracy. ⁵⁰

Third, let me turn to the scholarly reception of Antipolitics, Konrád’s most influential single-authored text, among academics. The American political scientist David Ost is particularly interesting among those who endorsed Konrád’s vision from a leftist position shortly after 1989. Ost’s 1990 book Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics explicitly borrows a key part of its title from Konrád and credits him with having “most neatly and crisply” (if admittedly unintentionally) formulated the goal set by the “Polish left opposition”: that of a permanently open democracy, the goal of which was “some radically new kind of society.” ⁵¹

In terms of his approach to—and evaluation of—Konrád’s political ideas, we find the populism expert Cas Mudde on what might be viewed as the opposite end. In his 2001 contribution, “In the Name of the Peasantry, the Proletariat, and the People: Populisms in Eastern Europe,” Mudde depicted the main difference between western and eastern European populisms as deriving from the fact that populism is employed as a political tool by “outsiders” in the former case while it is also being used by leading politicians and even intellectuals in the east. Mudde explained that the key populist element of Konrád’s antipolitics concept is not so much the voluntary separation from classic politics and questions of government, nor its watchdog attitude toward “real politics.” It is rather the claim it makes regarding forms of propriety in politics and the idea that “the people” could exert pressure based on their cultural and moral stature alone—instead of via electoral legitimacy. ⁵² Summarizing the central argument of Konrád’s key essay thus, Mudde did nothing less than identify him as a leading populist intellectual.

A whole host of other authors, such as Johanna Bockman and Gil Eyal, Michael Edwards, John Ehrenberg, and Martin Walzer, have explored, rather more conventionally, the connections between Konrád’s antipolitical musings and the rise of a certain type of (neo)liberalism. John Ehrenberg is most explicit about such a link when he argues that “[c]ivil society’s rebellion against socialism’s hyper-politics now assigned to the state the traditional liberal responsibility of maintaining law and order, establishing the rule of law, and defending the institutions of market society.” ⁵³ In Ehrenberg’s view, “antipolitics” generated a liberal theory of the state and the “formal abandonment of economic redistribution followed as a matter of course.” ⁵⁴ Adding specifics to Ehrenberg’s overarching perspective, Bockman and Eyal in turn highlight the strategic uses of the civil society concept, which in their interpretation encouraged radical reformers in their rejection of socialist reform. ⁵⁵

In his Politics and Passion, the political theorist Michael Walzer offered a more ambitious contextualization and critique of Konrád’s ideas. Walzer aptly highlighted the political and historical reasons behind the emergence prior to 1989 of what he saw as a romantic and utopian antipolitical stance. He also questioned its relevance and advisability after “the collapse of the unfriendly state.” Walzer’s nuanced argumentation is worth citing at some length:

At certain historical moments, civility and association stand in radical opposition to the state. The classic example is Eastern Europe in the last years of communist rule, when intellectuals and activists launched the late-twentieth-century revival of the civil society argument. Radical opposition, however, is a difficult position to generalize. In a tyrannical state, the terrain of civility is narrowly circumscribed and the mobility of individuals is constrained. Civil society takes on a romantic character. Life within it is rather like an underground activity; its oppositional values lead to a voluntary repression of internal conflicts, generating fierce loyalties and utopian aspirations—above all, the aspiration for the replacement of the state by pure associationalism. George Konrad’s “antipolitics,” a response to the communist restoration in Hungary after the failed revolution of 1956, is a useful and attractive illustration. But antipolitics in practice would quickly generate all the usual inequalities of civil society. So the collapse of the unfriendly state reveals the need for a friendly state, that is, for regulation, redistribution, and (sometimes) intervention. ⁵⁶

While the just-mentioned authors all appear to suggest that key Konrádian ideas have shaped contemporary history, and they may also assert that his ideas’ unsalutary impact now call for a corrective, Jan-Werner Müller expresses reservations toward such a narrative of dissident impact. On the pages of Contesting Democracy, his history of political ideas in twentieth-century Europe released in 2011, Müller interpreted Konrád’s Antipolitics more in accordance with David Ost’s vision, if less affirmatively. Müller depicted Konrád’s essay as an expression of a renewed yearning for self-management, part of a recurring pattern in modern Europe that has never found lasting institutional expression. Cautioning against overestimating the influence of such ideas in and after 1989, Müller added that the proponents of antipolitics found it difficult to adapt to “humdrum” political life, if they did not retreat from it altogether. ⁵⁷ These arguments may be read as a nuanced attempt to re-embed Konrád’s reflections and their impact in their proper historical context without forgetting about the broader canvas—instead of simply employing them as a seemingly organic part of a universalizing Western narrative.

Such contextualist interpretations are directly countered by those—such as Ulf Hannerz and Mary Kaldor—who prefer to highlight the eminently transnational and cosmopolitan aspects of Konrád’s thought. Ulf Hannerz approvingly quoted Konrád’s Antipolitics to underline how projects of international integration have come to determine our visions of universality, while national cultures have acquired an air of provincialism. ⁵⁸ In a 2003 article based on one of her lectures, Mary Kaldor even credited Konrád’s globalized notion of civil society as amounting to a key innovation that went beyond Western conceptions, calling Konrád “my favorite” of the new thinkers in eastern Europe. ⁵⁹

The reception of Konrád’s Antipolitics has also branched out in more unexpected directions. Let me close with just one suggestive example: Colin Flint’s Introduction to Geopolitics credits György Konrád, right alongside E. P. Thompson, with having reformulated what the Cold War was about, and having thus contributed to the invention of “critical geopolitics” and the rise of broader systemic theories about international politics. ⁶⁰ While imputing such a role to Konrád’s essay may strike us as rather exaggerated or even entirely questionable, Flint’s book also provides an excellent illustration of how widespread, prominent, and divergent the reception of Antipolitics has been.

In sum, the scholarly reception of Konrád’s ideas has revolved, first of all, around his publications concerning intellectuals, which he co-authored with Iván Szelényi and which tended to be understood as offering a major contribution to new class theory. As I have shown above, the arguments by Konrád and Szelényi have also been creatively compared and adapted to various contexts around the globe. Second, Konrád’s scholarly reception has focused on his musings on central Europe, where the reception has been mixed and polarized regarding both value and impact. Third, the scholarly engagement with his ideas has concentrated on his antipolitical vision and its connection to (neo)liberal agendas. An influential Western approach has asserted that such a link exists and does so in a critical fashion. Some authors, most notably David Ost and Jan-Werner Müller, dissent on this matter by being more affirmative or more contextually sensitive, respectively.

It might be read as a sign of Konrád’s canonization that much of the post–Cold War reception of his key dissident essay, Antipolitics, has depicted it as an expression or even an initiator of broader political and historical trends. Whether affirmatively or more critically disposed toward the ideas he expressed there, a whole host of authors has thereby helped entrench claims of their representativity and import—and thus also contributed to building the author’s authority in his post-dissident days after 1989.

Conclusion

This paper has analyzed the interventions and reception of perhaps the most prominent post-dissident public intellectual from Hungary. My detailed case study has inquired into the ways György Konrád wielded his post-dissident authority after 1989 and the impact his ideas have exerted.

The introduction sketched Konrád’s trajectory to clarify some of the key reasons behind the special position and reputation he came to acquire among Hungarian public intellectuals. I subsequently explored the contributions this recently deceased post-dissident writer and social scientist made to several of the major, and some of most contested, discussions of the post–Cold War era within Hungary and internationally—whether wars, the liberal teleology of history, questions of trauma and consolation, migration and refugees, interreligious coexistence, and the borders of Europe. Third, I discussed how Konrád’s most impactful ideas—such as his theory of the new class, his musings on central Europe, and his antipolitical agenda—have been received and interpreted in international scholarship.

By placing Konrád’s biography next to that of Ágnes Heller, I have sketched key features of the generational trajectory of a most impressive cohort of Hungarian Jewish intellectuals—who survived the Holocaust as teenagers, emerged as internationally recognized dissidents during Soviet times, and turned into “post-dissident authorities” after 1989. Through these brief parallel biographies, I have aimed to explain what might have distinguished Konrád: what combination of intellectual activities and characteristics made him such a widely connected and respected person, and how generationally determined factors might have shaped his personal relations and formal roles after 1989.

Exploring his post-1989 interventions into major debates regarding international politics, this paper has also shown how contrarian and inconsistent some of his key stances were—whether regarding the post-Yugoslav conflicts, the invasion of Iraq, or the European humanitarian emergency of the mid-2010s. The subsequent exploration of several of Konrád’s most prominent international appearances has led me to conclude how these stances reflected crucial ambiguities in his thinking. He assumed the role of a Holocaust survivor, the symbolic foundations of which he on occasion questioned, he repeatedly and calmly propagated a liberal teleology of history that he was quick to discard after 2010, and he was principled and seemingly flexible about the boundaries of the European political community while repeatedly expressing opposition to, and even rejection of, the Muslim “Other.” Attempting to trace the scholarly impact of his key ideas has in turn led me to map his intriguing, diverse, and at times polarized reception.

In conclusion, György Konrád’s contrarian streak meant that he recurrently, if usually rather gently, dissented from mainstream intellectual opinions even within his own milieu. This habit arguably enabled him simultaneously to employ and deflect his post-dissident political and moral authority. Fine-grained analyses of his most prominent appearances on international stages have also allowed this paper to show how Konrád wielded his post-dissident authority in a paradoxical manner. Through detailed coverage of his interventions and reception after 1989, I have ultimately aimed to show how Konrád oscillated between universalistic and civilizational discourses and between a generous spirit of openness and profound personal fears when his post-dissident authority made his voice prominent.