After the 1989 revolution, she got a compensatory pension granted to formerly dislocated citizens, and in the 1990s she established the Bethlen Foundation to support disabled people. Following the family tradition, she used her experience and financial resources to help those who suffer from physical disabilities. The foundation also operated a bookbinding workshop in Târgu Mureș. The Countess Bethlen reckons among the property of the foundation all the objects belonging to the collection.
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- Târgu Mureș, Romania
In 1938, he became a notary at the Budapest Court of Justice. It was at this time that he came into contact with the Márciusi Front (“March Front”), a left-wing association of so-called népi (populist) writers and university students. He became a member of the Philosophical Society, giving his inaugural lecture on “Ethics and Criminal Law,” and in 1940 he began giving lectures at the University of Szeged. From 1942 to 1944 he wrote a lengthy essay “On European Balance and Peace.” It was later influential, but initially unpublished. In this essay, he analyzed post-World War I social development in Europe. In 1944, following the German occupation of Hungary, he drew up “Plans for a Peace Proposal,” which was intended to serve as a framework for postwar domestic arrangements and for the redress of social disharmony. In 1944 and 1945, he handed out exemption papers to hundreds of Jews and other persecuted individuals, and for this he was arrested and forcibly suspended from his post. When he was released, he had to go into hiding.
In 1945, Ferenc Erdei, the Minister of the Interior in the interim national government (himself a sociologist and a peasant-populist [népi] writer), appointed Bibó as head of the ministry’s administration department. In this role, Bibó helped draft the new electoral law, and he wrote a memoir criticizing the expulsion of members of the German-speaking minority from Hungary. In 1946, he was appointed professor of political science at the University of Szeged, and a year later he became an administrator for the Institute for Eastern European Studies. Meanwhile, he published a series of incisive essays on the problems faced in Hungarian and East Central European societies. His essays “A magyar demokrácia válsága” ( “The Crisis of Hungarian Democracy”; 1945) and “Zsidókérdés Magyarországon 1944 után” ( “The Jewish Question in Hungary since 1944”; 1948) and his treatise A kelet-európai kisállamok nyomorúsága ( “The Misery of Small Eastern European States”; 1946) were recognized as cornerstones of modern Hungarian political thinking by the dissident intellectual movements of the 1980s. The communist regime, however, disapproved of Bibó’s ideas and activities, and in 1950, he was asked to retire. In 1951, he took up an independent position as librarian at the Eötvös Loránd University Library in Budapest.
During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Bibó acted as the Minister of State for Imre Nagy’s second government. When the Soviets invaded on November 4 and then crushed the revolution, he was the last minister left at his post in the Hungarian parliament building. Rather than flee, he remained in the building for another two days and wrote his famous proclamation, “For Freedom and Truth,” as he awaited arrest. Later, he also prepared a proposal for “a compromise to solve the Hungarian question,” which he intended to pass to the Soviet leaders through the mediation services of the Indian embassy and President Nehru. When he was arrested in May 1957, he was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment, but he was released in 1963 according to an amnesty. However, hundreds of his fellow-prisoners, mostly young 1956-ers, students, and workers sentenced to life in prison were not released under the allegedly “general” amnesty under the pretext that they were simple criminals and not political prisoners. For many years, Bibó tried to help them regain their liberty by sending letters of complaint to the High Court of Hungary and Party-Secretary János Kádár himself, and even by trying to persuade, through clandestine channels, his Western contacts to launch public solidarity campaigns for the liberation of revolutionaries who were still being held in prison. He put himself at great personal risk by doing this, but not with much success: most of the people in question were released no earlier than the early 1970s.
After having spent six years in prison, Bibó took a job in the Library of the Central Office of Statistics, and he lived a quiet family life. He remained under the close watch of the communist secret police for the rest of his life, and he was not permitted to publish his works in Hungary. However, a few years before he died, he managed finally to publish a book in England “illegally,” i.e. without the approval of the Hungarian censors: The Paralysis of International Institutions and the Remedies. The book was published by Harvester Press, Hassocks in 1976. Bibó was not permitted to travel to the West, though the University of Geneva, of which Bibó as a student was a grantee, offered him a research fellowship; his request for a passport was repeatedly rejected according to the standard formula: “Your travel would offend the public interests of the Hungarian People’s Republic.”
In the last years of his life, Bibó took a certain satisfaction in seeing that his earlier political studies were becoming more and more popular among some young historians and dissident intellectuals in Hungary. His friends and followers intended to publish a book in celebration of his 70th birthday. Preparations were well underway when, in May 1979, Bibó died of a heart attack, six weeks after his wife died.
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- Budapest, Hungary
Billy Graham (1918–2018) was an American evangelist and a prominent evangelical Christian figure. After graduating from Sharon High School (1936), he attended Bob Jones College. In 1937, Graham began pursuing studies at the Florida Bible Institute in Temple Terrace. In 1939, he was ordained by a group of Southern Baptist clergyman at Palatka. In 1943, Graham graduated from Wheaton College with a degree in anthropology. From 1943 to 1944, he served as pastor of the First Baptist Church in Western Springs. From 1948 to 1952, he was the president of Northwestern Bible College in Minneapolis. He organized many revival meetings in Los Angeles in 1949, and he became an internationally known preacher. From 1947 to 2005, he led more than 400 missions in 185 countries on six continents. In 1950, Graham founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in Minneapolis. He was a spiritual advisor to many US presidents. He was a close friend to Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon. He repudiated racial segregation, and he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to preach jointly at a revival in New York in 1957. He retired in 2005.
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- Buncombe County, Montreat, United States of America
- Charlotte, United States of America
- New Port Richey, United States of America
- Wheaton, United States of America
Painter. Studied at the University of Fine Arts, in Géza Fónyi’s class (1959-1965). Later, taught at the Secondary School of Visual Arts (1966-1984). In the early years of his career, he painted portraits, but he later rejected these pictures.
Around the end of the 1960s, he came under the influence of existentialist philosophy. In the 1970s, he was interested in French structuralism. In his art, this led him first to paint hyperrealist pictures and later to make conceptually motivated paintings.
In the middle of the 1970, orienting himself toward the underground scene, he gave up painting and turned toward the medium of photography. He became concerned with the picture as object and role. He was interested in three subjects: the situation of the picture (its relationship to the wall, the frame and, to viewer), the relationship between image and text, and the portrait.
He performed his famous lecture at the Rabinec sttudio at the beginning of the 1980s (Who is the victim? Who is the culprit? and What is to be done?), in which he declared that “avantgarde is dead,” and “we can rethink a lot of things.”
He started to paint again and integrated into the trend of New Painting, framed by “new sensitivity” theoretized and managed by Lóránd Hegyi. He painted gesture-based landscapes at first and then large-scale ellipses, positioned on divided panels.
At the end of the 1990s, he returned to realist painting. In these new pictures, he reflected on the “vital, communicative, amazingly rich, and very problematic photo-based world of images” (amateur, press, commercial, video, television, etc.).His works are featured in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, MUMOK, Vienna, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Neue Galerie, Linz, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Kiscelli Museum and the Hungarian National Gallery.
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- Budapest, Hungary
Alenka Bizjak is a Slovenian environmental activist, a lawyer by training, who was born in Maribor in 1937, to the parents who emigrated from Trieste to Maribor after the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. Upon graduating from secondary school in Nova Gorica, Bizjak worked at the Yugoslav Railways Directorate in Ljubljana (1958-1962), the Organization of Clubs of the United Nations in Slovenia (1962-1968), Institute of International Law and International Relations of the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana (1968-1972) and the administration of the School of the Medicine of the University of Ljubljana (1972-1990). In 1990 and 1991 she was a consultant in the Office of the Slovenian Deputy Prime Minister, Leo Šešerko, who was responsible for environmental protection and regional development.
Bizjak was active among Slovenian grass roots activists that established the Association of Environmental Protection of Slovenia in 1971, and she was the Association's secretary between March 1982 and December 1984 as well. Under the Association’s aegis, intellectuals of various professional backgrounds collaborated, while her role was writing press releases, preparing materials and writing articles. All of those activities earned her reputation and label by government as "someone who is blocking progress and development."
Bizjak's task was to draw the Slovenian public’s attention to environmental issues in Slovenia and Yugoslavia. The cases of the River Krupa in the Bela Krajina Region (1985), and then the Rivers Reka, Koritnica, Kamniška Bistrica and Krka should be mentioned. In all major cases, the common denominator was the plan to build hydroelectric power stations even in national parks (the Rivers Soča, Idrijca, Sava Dolinka) or on highly polluted rivers (Mura) or at the intermittent Lake Cerknica, and last but not least the construction of the Vršič and Triglav cableways. In the 1980s, she even participated in opposition to the use of electricity from the Krško Nuclear Power Plant due to the unresolved issue of nuclear waste.
Bizjak, together with her sympathizers, established the Green Party of Slovenia in 1989. In the first democratic elections in Slovenia in April 1990, the party won seats in the Slovenian Parliament, and afterward the party became part of the new Slovenian government led by Lojze Peterle. Despite its success, the party was torn apart due to infighting, and thus lost support and members, including Alenka Bizjak.
Following the formal introduction of democracy, Bizjak continued her environmental activism, warning the Slovenian public of the negative effects of the construction of golf courses on arable land, and the issue of illegal construction, even in protected areas. Since 2008, she has been active in the civil initiative Tržnice ne damo (We’re Not Giving Up Marketplaces), an initiative that opposes the construction of garages in the city centre of Ljubljana, and also opposes the support of the Slovenian government in setting up Magna Steyr, a paint shop at Dravsko polje near Maribor.
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- Ljubljana , Slovenia
- Maribor, Slovenia 2000