András Bíró (1925–2024)
In mid-April, he said,
He lived as long as people can today, at best, and even longer, as he had more than just one life. Born in Bulgaria to a Serbian father and a Hungarian mother, he almost had three mother tongues; he was an anti-fascist in Hungary, then first a devout and later a disillusioned communist, a rejected party-membership applicant, and, despite everything, a liberal and egalitarian leftist. He lived in Paris, in the Rome of Fellini and Mastroianni in the 1960s, in Kenya and Mexico, until, in the second half of the 1980s, he returned home(?). He had five wives, even more loves, many beautiful women, including Isabel Allende. He was like a relative of Robert Capa; a beautiful, attractive man, only taller. He loved life, he could live well, “I was persecuted by luck,” he used to say. He lived a long and fulfilling life, healthy, with the exception of the last few weeks, free, but always (or because of) responsible for others. That is why he became an anti-fascist, a communist, a leftist disillusioned with communists.
In his last years, he lived alone, but he was never lonely, and it is difficult to keep track of how many friends he had. Younger people, and many of his contemporaries, too stayed with him; he was lucky in this as well. Zsuzsa Ferge passed away only a few months ago, and on the 100th birthday of the now 102-year-old sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin, he was also present, on Macron’s invitation, in the Élysée Palace. (Morin, who, like András Bíró, was expelled from the Communist Party, published his autobiographical book in the first days of June, almost exactly when András Bíró’s autobiography was published.)
He edited the journal of the United Nations’s food agency in Rome, and turned it into a global journal focusing on the Third World, which, initially, caused consternation among UN bureaucrats. He then explored, in real life, what previously had been the subject of his writings; after his urban life in Rome, he did fieldwork in the Mexican countryside. He became an anthropologist and sociologist; he learned the profession from his friends, the country’s best experts—Pablo Gonzáles Casanova, one of the greatest figures in Latin American sociology, or the agricultural sociologist Rodolfo Stavenhagen—and from his own experience.
He did not want to be a scientist, to understand only what was around him, but, following Marx, to change, if not the world, at least local conditions. When he returned to Hungary and founded the Autonomia Foundation, he wanted to adapt his Mexican experiences to the reluctant Hungarian reality. He wanted to provide the Roma with credit, land, work, a livelihood, and a dignified life; for which his foundation received the alternative Nobel Prize.
Records of the Autonomia Foundation and most of the personal papers of András Bíró are preserved at the Blinken OSA Archivum. The documents will be available for research to everyone in the near future.
