COURAGE

connecting collections

In July 1983, Lantos submitted a long report to the secret police entitled “Experiences, Facts and Tendencies.” In this report, Lantos analyzed the political processes that were taking place, the behavior of the dissent students and the oppositional, anti-régime ideas circulating at the Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences (Marx Károly Közgazdaságtudományi Egyetem, or MKKE). He concluded that the intelligentsia was in crisis. According to Lantos, the reasons behind this were the decline of economic and political-ideological life and the lack of proper political education at the university.

Made as part of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which emerged following the collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy in 1919, the film offers a complex overview of revolutionary practice and the psychology of terror.

Dezső Magyar and Gábor Bódy, the director and the writer created a multi-layered narrative by using diverse literary sources, actual news footage, and references to current events. The main source of inspiration was Ervin Sinkó’s novel Optimists and the memoirs of József Lengyel and the wife of Tibor Szamuely. Georg Lukacs’s account on the subject was also used for references in some cases, as well as quotations from the writings of Mao and Che Guevara.

The film presents a general model of revolution through talking heads reflecting on their own interpretations and ideas. Though the story is based on actual events, the characters are all fictional. The protagonists, however, in addition to being professional actors, were members of radical intellectual and neoavantgarde circles. They pursued intense theoretical debates on the possibilities of revolutionary action, the dilemma of violence, the criticism of new bureaucracy, and the essence of working class culture.

In part as a consequence of the experiences of the Prague Spring and student movements in the West, the terms of the discussions were changed. The 68er radicals dropped Marxist-Leninist concepts and debated the meaning of leftist politics, the future, and the potentials of revolution and social autonomy. They developed an allegorical reading of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, which provided a pretext for the filmmakers to discuss 1968. Due to its subversive approach, the film was banned for decades.

According to the testimony of the Aktionsgruppe Banat members, the poem was the collective work of the entire group, which they assumed and published as such (Totok 2001, 22). The text was sent for publication in Romania in 1974, but the censorship prevented it. It was first published two years later in a changed form in the West German cultural magazine Akzente: Zeitschrift für Literatur (No. 6/1976; Totok 2001, 22–23).

The poem uses wordplays to suggest the omnipresence of coercion in the society they lived in and it represent a subtle critique of the state–citizens relation in Ceaușescu’s Romania. The authors played with the meanings of the German word Engagement which in the poem could be understood both as employment and (ideological) commitment. In the second part of the poem, the authors suggest overtly and ironically the coercive character of the state–citizen relation in the society they lived in and the impossibility of the latter modifying this relation either in ideological or in practical terms:

“I’ve been engaged for too long

I don’t want to be engaged anymore

I have also been engaged too long

yes

with you

also with you

I am no longer engaged

I am not engaged either

yes yes, me neither

in vain, who was once engaged

remains forever engaged.”

An album composed of clippings of period texts, pictures, photographs and graphics. Its author, nor the exact date of origin, is known. Perhaps his creator was one of the founding members of the Masaryk Society in Brno. Its foundations can be found in the 1930s, since the greatest amount of material came from this time - mainly newspaper clippings about TGM’s death (in 1937). The album was probably used as a pictorial accompaniment to lectures that took place at the time of socialism as an unofficial event in private flats. At this time, no articles with references to the personality or the work of the first Czechoslovak president were officially rooted and there was a lack of available photographs of President Tomas G. Masaryk and other illustrative documents. This album offered a rich visual accompaniment to the stages of his life and topics related to his personality. The pictures accompany published texts, for example, by Edvard Beneš. Owning such an album and its public presentation could have had unpleasant consequences for the owner during socialism. It is good to note this context at the moment, because all controversies of this kind have disappeared, the visual material about TGM is more than enough and the old album with clippings from newspapers would not attract any attention.