COURAGE

connecting collections

This tape recorder is the instrument with whose help over 1,000 hours of interviews were recorded in the course of Zoltán Rostás’s oral history project. It is a professional tape recorder, of West German manufacture, weighing approximately 7 kg, and is still in good working order, more than four decades after it was used for the first time. The UHER tape recorder has four recording speeds. Zoltán Rostás mentions that, in order not to have to manoeuvre the microphone attached to the tape recorder very often, and thus to avoid deterioration in the quality of the sound recorded, he used the instrument at the lowest speed. In this way, the recording capacity was considerably extended, and could be as much as five hours for a narrow magnetic tape.

Initially, this tape recorder belonged to the editorial office of the Hungarian-language publication A Hét (The week), where Zoltán Rostás worked before 1989. Identical audio instruments were also in the possession of the national radio and the Institute of Folklore, as they were very sturdy, durable pieces of equipment with an excellent recording capacity. “At the national television there were even better ones, Nagra. But I think I managed very well with my UHER. Which in fact, initially wasn’t actually mine. It was only after 1989, when the instrument was discarded, that it came into my possession,” mentions Zoltán Rostás. The UHER instrument is now in Zoltán Rostás’s home, close to the hundreds of tapes recorded with oral history testimonies. The great majority of the tapes used and now in the Zoltán Rostás private collection were Munplast, of Romanian manufacture.

MEFESZ Bulletin, 4^th year, 2^nd issue, May 1963

When a new issue of the Hungarian émigré students’ bulletin was published in May 1963, major political changes had taken place both in Hungary and all over the world. By the end of 1962, the “Hungarian question,” which had been a subject of debate for six years, had been taken off the agenda of the UN General Assembly. In early 1963, an amnesty was proclaimed in Hungary for most of the 1956 political prisoners, and the consolidation of Kádár regime began with a number of concessions. It seemed that those in power in both East and West preferred peaceful cooperation to confrontation. This challenging new setting forced the politically active Hungarian émigré circles to rethink their future role and strategy.    

The UFHS/MEFESZ also felt the need to reorganize its activities according to some new preferences. They felt that their three most important tasks were defending democracy and defending human and minority rights (especially the rights of ethnic Hungarians beyond the borders of Hungary). This can be seen in the front cover news and articles. UFHS/MEFESZ would open public debates for its members to discuss recent economic, social, and political changes in Hungary, together with presentations by experts, and it launched a new solidarity campaign with Transylvanian Hungarians suffering from forced assimilation by the Romanian state.

The latter subject is of particular interest, as it was in part a sinister by-product of the massive reprisals following the brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolution of 1956. As is explained in an open letter to UN General Secretary U Thant by the central Geneva office of the UFHS, in Romania, especially in the cities in Transsylvania and Partium (where larger Hungarian-speaking communities lives), there had been massive peaceful solidarity demonstrations during the Hungarian revolution, and in revenge, thousands of students had been arrested and brutally beaten by the Romanian police. Years later, many of them were still kept in jail for nothing, while in Hungary a general amnesty has been announced and most of the revolutionaries had been released. U Thant was just about to pay a visit to Bucharest as a official guest, and he was asked by the UFHS to raise his voice in support of a general amnesty in Romania too. (Political prisoners started to be released from jail in Romania only a year later, in 1964.)

Ujj Zsuzsi presented her first exhibitions and concerts together. In her oeuvre, the visual arts and poetry that is sung are organically fused, as for instance in the case of Fürst Január ICY (Baksa Soós János), fe Lugossy László, and Nah Te (Vető János). Her knowledge of the oeuvre of the Hajas Tibor, who died at a tragically young age in 1980, was decisive in her work.

In her publication issued on the occasion of her first exhibition and concert (First brochure - Liget Gallery, 1987) she presented twenty-nine photographs and twenty-eight lyrics, along with some scores. Later, she created new photographic works (with the technical assistance of István Halas) in response to invitations to exhibit.

In 1991, she gave up photography. She has since written poems, songs and non-public texts. As the singer and author of the band Csókolom, she published musical recordings in 1994, 1995, 2000, and 2006.

Her visual works consist of carefully arranged black and white photographs and moving images. These images document her non-public performances. Interest in her works became more lively in the second half of the first decade of the new millennium, along with increasing interest in issues of gender representation.

The Piarist monk Ödön Lénárd was the Hungarian priest who was in jail for the longest time (for 18 and a half year) under the communist dictatorship. An important part of his collection is his correspondence with his brother, Ernő Lénárd. The copied letters reveal a great deal about the conditions in prisons in socialist Hungary, and they are important sources on church history too. These letters are testimony to Lénárd’s spiritual resistance against the dictatorship. They make clear that imprisonment did not break Ödön Lénárd, who, after his last release in 1977, continued his silent struggle against the communist dictatorship: he became a pastor and a spiritual leader of adult groups and a clandestine community of secret Cistercian nuns.

Launched by Robert Tekieli in Kraków in 1986, brulion (original spelling) was a literary and cultural periodical, which contested not only the communist system, but also cultural elites associated with the underground Solidarity and the ethos of dissident subculture. Instead, the periodical endorsed postmodernism, took inspiration from the New York School poets, focused on phenomena characteristic for both mass culture and alternative art, and analyzed socio-cultural processes that accompanied transition to capitalism. The milieu of brulion, sometimes also referred to as 'the brulion formation', comprised of poets, writers, and essayists who were born in the early 1960s, represented diverse literary traditions and genres, and strongly influenced post-1989 Polish literature, culture, and mass media. Among writers associated with brulion in the 1980s and '90s were Marcin Świetlicki, Cezary Michalski, Manuela Gretkowska, Jacek Podsiadło and Krzysztof Koehler. Following Robert Tekieli's conversion to orthodox Catholicism and social conservatism, brulion desintegrated and closed down in 1999. Polish Underground Publications Collection holds six issues of brulion released from 1987 to 1990.