Address by Viktor Orbán at the funeral of György Granasztói

August 25, 2016

I had had a plan for this Autumn when it would “slip into Paris, coming silently down Boulevard Saint-Michel,” to quote the famous poem by Endre Ady. The plan was to slip away, together with György Granasztói and János Martonyi, if only for a day, to Paris, where in the very heart of the city an impressive Russian orthodox church had just been built. The completion of this grand building would obviously put the French capital in the limelight of political headlines for days, and provide an opportunity for weeks to deploy trains of thought about Europe, about the future of civilizations, about the interdependence of politics and culture. I had been looking forward – as it turns out, all too prematurely – to that imagined afternoon when I would attend their invigorating treatises in the philosophy of history as a silent but eager audience.

The eternal student that I have always been will unfailingly recognize an eternal teacher from miles, almost by scent, if you pardon the expression. This was how I first sought out the company of György Granasztói, the eternal teacher, and have abided by him ever since, to the last. The type of teacher I am talking about will never lecture, pontificate, or drill you at an exam. An educator of the rare breed to which György Granasztói belonged simply exists, lives his life, and lets us live side by side with him. He will not argue, let alone browbeat others, to hammer home a point, but simply tell stories. And when you begin to talk, he will be all ears. If you say something inane, he will respond by a counter-narrative as an elegant alternative to sheer rebuke, and you will realize your inanity without having to admit it. And if you happen to have said something original and valid, you will feel, deep down in your heart, that he shares in your joy of intellectual discovery.

Our loss is immense and unfathomable indeed. But this is not the kind of loss that cries out to heaven or pounds at your chest causing excruciating anguish; it is a loss of the quiet, if profound, kind. This kind of loss will not swipe you off your feet, smite you down to the ground, or rattle you to the bone. It is the kind of loss that makes you realize you will not be able to get rid of this blunt pain over the absence of that man, that it will haunt you day by day, for a long time to come. I have always thought of him as the archetype of the citizen. If there has ever been a true incarnation of the human ideal as the writer Sándor Márai envisioned it, a lone survivor of this species, then it was certainly György Granasztói. He was also a model Hungarian citizen, who – while taking for granted the primacy of the spirit over matter, seeing man as more than a speaking animal after all – always avoided the pitfall of valuing intellect, erudition, and refined manners over upright character. He knew that some of the Nazi officers who kept fellow human beings in conditions hardly fit for animals knew how to play a musical instrument with consummate skill and a rather sensitive touch. He also knew that it was not past some outstanding philosophers to perpetrate iniquities in the name of red terror. “Yes, gentlemen,” he seemed to admonish us with every gesture he made, “at the end of the day, there is nothing more important than character.” It was this view that made him a true democrat in addition to his superior erudition and membership in the rarefied club of the intellectual aristocracy. Indeed, we may not all have equal access to education and erudition, but every one of us has a chance to cut out a firm character and a life of probity for oneself. This chance is right before our eyes, we only need to reach out to grab it – or, rather, to open our hearts to let it in.

I always felt pleased on the few occasions when I heard him go off on an impetuous diatribe without mincing his words, when something threw him off kilter – not like us, born of “the people”, but even then preserving a good measure of decorum as only Granasztói could. Yes, there were things and people who forced him to revert to the tasty, if harsh, idiom of the Hungarian vernacular. For one thing, he could not suffer treason and its perpetrators, no matter how lofty the intellectual circles they hailed from. He was Hungarian to the bone, and liked to be that way. In fact, nothing was more essential to him. He would not tolerate anyone hurting, belittling or insulting us Hungarians. When something like this happened, he would always join the vanguard of the vocal minority rather than retreating to the camp of the silent, disgruntled majority. For most of us Hungarians have become a bunch of peevish grumblers who settle for indignant huff and puff. Only a minority has the guts to go beyond licking his wounds and raise his voice, grab a pen, or reach for a stick to defend himself, to get even, or simply to fight.

György Granasztói was a brave man. He raised his voice, grabbed a pen and, had the situation called for it, would not have shied away from wielding a stick. It was an honor to fight shoulder to shoulder with him for the honor of Hungarians. Yet even his courage was that of the faithful, modest citizen, the kind that asserts itself without flaunting his weapons or bragging of glory. He was a good soldier who never forgot that the fight was not so much against the enemy in front of us as for those behind our own ranks. Indeed, my fellow citizens in mourning, the passing of György Granasztói is the loss of a great fighter.

He was one of the few truly distinguished members of a gifted and erudite generation who, without for a moment wavering in the upheaval of the democratic turn of 1989-90, sized up the situation correctly, and unerringly staked out his own place in it with the speed of lightning. Without a hint of conceit and mannerism, he instantly realised that those gathering around the figure of József Antall formed the only group capable of offering a meaningful intellectual and political alternative to the post-Communist forces and the liberals who were soon to join them. Loyal people are of two kinds. Some find they need to make a constant effort to persevere and stand up for a cause, to mobilise vast amounts of energy to keep to the true path, and even more exertion to haul the cart back on the road when the horses have wandered off and dragged it by the wayside. And there are those for whom loyalty is a natural element welling up with a force that leaves them no other choice. These people may take well-trodden paths or blaze new trails, but will always move inexorably toward fulfilling their destiny.

György Granasztói was of this latter ilk. As a child still, he witnessed the forfeit of Hungary’s sovereignty beginning with the Nazi occupation of 1944. He saw the country turn into a field of war, totalitarian regimes brought on us, various groups of the nation now deemed enemies excluded, deported, destroyed, exiled, thus consigned to slow atrophy. He saw the destruction of millennium-old values, and he saw the relentless drive to obliterate an entire nation’s past. He saw everything there was to be seen during those two long, sunless nights of history. And in this treacherous maze of the times and its morals, which put men, character, stamina, spiritual endurance and willpower to the test, he always managed to follow the true path with a kind of light-footed elegance, and remain a most worthy proponent of his own historic class, country, and civilization – a citizen of both Europe and Hungary.

Remarkably, he took it for granted that Hungary could never be conclusively wrenched from the West, even by Soviet occupation. One can only marvel at the unshakeable confidence with which he knew that the ferry ship of the Hungarian state would not forever be held captive on the Eastern bank of the river, that it was solely up to us, and our sheer human worth, to hold in safe keeping the steel rope which, when the time came, would winch our country back to the Western bank. And he was right.

He would never come out and say whether he was dismayed, on our return to the fold, by being greeted by a West that was different from the one we had been forced to leave behind. He would not talk about it, but I could see how hurt he was. Yet he refused to indulge in the luxury of self-abnegation and idleness that so often come with desperation. He remained loyal to the very much overt conspiracy to empower Europe to find itself again – a self that is free, bursting with the joy of life, serene, and eminently Christian. We owe him a debt of gratitude for having had us as his friends and colleagues.

For now, these feelings of gratitude are mingled with those of loss. The ratio between these two sentiments often depends on the age of those we mourn: The older they are at the time of departure, the more we are inclined to see their life as consummate. Now the tone of the farewell we are taking is that of gratitude, struggling as we may be with tears. Let us then praise the Lord for having allowed György Granasztói to leave behind for us a complete oeuvre – and the sense of a life’s mission well fulfilled.

It is difficult to escape the feeling that what we are taking leave of just now is none other than our better self.

Gyuri, may the Lord judge your soul with the same magnanimous equity with which you always judged us mortal souls in this Shadow World of ours. May God speed you well!

Translation by Péter B. Lengyel and Hungarian Review