By Victoria Harms
On October 10, 2025, the Swedish Academy announced László Krasznahorkai as the recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. A representative reached the audibly flustered laureate by phone in Frankfurt, Germany. Although he had been considered a candidate for a while, the honor humbled a writer whose childhood in 1950s Hungary hardly predicted his rise to global fame and this distinction at the age of seventy-one.
Congratulations poured in quickly, including from his long-time collaborator, the filmmaker Béla Tarr. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán also seized the moment and posted his well wishes across social media: “The pride of Hungary, the first Nobel Prize winner from Gyula, László Krasznahorkai. Congratulations!” Orbán feted this third Nobel Prize for a Hungarian in just two years (Katalin Karikó, Medicine, 2023; Ferenc Krausz, Physics, 2023), and the second one in literature (Imre Kertész, 2002) as a recognition of his country’s exceptionalism.
One can question whether the prime minister has read any of what the Swedish Academy hails as “a compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” Krasznahorkai’s birthplace, the small town of Gyula in southeastern Hungary which informed the author’s apocalyptic quartet – Satantango, The Melancholy of the Resistance, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, and War & War – center the destitute, the heavy load of the poor, humanity’s depravity, and the deceptive power of hope. In these stories, the people inadvertently fall for a false prophet who promises salvation only to plunge them deeper into misery – hardly a vision that complies with Orbán’s folkish notion of Magyardom; lest the prime minister desires to be mistaken for a deceiver himself.
To be sure, Krasznahorkai has repeatedly affirmed that Gyula and the people he encountered as an itinerant worker have informed his stories. A Hungarian newspaper once published the writer’s earnest recollections of his hometown, which illustrate the parallels between reality and fiction. However, what he conceived of as charming memories of, for example, the village eccentric who wandered down the street once a year, the obsessive philatelist cosplaying as a Catholic priest during daylight, and the drunk doctor who inevitably drove his Csepel motorbike into a ditch failed to charm the relatives and neighbors left behind. Yet, reprinted in a German-language volume, “My Gyula” later charmed foreign readers.
The DAAD Experience in West Berlin
Krasznahorkai left his native village for military service, which – by his own account – almost cost him his life. In 1976, he moved to Budapest to study law but switched to cultural studies after two years. Tellingly, his thesis discussed Sándor Marai in exile. While enrolled at Eötvös Loránd University and working for the Gondolat publishing house in the late 1970s, Krasznahorkai wrote his breakout novel Satantango. Béla Tarr, then an up-and-coming filmmaker, read it in manuscript. Fascinated, he sought out the author, launching a friendship and collaboration that would last a lifetime.
Officially published in 1985, Satantango inspired the elder poet and writer Miklós Meszöly, his mentor, to recommend Krasznahorkai for a one-year DAAD artist-in-residence fellowship in West Berlin. In 1974, Meszöly had been the first Hungarian author invited to the DAAD program, initiating an almost continuous presence of writers from Hungary in the divided city: György Konrád in 1977, Miklós Haraszti in 1978, Péter Esterházy in 1980, Péter Nádas in 1981, István Eörsi in 1983, György Dalos in 1984, György Petri in 1986.
In 1987, it was Krasznahorkai’s turn, and the DAAD treated him to his first visit to the “West.” The fellowship changed his life. He recalled the enclosed city as buzzling with creativity and excitement. His DAAD cohort included the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, the South Korean artist Nam June Paik, the Brazilian writer Jorge Amado, and fellow Hungarians László Lakner and György Jovánovics. Béla Tarr joined the DAAD program two years later, as they developed a film script based on Satantango, worked on The Last Boat, and pondered initial ideas for The Turin Horse, which would not hit the movies until 2011.
For Krasznahorkai, as for many DAAD fellows from Hungary, West Berlin became a gateway to international success. In the 1980s, Hungarian creatives were integral to the city’s unique cultural milieu. The DAAD fellowship offered great opportunities to acquaint the West German “Bildungsbürgertum,” fellow artists, and publishers with their work. Many fellows returned for events long after their initial stay had ended. For example, while Krasznahorkai was a DAAD fellow, Konrád, Dalos, and Eörsi participated in the joint takeover of the Berliner Tageszeitung by twenty-seven writers during the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 1987. The year also marked the 750th anniversary of Berlin’s founding, for which the DAAD partnered with the Literaturhaus, the Academy of Fine Arts, and the Literarische Colloquium (LCB), to host a series of events, and it invited, among others, Péter Esterházy and Miklós Meszöly.
In 1989, Krasznahorkai returned to Berlin as a guest of the Literarische Colloquium, a retreat at Lake Wannsee. The first stay in the city had rendered the resumption of a “normal” life in Hungary impossible. On June 14, 1989, two days before the reburial of Imre Nagy and the other 1956 martyrs in Budapest, he took a seat in the daadgalerie on Kurfürstenstrasse to read from Gnadenverhältnisse (Kegyelmi viszonyok), his first work translated into German. In 1990, Rowohlt published Hans Skirecki’s translation of Satantango. Krasznahorkai has often asserted that he had never aspired to be a writer, only to write one book. But then he discovered flaws in Satantango and developed The Melancholy of Resistance to compensate. It was in fact his second book that inspired Susan Sontag’s description of Krasznahorkai as a “Hungarian master of the apocalypse,” the quote that dominated headlines and bylines announcing the Nobel Prize in October 2025. The prestigious Zürich-based Ammannand Frankfurt-based S. Fischer publishing houses acquired the rights to The Melancholy of Resistance, and they have remained his German publishers since.
The Global Writer
With German unification and the regime change in Eastern Europe leaving much to wish for, Berlin became a launch site to explore the world: In 1990, he travelled to China and Mongolia, which inspired his novel The Prisoner of Urga. Within a year of the Hungarian original, Ammann published Skirecki’s German translation. He travelled across the US and Europe. Japan and China became frequent destinations, too, and inspired A Mountain in the North, A Lake to the South, Paths to the West, A River to the East (orig. 2003) and Seibo There Below (orig. 2008). By 1998, Magyar Narancs called him a travelling poet.
Despite the globetrotting, Krasznahorkai kept returning to Berlin: in 1994, Tarr’s over seven-hour long adaptation of Satantango was shown at the Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Calligari Film Prize and the Ecumenical Jury’s special mention. Krasznahorkai spent 1996 at the prestigious Wissenschaftskolleg, an institute of advanced studies in Berlin Grunewald. In 1999, the third installment of the apocalyptic quartet, War & War, was published simultaneously in Hungarian and German. In 2006 and 2008, the author served as curator of the Berlin International Literary Festival. In 2010, he received the city’s Brücke Award.
Delayed Success in the US
The US also influenced Krasznahorkai’s thinking and writing: In the 1990s, he shortly stayed with Allen Ginsberg in New York City, an episode fondly remembered in The Manhattan Project (2017). New York represents the destination of György Korin’s crazed odyssey in War & War. In the 2000s, he published essays in the New York Times and The Guardian, was invited to Stanford and Cornell Universities, and held a visiting professorship at Columbia.
Despite his frequent visits and undeniably growing international fame, Krasznahorkai remained a “trade secret” in the US for long. New Directions published the English translations of The Melancholy of Resistance in 1998 (orig. 1989) and War & War in 2006. But the New York Review of Books, traditionally attuned to Hungarian writers – writers generally – of Krasznahorkai’s predisposition, shunned his books. In a 2007 essay about New Directions, it lists him alongside Antonio Tabucchi, Césaire Aira, and others in a backhanded compliment: “[New Direction’s] books are still rarely reviewed, still wait out their twenty years depending on word of mouth among the people who still have a taste for these things.” The Review had a point. Krasznahorkai was indeed for US connoisseurs: The exquisite Sylph Editions published his collaboration with the artist Max Neumann, Animalinside (with a foreword by Colm Tóibín), about which the influential New Yorker published a flattering essay in July 2011, while the New York Review of Books reprinted excerpts and illustrations.
Partly, the delay of his popular breakthrough in the US was of Krasznahorkai’s own making: he had insisted on George Szirtes as translator for Satantango.
It took ten years before it reached the US market in 2012. It instantly won the Best Translated Book Award, and Krasznahorkai garnered his first proper review in the NYRB.
In August 2014, reviewing Satantango (2012) and Seiobo There Below (2013), the New York Times observed non-chalantly: “the English-speaking world has been tardy in discovering what European readers already know: If gloom, menace and entropy are your thing, then Laszlo is your man.”
The International Man Booker Prize in 2015 accelerated Krasznahorkai’s belated success in the US. Other honors followed suit, such as a ten-month fellowship at the New York Public Library, which provides the framework for The Manhattan Project. Sylph Editions published this “literary diary” of the author’s search for Hermann Melville’s home alongside stunning black-and-white photos by Ornan Rotem. Sylph’s publications illustrate Krasznahorkai’s holistic understanding of art. Music features prominently in Krasznahorkai’s œuvre. Chasing Homer. Good luck, and Nothing Else (2019) is literally set to music by Szylveszter Miklós, which readers can listen to by scanning QR codes. A band member in his youth, Krasznahorkai plays several instruments, including the guitar, the piano, the organ, the harmonica and the accordion, several of which he travels with.
Confronting this Political Moment
Especially the 18th-century composer Johann Sebastian Bach, whom Krasznahorkai recalls echoing through the streets of Gyula’s German neighborhood, appears across Krasznahorkai’s stories, including in his latest epic, Herrscht 07769 (2021). In a small fictional town in Thuringia, Germany, the protagonist, Florian Herrscht, a hap- and helpless man-child, endures the tyranny of his boss, who is the owner of an industrial cleaning company, a Bach enthusiast and ever-frustrated director of the town’s choir as well as the leader of the local neo-Nazi gang. Florian is caught between those who pity his naivety, caring neighbors such as Herr Köhler and Frau Ringer, and his boss, who once rescued him from an orphanage only to abuse and exploit him. Desperately writing never-to-be-answered letters to Chancellor Angela Merkel, Florian gets trapped in an escalating situation that makes him privy to an attack on the town’s immigrant-owned gas station, sees a return of wild wolves, and has NABU climate activists combat rural “ignorance” while Florian’s neo-Nazi friends fight a graffiti proxy war. Bereft of hope, Florian turns into an avenging angel.
Herrscht 07769 is an impressive portrait of a provincial town in East Germany, one of the many “losers of German unification,” whose remaining populations have turned to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) for simplistic answers but no solutions. It bespeaks Krasznahorkai’s incredible familiarity with Germany’s past and present and shines a light on the rising antisemitism belying the country’s oft-hailed “Vergangenheitsbewältigung.” In an act of defiance, the theater in Rudolfstadt, Thuringia, the heartland of the AfD, put Herrscht 07769 on as a play in November 2022.
Paradoxically, though, for someone so worldly and otherwise curious about other cultures, in a 2023 interview, Krasznahorkai associated Arabs, likewise scapegoated by the far-right, with antisemitism: in the context of his family’s experiences and distinct efforts at assimilation in interwar Hungary, he suggested that he would be Jewish enough for Arabs to cut off his ears, nose, gouge out his eyes, and torture him, articulating problematic anti-Muslim prejudices, similar to those previously proclaimed by Konrád and Kertész.
At the height of the refugee crisis in 2015, Orbán had embraced the Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész, a DAAD artist-in-resident in 1993, whose Fatelessness won him multiple German awards and the Nobel Prize in 2002. The PM spoke at Kertész’s funeral in 2016 – to the dismay of Péter Esterházy and others. Seriously ill himself, Esterházy rose to challenge Orbán in the tribute to his late friend. In 2020, the Orbán regime named an institute after the Nobel laureate, while it removed Kertész’s books from the Hungarian school curriculum. When international protests erupted, especially in Germany, they were restored as electives, but not without Hungarian functionaries lamenting the “foreign interference.”
Krasznahorkai’s disillusionment with Hungary has been an open secret. In 2014, four years into Orbán’s reign, the New York Times noted: “Nowadays, Mr. Krasznahorkai’s status in Hungary is similar to what it was under Communism, that of an outcast.” The Süddeutsche Zeitung, which has celebrated Krasznahorkai from the get-go, surmised that particularly German connections have made Hungarian writers “suspect” in their home county. This year, in an interview with the Sveska Dagbladet, the writer asserted: “There is no hope in Hungary left today.” The apocalypse, as he does not tire to repeat, is now. Since 2022, he has been adamantly opposed to Hungary’s obstructive policies vis-à-vis Ukraine. In 2024, he followed the examples of György Konrád and Péter Nádas, who refused to leave their personal archives in Hungary, and signed his own over to the State Archive at the Austrian National Library in Vienna.
The (Non-) Celebration
The Nobel Prize coincides with the fortieth anniversary of Satantango’s original publication. The announcement dropped only days before the prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair, which had spotlighted Hungary in 1999, cementing the popularity of Hungarian writers in Germany. He was announced as speaker at this year’s opening but then replaced. Rumors suggested he had fallen sick, but the laureate objected on social media: he was simply, and understandably, overwhelmed.
Regime-friendly media and institutions in Hungary have not taken his refusal to be coopted into the government’s agenda lightly: The tabloid Blikk snidely remarked that his home town of Gyula failed to honor the Nobel Prize, save for a A4 size paper with his photo and the assertion: “In this house, we are proud of you, congratulations!” Meanwhile, the Petőfi Literary Fund, responsible for the Hungarian presence at the Frankfurt Book Fair, failed – or refused – to change its display and celebrate the nod from Stockholm. The Fund’s and the Petőfi Literary Museum’s websites have yet to acknowledge Krasznahorkai’s Nobel Prize. Yet, none of it has fazed the honoree. A resident of Berlin, Krasznahorkai has held German citizenship since 2017.
Victoria Harms is currently an Associate Teaching Professor at the John Hopkins University in the United States. Victoria specializes in post-1945 European history and transatlantic Cold War studies. Her most recently published book is The Making of Dissidents: Hungary’s Democratic Opposition and its Western Friends, 1973-1998.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
