Interview with Kati Marton

 

The CEU Weekly interviewed  Kati Marton, Hungarian-born American journalist, author and scholar, and member of CEU’s board of trustees. Kati Marton has combined a career as a reporter and writer with human rights advocacy. She has worked as part of the leadership of renowned human rights organizations, including the International Women’s Health Coalition, Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, and International Rescue Committee. As a reporter she has contributed – among others – to ABC News, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and Newsweek. She is also an author of eight books.

TCW:  Among your many activities, you are a member of the board of trustees of CEU. What is your idea of the future development of CEU, and the community?

KM:  I think CEU is a treasure, I think that it has an enormous role to play in Hungary’s future, not only in Hungary’s future, but in the region’s. It has now a worldwide reputation as probably the most vibrant international institution of learning in Europe. And for me the pleasure is just walking around in this neighborhood and hearing the exciting buzz of students from a hundred different countries obviously really turned on by each others’ company and by the city, and by the professors here, who are fantastic! I wish I could start school all over again.

TCW: One question that came out of your talk we found very inspiring: you talked about fear and how it is a tool in the hands of dictators. Sometimes as students, we have also fear, not of dictators, but of authorities…

KM: Of dictatorial teachers?

TCW: Even that, but not only. How would you suggest, based on your experience, we can best overcome this fear of challenging authorities?

KM: I think that part of the raison d’être, the reason for being of CEU, is to inculcate independent thinking. And really the only guarantee against dictators is independent thinking. So that you are not so easily swayed by somebody selling you something that you don’t really want to buy. Independent thinking is being skeptical, not cynical. There is too much cynicism. I am very much opposed to cynicism, because I think that there is always something that we can do to make things a little bit better. And I think that it is really important to be fearless as students. And to go outside your comfort zone in your studies, because we all have a tendency to just go where we know we will do well and get a good mark. In retrospect, now I wish I would have studied things that I was afraid of, that I didn’t think I was going to do as well in as I would in languages, history, writing. Those were my comfort zones. I wish I would have done more science and mathematics, the things that I ran away from. I wish now that somebody would have said it doesn’t matter if you don’t get an A. because I always wanted to get the good grade. You should expose yourself to things. Because you never again will have such a chance in your life to just be concerned about yourself and about you expending your horizons. And another thing that you never again will have the chance is to make the friends who will be your friends for a life. This is as important as anything you learn in the classroom. I think that the hope for the world is a setting like this, where students come from all over the world and connect each other, expend each others’ worlds. This is your future, this is your future network, they will be your friends forever!

TCW: By the way, speaking about the comfort zones, did the fact that both of your parents were committed journalists play a major role in your choice of profession?

KM: Yes, definitely. I could not imagine a more interesting life than the life that my parents lived. Every day was different, they had very interesting friends, and they were really engaged in the world. And of course it turned out to be a dangerous profession too, so I don’t think I would have taken the chances that they took if I would have had little kids as they did. But that was their choice. The only other thing that appealed to me was to become a diplomat. So I married a diplomat.

TCW: And since when have you considered human rights activism as your vocation?

KM: I started being interested in journalists’ rights. Pretty much as soon as I became a journalist, I was a foreign correspondent for ABC News and I started travelling to countries where journalists didn’t have my rights, including here in Hungary, this was during the Communist times, but also in Africa and elsewhere. I realized how easy it was for us when compared to them, we didn’t fear anything. , I was leaving the next day those countries, but my local colleagues were not. And I knew that my parents had been in that situation where they had to stay and face the music when they wrote pieces about Rákosi –he was the terrible tyrant here in Hungary. So I joined the Committee to Protect Journalists and then I became its head for five years. That kind of work brings you into contact with others working in similar fields, like Human Rights Watch. I was on the board of Human Rights Watch for ten years, than on that of the International Women’s Health Coalition. It’s networking, you meet people and one person leads to another, and pretty soon you are caught up in that world. After a certain time as a reporter, that wasn’t enough, I wanted to do something that was a little bit more altruistic. I wanted to put back. I consider myself a really fortunate person, even though I’ve gone through some big losses obviously, but still I consider myself really lucky. I had some good breaks, and my parents were pretty amazing people, I had some good chances in life, and so I think people like that need to look out for others too. And my kids are that way too, I’m happy to say.

TCW: Oh, yes one of our prepared questions was whether any of your children follow you in your vocations in one way or another?

KM: Yes, absolutely. Ma daughter lives in Pakistan, and works for the United Nations, for the World Food Program. She has just spent two years in Haiti, doing the same kind of work. And before that she was working in South Africa. So she is definitely a full time humanitarian worker. And my son is about to publish his first book. So he is the writer.

TCW: Coming back to your advocacy of freedom of press: how do you see the recent Hungarian law regarding the media? The European Union, especially Germany was very critical of it. Do you think this is something we should be critical of, and concerned with, or is it an overreaction?

KM: No, it’s not an overreaction. I think there is an attempt to rule back some of the hard earned freedoms of the Hungarian media. And that has no place in a democracy. And first of all it doesn’t even work in the age of the internet, it’s getting really tough on those poor dictators who are trying to control the media. It’s hard with the internet! It’s beneath contempt to try to control the press. This is why we got rid of the Communists, to have a free press. As I sad in my speech, free press is really the only thing that separates a democracy from any other form of government.

TCW: And relating to Communism, you have mentioned that you have been to Hungary between your family’s emigration and the fall of Communism. It must have been very difficult, we imagine?

KM: Yes, the first time was really emotional.  Because it was still in the Communist times and I was still afraid, even though now I was an American reporter, down deep I was still a little girl, whose parents were taken away by this system. So I was quite nervous in those days. But I’m over that now. I have a very normal relationship with Hungary, which is a big part of my identity. I’m really thrilled be a part of the CEU family, it gives me an institutionalized framework for coming to Hungary, a reason to come to Hungary with a very good purpose. And I love watching this university, it’s very exciting to me, and to have a stake in Hungary’s future is also pretty me.

TCW: We have one more question regarding what Professor Shattuck mentioned. You were married to very important men, but you have a career on your own. How can you preserve your own place while being next to a successful man?

KM: Well, you have to be pretty determined, because Peter and Richard were very highly profiled big personalities. First of all I always kept my name, Kati Marton, I was never anything else. And which is more important, I always kept my work. I was always working. When being a foreign correspondent didn’t go well with my life after I had two little kids, I started writing. The important thing is to keep working your brain. And to stay engaged, don’t retreat, and also stand up to the big guy. Even when I was the wife of the UN ambassador, and we were having dinners almost every night, I was sleepy a lot, but I was still working on a book always. Writing I find very compatible with being a mother and a wife. But now, I don’t think it’s such a big issue. I hope it isn’t. But it was a big issue in the 80s and 90s. However, in the end they married me because of who I was, not because of whom they imagined I could become. We also have to be pretty fearless in claiming that right and sharing the responsibilities. I think your generation is already doing that.

TCW: Picking up on the discussion during your lecture, the question of what you are writing now was raised. Are there any ambitions to portray an extraordinary female character that might inspire ordinary people, or is it just a coincidence that it hasn’t yet come up?

KM: Yes, It’s a coincidence. And I did write a book on hidden power, about presidential marriages where the women got their due. Actually I do think that I have a female perspective, so my voice, which I think can be felt in my writing, is a woman’s sensibility. It’s not that I’m not interested in politics and all of the so called “masculine” things, wars, etcetera, but I see things through a woman’s perspective, which I’m happy to say is different in some ways.

TCW: And do you feel the difference when you write a journalistic article and when you write history, or they overlap?

KM: They overlap. Even when I write short articles they have a historic component. So I don’t write about daily events. For instance if  I write about the reverse of Sarajevo, it will have a lot of history, it won’t be about that there was a car crash in Sarajevo that killed five people last week, or that kinds of things, which is how I started out.

TCW: In the end we also would like to ask about your argument that facing the past for a society is essential to be able to build democracy.

KM: I hope I was clear on that.

TCW: Yes. Why do you think it has not happened in Hungary, although in the last almost quarter of a century there have been many chances for it to come to terms with it’s past. Whose responsibility is it, all of ours?

KM: Yes, I think, it’s everybody’s. You start with leadership, which after all should lead. But I think that there is a real allergy about the past, because it’s so traumatic, so many bad things happened. And what happened to the Jews here is really terrible, especially given that they had such a big role in building this city. And then were so brutally treated. Obviously there are a lot of people with a lot of guilt, bad consciousness. My mother could not talk about what happened to her parents. It was traumatic. Her parents died in Auschwitz and I never knew that until I researched for my book on Wallenberg. It is painful, it is so much easier to talk about the movies or whatever, but it’s a necessary pain. For instance it’s painful for me to talk about Richard, but yet I wrote a book about him, about our life, because we owe those who went before the debt of memory. But we also owe it to ourselves. We have to be brave about taking them with us. And taking our history with us, that’s how we are. Otherwise we are very shallow people, if we are just about the events of the day and not about what went before, and how we got here. Why did I choose to study this instead of that, the only way to figure that out is if you know not only your personal history, but the history of your people. Sometimes you just have to work your way through really painful stuff. But I think you come out on the other side as a fuller human being. The human experience is pretty amazing. But you cannot just pick and choose just the parts that are cheerful and happy, because loss is part of the human experience. In some form or another it’s part of human life. We have to bravely embrace that. That’s our duty to all who went before; in my case my grandparents, my parents, my husband. They are all here.

TCW: Absolutely. Thank you very much, it was a pleasure to have this interview with you!

Interview by Ágnes Kelemen and Julia Michalsky