A compelling part of the collapse of communist rule in Europe at the end of the 1980s was the arrival in political power of several heroic cultural figures. The Czech, Václav Havel, was the best known, but Hungary had its own playwright-president. Árpád Göncz was persecuted under communism, resisted with essays and plays and, in 1990, found himself as his country’s head of state. He and Havel, he joked, were part of “the international conspiracy of writers. We’re trying to grab all the power in the world!”
President of Hungary throughout the 1990s, Göncz was a genial, avuncular figure with a ready smile. He was encouraging, he hoped, a spirit of reconciliation and optimism in his notoriously pessimistic country. It was a spirit that suited