COURAGE

connecting collections

The collection reflects the activity of the Romanian-German writer and journalist William Totok, persecuted by the communist authorities for the criticism towards Ceaușescu’s political regime expressed in his literary texts. The William Totok private collection comprises mainly books, literary manuscripts, drafts of academic papers, audio and video documents, and correspondence.

Wojciech Zamecznik's collection represents the early stage of Polish school of poster design. Zamecznik himself has an interesting biography - ex-Auschwitz prisoner, active member of Association of Polish Artists and Designers, who created posters for artistic and political purposes. The collection shows the tension between the official language of socialist posters and private photographs, more intimate and portraying the everyday life.

The Woman and Society Feminist Collection at the Centre for Women's Studies in Zagreb consists of one register containing the manuscripts from the lecture cycle which was organized by the "Woman and Society" Section in 1982/83. The lectures dealt with the “woman question” in the historical context, as well as the “woman question” issues in socialist self-management and Marxist theory. The Collection testifies to the engagement of a smaller number of intellectuals who sought to put the “woman question” into public focus, thus affecting the improvement of the status of women in Yugoslavia, while the authorities argued that it was unnecessary because they thought that the ˝woman question˝ was resolved within Marxism.

The Women’s Activism in Kosovo collection belongs to the Kosovo Oral History Initiative, and contains Kosovan women's vivid personal stories, which often intersect with broader historic events within Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1999. It depicts women's specific forms of engagement and resistance in protests against the Yugoslav regime, as well as their fight for women’s rights. The Women’s Activism collection offers a unique online archive of oral records, giving visibility and permanence to a history of women’s experience, which has been consistently marginalized, if not forgotten. To date, the collection contains thirty interviews with women activists, of which twenty-five are Albanian, three are Serbian, and two are of other nationality.