Richard Swartz: We had 50 years of friendship across the East-West divide

Richard Swartz first met Péter Nádas in Budapest in the spring of 1976, in a gathering where others were enthusiastically discussing Tolkien. The two quickly withdrew to a corner and agreed that the books were little more than dilettantish boyhood fantasies. They spoke German, the only language they shared, and continued doing so until Nádas’s death.

Their conversation turned instead to the memoirs of Cardinal József Mindszenty, the head of Hungary’s Catholic Church, who had spent nearly 15 years in exile inside the American embassy after the 1956 revolution was crushed. Swartz lived in Vienna, close to Budapest but separated from Nádas by the border between East and West. As communism began to erode, Nádas could occasionally visit and stay with him on Vegagasse.

Swartz recalls a coarse, large-checkered American sports shirt Nádas wore that first evening. The shirt became a ritual whenever Swartz visited, a kind of second skin and secular prayer cloth for their friendship. Both men opposed boundaries and confinement, including the idea that time should be divided neatly. They saw the past as remaining present, like a shadow or watermark.

That outlook put them at odds with Europe’s political order on both sides of the divide. In the East, censorship had long prevented Nádas from publishing, while Swartz, working as a correspondent, was repeatedly declared persona non grata in socialist states. In 1981, Nádas received a one-year fellowship in West Berlin, but West Berlin’s security police abruptly stopped it. He waited for weeks at Swartz’s home in Vienna, while Swartz ironically waited in vain for a visa to Poland. Swartz’s column also argues that Nádas deserved a Nobel Prize, one he never received.