András Kovács

* 1947

  • I suggested to Jancsi Kis that we should switch to printed samizdats. He said, all right, then you should do some research on how we should go about it equipmentwise. First I went back to Vienna, then to London, where I met up with Miki Haraszti. With Miki we browsed through what they had on offer. But all the equipment in the shops was very expensive as well as unfit for our purposes. Therefore, it seemed to make more sense to get a hand-operated one. Well, obviously, buying could have been an option. However, believe it or not, there was no money flowing in to the Hungatian samisdat from abroad. What the ’comrades’ apparently believed, that these things are supported by someone or other from the West, was rubbish. No one on earth did, in actual fact. So I started to try and find a way around it and make an effort. Now I’ll make a jump ahead in time, because at that point it didn’t happen yet. Well, I was just in London when the Solidarność strikes, the ones in Gdansk which concluded with an overwhelming victory, were on. I was very passionate about them. I talked about the fact that we needed a stencil-machine, to quite a few people, Bill Lomax being one among them. He called on me one day rather unexpectedly, by that time I was already in Cologne, and brought me a stencil-machine in a suitcase. He left it at my place so it would be up to me to work out how to smuggle it into Hungary. K: Was it actually an easy bit of the exercise not even worth mentioning? V: Well, the machine itself was already a godsend. And there were others trying to sort it out, too, I wasn’t the only one. Later on I secured another machine. At the University of Paderborn I saw an electric equipment gathering dust – the one brought by Bill was hand-operated – and I kept inquiring who it belonged to, but no one knew. It had been there for years. I met a boy who I built a very close friendship with, a Spanish anarchist working as an administrator at the Department of Sociology as well as studying there. I told him how cracking handy this machine would come for the Hungarian resistance, and then he reached it down from the shelf , put it in a box and said, there you go! So that’s already two machines. The one from Bill was sorted out by the Spanish anarchist and the expenses of the trip were covered by Péter Kende. They hired a nice big car, crammed it with holiday makers’ stuff – it was at about the summer of 1981 – an inflatable beach matress, a rubber dinghy and the machine. They simple drove through the border checkpoint. […] It was finally Gábor Iványi who received this particular machine which migh have been among the first ones that made Hungarian samisdat printing possible.

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Budapest, 18.08.2010

    (audio)
    duration: 02:40:13
    media recorded in project Oral History Archive - Budapest
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

We meant to talk without being censored

András Kovács, at the end of the seventies
András Kovács, at the end of the seventies
photo: Kovács András

András Kovács was born in Budapest in 1947. He studied at the Kölcsey Ferenc Secondary School from 1957 onwards. He earned his degree at the Arts Faculty of ELTE Budapest in 1971. He was awarded his Ph.D. degree in sociology at the same university in 1973. His areas were the philosophy of history and the philosophy of science; he was a part time lecturer at ELTE’s Department of Philosophy and worked as an editor for publishing houses. He edited his Marx in the Fourth Decade based on the answers given by 21 of his contemporaries to a set of questions in 1977 and he also had the copies of the book typed up. As a result, he got dismissed and was banned from being employed. He made a living by doing translations and casual jobs. He belonged to the circle of the democratic opposition. In 1980, in response to international pressure, he was allowed to get a passport and could work at universities and research institutes in Germany, France, the US and the Netherlands as a visiting professor up until 1984. By that time his area of research was focussing on the Jewish question and Jewish identity. After the change of the system he got rehabilitated and became a research fellow at the Institute of Sociology. Parallel to his activity as a social scientist and lecturer, he worked as an advisor for the Federation of Young Democrats until 1994. Since 1997 he is a lecturer of the Nationalism Studies Program of the Central European University and the Academic Director of the university’s Jewish Study Program. Since 2006 he has been the Doctor of Sciences at the Academy of Sciences, and since 2008, Professor at the Central European University. In 2013 he was awarded the Szechenyi Prize in recognition of decades of teaching and research in the field of post-war Hungarian Jewish social history, as well as the sociology of minority identities.