Bear



Bánk’s number one mythical figure was a nephew of Eszter’s by the name of Medve, or Bear (Gábor Molnár, 1938-1992). As the author of numerous traditions, Bear embodied the ideal to which all participants aspired: that of the original, creative, courageous, extroverted, community-spirited (male) teen. Bear first attended the camp in Bánk during the 1940s, and by 1948, was the occupant of his own “private suite”. His life and talents were inseparably intertwined with the camp’s first major heroic era: an age of play that was wild, masculine, and mythological, while at the same time democratic and less elitist than in the camp’s latter days. The age in question ended with the Revolution of 1956, after which a number of the campers and their families, including Bear’s, were forced into emigration.

Bear was a multi-talented young individual who wrote poetry, painted, and hoped one day to continue his pursuit of “serious games” as an actor. At the age of eighteen, he took up arms and fought in the Revolution on the streets of Pest, becoming one of many forced to flee the country upon the revolution’s defeat. In 1956, he emigrated to Switzerland; and though he never returned to Hungary, he followed the politics of his birth nation with great attention, writing to Eszter and his friends in a way that even decades later testified to extreme homesickness. When Bear’s childhood friends from Bánk travelled to “the West,” they always visited him. Many claim that he was never truly at home in Switzerland; moreover, his dreams of becoming an actor vaporised in the foreign-language environment and his far-ranging interests and creativity lacked the setting they needed to unfold. While he did manage to earn a degree in psychology from the University of Geneva, the diploma was hung up-side-down on his bathroom wall. He never married or started a family, but lived a Bohemian lifestyle filled with complicated, short-lived, intense romantic relationships, supporting himself through odd jobs amidst frequent financial difficulties. In March of 1992, Bear committed suicide in Geneva.