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By Root 672 0

was troubled by incidents such as the Wolf Biermann affair in 1976. Biermann was the West German son of an Auschwitz victim who moved to the GDR and became a popular poet and ballad writer. He had the kind of impeccable “antifascist” credentials that made friendly criticism permissible. But by the mid-1960s, he was being almost entirely censored, and in 1975, after being granted permission for a visit to the West, he was not allowed back into East Germany. This was a shock to many East German Jews who, like Biermann, had suffered under the Nazis and gone to the GDR for idealistic reasons. What had gone wrong that the new socialist Germany would treat in this way one of their own who had come back to rebuild?

21

In Budapest

HUNGARY HAD A LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER OF EXTRAORDI-nary endurance who had never won any Olympic medals. Rather than compete in sports, he ran to publicize political events. For the centennial of Lenin's birth he ran from Budapest to Moscow. He had carved out a strange career for himself—a runner who never competed. To Gyula Gazdag, it was what everyone had to do—shape and fit a career to the needs of the state, let yourself be used; rather than compete in the real world, offer yourself to the slate in a symbolic gesture. This was the subject of his first documentary film.

The state, not surprisingly, did not like being portrayed in documentary films in this ironic light. Under Janos Kadar, Budapest had begun at last to lose the dark, bombed-out look from the war. The last of the great historic bridges that connected Buda and Pest across the Danube was rebuilt in the 1960s. By 1970, the last of the bombed-out lots had been cleared and rebuilt. Limited private initiative was tolerated. But films satirizing the system were not.

Most of Gyula's subsequent films were not appreciated by the state either, and six of them were banned. After Gyula made a film, he would be called into a political office, and the ideological problems of the work would be explained to him. Sometimes he would be told that if he did such a film again, he would no longer be allowed to make films. He was frequently spied on. “I didn't know Gyula was applying to military school,” a neighbor once said to his parents.

“What!?”

“They came by. Said he had applied to military school and needed to ask us certain security questions about him.”

Gyula had been one of only eleven accepted out of some 900 applicants to the film institute. But while being a film director was a privileged position, it earned a very low state salary. Because Hungarian Communism believed in incentives, the bulk of a filmmaker's income was paid on delivery of projects. When a film was banned, not only would the filmmaker not get his money, but neither would anyone else who worked on the film. When Gyula's film was banned, he was letting down his friends and colleagues. That was how the system worked under the soft Hungarian dictatorship of Janos Kadar, the man known as Father Joe. “It seems that people here, even when grown up, need a father to tell them what to do,” Gyorgy Konrad wrote.

Konrad also tested the limits of the system's vaunted tolerance. Two-thirds of the essays he wrote following the 1956 uprising were not published. He would play with the system. With a certain editor, certain things would get by for a time. Then editors would change. Classics would work. Politics would not. Things had to be hidden or carefully woven. Thinking there must be something more worthwhile to do than write essays that no one was allowed to read, he became a social worker, and from 1959 to 1965 he worked with troubled children.

“I believed it was better to have jobs that were independent from the ideological literary scene because there I was more dependent. Here, I do something that corresponds to my own values, because to do something for children is okay. And to edit the classics is also okay, so I can earn my livelihood and support my family in two solid activities, and I'm not depending on the censors.”

In 1969, Konrad's first work of fiction was published,