György Aczél

György Aczél

György Aczél , birth name Henrik Appel , (born August 31, 1917 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary ; died December 6, 1991 in Vienna ) was a communist Hungarian cultural politician.

From 1956 to 1989 he was a member of the Central Committee and since 1970 a member of the Politburo of the MSZMP ( Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party ). From 1957 to 1967 he was Deputy Minister of Education, from 1967 to 1974 and from 1982 to 1985 Secretary of the Central Committee. At the height of his political career - from 1974 to 1982 - he was Deputy Prime Minister. György Aczél was the closest confidante of János Kádár (First Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party from 1956 to 1988) and the chief ideologist of the Kádár era .

youth

Aczél was born in 1917 under the name Henrik Appel into a Jewish working-class family and was placed in an orphanage for four years after the death of his father - a butcher's assistant - in 1925. He spent his youth on the street, working as a servant, as a bricklayer and amateur actor. In 1936 Aczél passed the entrance examination to the Theater Academy in Budapest. In the information sheet for the year 1936/37, the name Aczél appears for the first time in connection with his person. At the time, performing artists in Budapest were expected to take the stage with a Hungarian-sounding name. However, before the end of the first year, Aczél was dismissed from the theater academy for unexplained reasons. A temporal correlation exists with a change of director ( Árpád Ódry 1930–1936; Ferenc Kiss 1937–1944) and the incipient discrimination against Jews in the Hungarian theater landscape; a causal relationship has not been proven. Like many other leading party functionaries of the post-war period, Aczél did not attend secondary school. In contrast to the closer circle of power around János Kádár , however, he had an above-average level of education, which he had primarily acquired autodidactically. In the 1930s, Aczél was already on friendly terms with numerous well-known representatives of the Budapest cultural scene, including Attila József , Antal Szerb , Miklós Radnóti , Margit Kovács , Tibor Déry , Gyula Illyés and Géza Ottlik .

Political career

Aczél joined the KMP ( Hungarian Communist Party ) in 1935 , and through his work in the communist underground he soon met János Kádár . Aczél was arrested in 1942 and interned in a labor camp, from which he was released under the pretense of having an advanced sciatica. During the German occupation of Hungary and the Arrow Cross government , he made it possible for hundreds of people to escape or go into hiding, including in cooperation with the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg . After the end of the Second World War, Aczél joined the newly founded MKP ( Hungarian Communist Party ) in Budapest, from August 1946 he was party secretary in Zemplén County. There he skillfully practiced the “salami tactics” of the Hungarian communists during the phase of the Sovietization of the country. When the Communists came to power, he was imprisoned for political reasons in July 1949; the next five years - the Stalinist dictatorship of Mátyás Rákosi - he spent in solitary confinement (until 1954). After the popular uprising was suppressed in 1956, János Kádár headed the new MSZMP ( Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party ). After initial hesitation, György Aczél returned to politics and became known as the chief ideologist of the Kádár era.

The influence of Aczél is pro forma little founded, because next to him there were more and more powerful functionaries in the ideological-cultural sector. Aczél's position can only be understood against the background of informal processes on the way to political decision-making in socialist Hungary. For every government department (e.g. education and culture) there were at least two responsible persons: one in the government (e.g. the minister for the respective department) and a second in the party. The latter usually held a formal and therefore understandable position within the party (e.g. ideological secretary of the party's central committee). The example of György Aczél - who never filled this post - shows, however, that there was also an informal possibility of political influence or responsibility.

Aczél's party offices gave him great influence over many years. His way of fulfilling these offices and his network of relationships within the apparatus as well as with people from literary and cultural life endowed him with a power that was not lost even when he was temporarily relegated to less influential posts. In connection with his management style, the terms kézivezérlés (hand control) and kegygazdálkodás (favor economy) have become established in Hungary . As the ideological leader and thinker of the party, Aczél was given almost all powers. So he could z. For example, if necessary, he could arrange for the coveted blue passports - which were necessary for trips to the West - to be issued at lightning speed, and he occasionally initiated access to western cars and real estate. According to contemporary witness reports, previously promised contracts and events by Aczél could be overturned with a casual gesture. Aczél retired from politics in 1985, but in 1989 he played a decisive role in the overthrow of Károly Grósz , the successor to János Kádár.

The policy of the 3 T

György Aczél has divided the works and their creators into the categories támogatott (supported), Türt (tolerated) and tiltott (prohibited). This approach went down in Hungarian contemporary history as the politics of the 3 T. Works that were faithful to the line ( socialist realism ) were supported; non-Marxist works were tolerated unless they openly polemicized against Marxism ; Anti-Marxist and anti-regime works were banned, and their creators were often banned from professions if they were intransigent. In case of doubt, the cultural policy was “managed” on a daily basis, possibly with the top management level in the form of György Aczél dealing with the respective phenomenon. Failure to consistently adhere to the above principles with regard to the division into one of the three categories suggests that Aczél's decision-making was often based on intuition. As a result of this approach, Aczél's cultural policy had both restrictive and pluralistic features. In an interview after the end of his political career, he asserted that his hand control system was bad, but necessary. Necessary to counter the effects of an over-regulated impersonal system with personal structures.

Public perception of his person

The public perception of his person was and is ambivalent to this day. Because of his supposedly arbitrary instructions, he experienced strong hostility, especially after the system change in 1989/90. Before that, he had made himself unpopular with some of his party comrades because of his long-standing supremacy in cultural politics and as János Kádár's closest confidante . On the other hand, he was undisputedly a personally extremely humble man who renounced all kinds of material privileges. His life-saving underground work during the German occupation at constant risk of death and the fact that he was not only free from compromise in the Stalinist Rákosi era 1949-1953, but was himself a victim, brought him in connection with his autodidactic education and the fundamental respect recognition of the country's intelligentsia from various quarters.

literature

• Cohen, Francis: Entretiens avec György Aczél sur un socialisme. Paris 1982.
• Révész, Sándor: Aczél és korunk. (Aczél and Our Time) Budapest 1997.
• Romsics, Ignác: Magyarország története a XX. században. (The History of Hungary in the 20th Century) Budapest 2005.
• Valuch, Tibor: Magyarország társadalomtörténete a XX. század második felében. (The social history of Hungary in the second half of the 20th century) Budapest 2001.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Valuch: Magyarország társadalomtörténete a XX. század második felében. 2001, p. 354.
2. ↑ Revesz: Aczél és Korunk. 1997, p. 12.
3. ^ Cohen: Entretiens avec György Aczél sur un socialisme. 1982, p. 9.
4. ↑ Revesz: Aczél és Korunk. 1997, p. 88.
5. ↑ Revesz: Aczél és Korunk. 1997, p. 29.
6. ↑ Revesz: Aczél és Korunk. 1997, p. 27.
7. ↑ Informal conversation with the journalist Gabriella Löcsei, member of the editorial board of the daily Magyar Nemzet since 1975; conducted on June 2, 2007 in Budapest.
8. ↑ Romsics: Magyarország története a XX. században. 2005, p. 497.
9. ↑ László Garai: Egy nomenklaturista értelmiségi (A nomenclaturistic intellectual) 2005  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved January 28, 2011.  
10. ↑ Revesz: Aczél és Korunk. 1997, p. 238.