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Born
Ágnes Heller was born on 12 May 1929, to Pál Heller and Angéla "Angyalka" Ligeti. They were a middle-class Jewish family. During World War II her father used his legal training and knowledge of German to help people get the necessary paperwork to emigrate from Nazi Europe. -
Auschwitz concentration camp
In 1944, Heller's father was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp where he died before the war ended. Heller and her mother managed to avoid deportation. -
University of Budapest and Communism
In 1947, Heller began to study physics and chemistry at the University of Budapest. She changed her focus to philosophy, however, when her boyfriend at the time urged her to listen to the lecture of the philosopher György Lukács, on the intersections of philosophy and culture. She was immediately taken by how much his lecture addressed her concerns and interests in how to live in the modern world.
Heller joined the Communist Party that year, 1947, while at a Zionist work camp. -
Stalinist Rule
However, she felt that the Party was stifling the ability of its adherents to think freely due to its adherence to democratic centralism . She was expelled from it for the first time in 1949, the year that Mátyás Rákosi came into power and ushered in the years of Stalinist rule. -
Teaching
1955 she began to teach at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Budapest. -
Hungarian Revolution
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution was the most important political event of her life, for at this time she saw the effect of the academic freedoms of Marxist critical theory as dangerous to the entire political and social structure of Hungary. Heller saw the uprising as confirming her ideas that what Marx really means for the people is to have political autonomy and collective determination of social life. -
Expelled from Communism
Lukács, Heller and other critical theorists emerged from the Revolution with the belief that Marxism and socialism needed to be applied to different nations in individual ways. These ideas set Heller on an ideological collision course with the new Moscow-supported government of János Kádár: Heller was expelled from the Communist Party and she was dismissed from the university in 1958 for refusing to indict Lukács as a collaborator in the Revolution. -
Budapest School
From 1963 can be seen the emergence of what would later be called the "Budapest School", a philosophical forum that was formed by Lukács to promote the renewal of Marxist criticism in the face of practiced and theoretical socialism. Other participants in the Budapest School included together with Heller her second husband Ferenc Fehér, György Márkus, Mihály Vajda and some other scholars with the looser connection to the school. -
Prague Spring.
Until the events of the 1968 Prague Spring, the Budapest School remained supportive of reformist attitudes towards socialism. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces and the crushing of dissent, however, the School and Heller came to believe that the Eastern European regimes were entirely corrupted and that reformist theory was apologist. -
Death of Lukács and exile to Australia.
After Lukács died in 1971, the School's members were victims of political persecution, were made unemployed through their dismissal from their university jobs, and were subjected to official surveillance and general harassment.Rather than remain as dissidents, Heller and her husband the philosopher Ferenc Fehér, along with many other members of the core group of the School, chose exile in Australia in 1977. -
Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy
Heller and Fehér left Australia in 1986 to take up positions in The New School in New York City, where Heller held the position of Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate Studies Program. -
Sonning Prize
In 2006, she was the recipient of the Sonning Prize. -
Goethe Medal and campaign for a referendum
In 2010 she received the Goethe Medal and In 2010, Heller, with 26 other well known and successful Hungarian women, joined the campaign for a referendum for a female quota in the Hungarian legislature. -
Interview
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Death
Agnes Heller, a prominent Hungarian philosopher and dissident who repeatedly found herself unwelcome in her own country, died on July 19 while vacationing on Lake Balaton in western Hungary. She was 90. Ms. Heller had gone for a swim, when her body was found floating in the lake, at the summer resort of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the town of Balatonalmadi.
The cause of death was not immediately clear. The police, Mr. Feher said, saw no sign of a heart attack or aneurysm.