COURAGE

connecting collections

The volume published by the Tóth couple at the end of 2017 successfully resumes the independent writings, interviews and all details appearing in the course of time which shed light on past events that have meanwhile become history. The texts comprised in the five parts of the book – introduction, interviews about Ellenpontok (Counterpoints), the discussion in Budapest, recollections and writings of others – are ordered according to the time of their publication. The fourth part of the volume, entitled “Recollections” includes the text “How the Romanian State Security found Ellenpontok?” which represents the first attempt at revealing the details of the discovery of the Transylvanian samizdat by the secret police on the basis of the observation-data collection files on Antal Károly Tóth known by the codename “Bastion” in the Ellenpontok Ad-hoc Collection. The text which was also published in the 2013 issues of the Hungarian-language independent cultural and public life magazine Kapu (Gate) offers insight into the world of the Securitate, the staff of which resorted to the complex ways and means inherent in the informant network, operative technique and outdoor street shadowing in the course of the unravelling of the case across several counties. 

The crucial issue of the Hungarian minority ideology prior to 1989 was that every other consideration had to be subordinated to the issue of persistence and survival, and inaction seemed the wisest option. However, in the related term of passive resistance, resistance denotes the essence and the purpose, while passivity only refers to the form. It was the radicalism of their thinking that distinguished the editors of Ellenpontok from real Transylvanian Hungarian politicians and this led in the early 1980s to the creation of the second public sphere in the Partium.

This exhibition was presented to the public for the first time between 4 and 10 December 2017, in the Constantin Brâncuşi Exhibition Hall, which is located in the Palace of the Parliament of Romania. The opening coincided with the Annual Conference of the European Network of Official Authorities in Charge of the Secret Police Files, when CNSAS handed the presidency of the network to the Committee for Disclosing the Documents and Announcing Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens to the State Security and the Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian National Army. The exhibition illustrated the methods of controlling and keeping writers under surveillance, while trying to reassess the meaning of so-called “resistance though culture” in communist Romania. The items selected for the exhibition originated from the Confiscated Manuscripts Collection and from other fonds of the CNSAS Archives: Penal Fonds, Informative Fonds, Network Fonds, and Documentary Fonds. Three different types of materials illustrated the theme of confiscated manuscripts: archival documents, visual images, and extracts from interviews with writers in the Oral History Collection at CNSAS. The topics illustrated by these items were censorship, writers’ trials in which confiscated manuscripts were used as incriminating evidence, and writers’ surveillance by the secret police. The main items of the exhibition were, however, the writers’ confiscated manuscripts: unpublished prose, poems, pieces of poetry, essays, diaries, memoirs, daily notes, and annotated censored publications.