COURAGE

connecting collections

Perhaps the greatest irony of Andrei Siniavskii's career is that he wrote his most controversial book Strolls with Pushkin while he was imprisoned in Dubrovlag, a Soviet labor camp in the Mordovia region of Russia. In an interview with Catherine Nepomnyashchy in 1990, Siniavskii explained how he wrote the novel by sending excerpts in letters to his wife Mariya Rozanova, while also remaining under constant surveillance by the authorities. There was a restriction on the frequency of letters (only two per month), but the authorities were far less concerned with length. Siniavskii wrote twenty-page letters in tiny but very neat handwriting, making sure to avoid topics that were sure to grab the attention of the censors, chief among them criticism of the Soviet government and complaints about life in the camps. Siniavskii added an additional layer to avoid the detection of his novel, talking about Aleksandr Pushkin under the guise of sharing what looked to be random thoughts, but were already a thoroughly conceived book. His wife Mariya caught onto this method and separated out all these passages from his letters and collected them in one place. Once Siniavskii was released in 1971, the novel was finished.  

Lucian Pintilie’s second film project De ce trag clopotele, Mitică? (Why are the bells ringing, Mitică?) was presented for the first closed screening before the censoring committee in June 1981. After the screening, the cultural authorities decided to stop financing its production. Consequently, Lucian Pintilie protested against this decision in meetings with the highest Party leaders and wrote a letter signed by him and the film crew to complain about the situation (Pintilie 2003, 320–328). The report chosen as a featured item of the collection records what happened after the first screening and details the circumstances and the reasons that led to the banning of the film. Probably due to Lucian Pintilie’s protest, a second screening was organised on 25 October 1981. The decision-makers gathered to make recommendations about the film and on the basis of these to grant their approval for it to be finished. The report underlines the fact that the audience had different opinions about the film. While the censoring committee and other cultural activists agreed that Pintilie should be allowed to complete his work, his fellow directors spoke about “inappropriate aspects” of the film. Despite these optimistic assessments, the management of the studio for which Lucian Pintilie produced the film handed him an official address on 4 November 1981. The document contained critical evaluations made by the censoring committee about his film, concerning his directorial perspective and elements that were not included in the original script. Moreover, he was required within an interval of ten days to remove eighteen sequences that were outlined as inappropriate (lines with double meanings, ribaldry, sexual acts, etc.). After the implementation of these changes the film would undergo another closed screening in order to get approval. The report records the reactions of the Romanian director regarding the censorship of his movie. He declared bluntly that he would not make any of the suggested changes. and threatened the management of the film studio and the cultural authorities that he would protest publicly about the unfair treatment and censorship of his work. His intransigent position and threats of public protest influenced the Romanian authorities’ decision to give Pintilie’s film a new chance in 1982. As he again refused to implement the changes requested by the censorship, the official premiere and public screening of De ce trag clopotele, Mitică? did not occur until after the fall of the communist regime (ANCAS, Informative Fonds, file 235, f. 12 f-v).

The photo shows the first line-up of the band Azra in Gospić in October 1978. The concert was part of the first tour of Azra organized by Polet. The first line-up consisted of Branimir Johnny Štulić, Jura Stublić, Marino Pelajić, Branko Hromatko and Mladen Max Juričić. In 1979, Jura Stublić, Marino Pelajić and Mladen Max Juričić left Azra and founded the group Film. With Azra soon reformed by Johnny Štulić, the group Film became one of the leaders of the new wave scene not only in Zagreb but also throughout Yugoslavia.

After the strike in Gdansk in August and September 1980 and the establishment of the Solidarity trade union, which meant the beginning of the fall of communism in Poland, Štulić wrote the song "Poland in my heart." It expresses explicit support to events in Poland, and mentions Wojtyla, i.e. Pope John Paul II. Among the young people in Yugoslavia, this song was perceived as a call to freedom from communism and cultural disagreement with the older generation who were in the Party.

After one concert and eight studio albums, Azra broke up in 1990. After several changes in the original line-up, group Film continued to perform and still plays today under the name Jura Stublić & Film.

Ihr wichtigstes Werk, den Roman "Franziska Linkerhand" über das Scheitern einer jungen lebensbejahenden Architektin beim Aufbau des Sozialismus, konnte Brigitte Reimann nicht mehr vollenden. Sie arbeitete daran seit 1963 bis zu ihrem Tod 1973. Schon ein Jahr später erschien das Fragment im Berliner Verlag Neues Leben und erlebte schnell Übersetzungen in mehrere osteuropäische Sprachen, Lizenzauflagen in der Bundesrepublik und Adaptionen für Bühne und Fernsehen. Die letzte Seite des ursprünglichen Manuskripts aber blieb bis zur ungekürzten Neuausgabe 1998 unveröffentlicht.

Er war so fair wie ein Mann nur kann

(…) Rücksicht (…) sein Urteil. Sie hatten die beiden Entwürfe auf den Tisch geheftet – Kowalski und bucklige Kleine hatten eine Kollektivarbeit eingereicht -, und Schafheutlin bestand darauf (…) seine Einschätzung, und das sie, wenn auch etwas gehemmt, weil die Stimme des Chefs eisern blieb, weder Zustimmung hier noch Ablehnung dort erraten ließ.

Fr. hatte den Zweikampf verloren, noch ehe sie ihn antrat.

Group and community photographs feature heavily amongst the corpus of confiscated images in the secret police archives. Such images were often taken at pilgrimages, religious festivals and special gatherings and were a means for the community to materialise communal memory and present their values and beliefs in distinctive visual form. For the secret police they were an invaluable source of information and a convenient means of tracing networks and personal relationships in the religious underground. The photographs in the archives, therefore, represent an important resource for understanding how religious groups chose to represent themselves and how the totalitarian system used images of religious groups in order to identify, trace and incriminate their members. Photographs such as ones confiscated from pastor József Németh in 1972 form an important part of the Hidden Galleries Digital Archive, not only because of what this rich corpus of images can tell us about religious practices and spaces in the underground during communism but also because in many cases these photographs remain hidden from the communities that produced them. One of the principal aims of the Hidden Galleries Archive is to re-connect communities with lost aspects of their cultural and sacred patrimony. The photographs featured in this entry were later shown to the community from whom we came to know that the hidden house church was no longer used following the house raid in 1972 and due to ongoing surveillance the community was forced to dissolve. József Németh only succeeded in planting a new community ten years later in 1982. The new community began to gather again in the same house church. We also learned that the young girl featured in the picture of a baptism is the daughter of the pastor, who was 12 years old at that time, and that the baptism took place in the garden of the hidden church in a specially constructed font.

http://hiddengalleries.eu/digitalarchive/s/en/item/15