ABSTRACT
If we can talk about Georg Lukács’s ‘Budapest School’, then Ferenc Fehér played a key role in its organisation. He was a real critic. Even in the improvised and forceful articles of young authors, he could pinpoint the place where a world – a small world – could be moved. He instilled responsibility in the School, and laid out what was to be done, as well as pointing out those broader connections in which he thought someone’s individual effort was couched. In his heart of hearts, it was nonetheless still a strange and unfashionable pathos that dominated. The hope that things would turn out right, he thought, ‘could never quite be disabused’. It flared up thanks to the annus mirabilis – 1989 – but he was the master of processing the disappointments that followed without self-deception or resignation. But in 1989, there was no more Budapest School – that had very much been a product of the 1960s.
