COURAGE

connecting collections

The video periodical Black Box was the first independent film production studio during the last years of communist rule in Hungary. It reported on demonstrations and civilian initiatives that the official media passed over in silence or reported on with disinformation. With its film reports, and portraits distributed in samizdat channels, at the beginning Black Box managed to create the largest film collection documenting the events of the transitional period and the change of political system both in Hungary and in other communist countries.

In the collection of the Ideological Commission of the League of Communists of Croatia (IC LCC) (1956-1965), a number of documents illustrate the IC LCC's view of ideologically inappropriate occurrences in cultural creativity (art, literature, film), the media (the press, radio and television), education and science in Croatia. This commission had the task of monitoring, analysing and directing overall activity in these areas, issuing its directives and establishing staffs in all major institutions and organizations. In this way, it also reacted to ideological currents that did not align with the accepted direction, and it thereby became the deciding factor in cultural policy in Croatia. 

The Dan Petrescu and Thérèse Culianu-Petrescu collection includes representative Western books that offer critical analyses of the communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, brought semi-clandestinely into Romania and used as alternative sources of intellectual formation. An example of moral resilience in the face of communist dictatorship, this collection illustrates the cultural nonconformism of an informal grouping of young intellectuals known as the Iaşi Group, out of which, at the end of the 1980s, in a period of profound despair, the critical discourse, lucid and courageous, of Dan Petrescu made an impression through the intermediary of the Western mass-media. The story of dissidence in Iaşi, in particular that of Dan Petrescu, was until 1989 that of a confrontation between the truth of critical intellectuals and the lies of dictatorship. The dichotomous story of dissidence during communism turned after the opening of the files of the former Securitate into confrontation between each of the protagonists with the collective past of the group. Preferring marginality to stardom, Dan Petrescu and Thérèse Culianu-Petrescu are among the few heroes who did not lose this status even after the files of the secret police brought to light betrayals and complicities hitherto suspected but unproven.