COURAGE

Свързване на колекции

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.

Brigitte Reimann was unable to complete what is regarded as perhaps her most important work, the novel "Franziska Linkerhand“ which details the failure of a jaded, young female architect to embrace socialism. She worked on the novel from 1963 until her death 10 years later in 1973. In 1974 the fragments were published by the Berlin-based New Life publishing house and translated quickly into multiple Eastern European languages. Additionally, the work was licensed for publication in West Germany and adapted for the stage and television. The final page of the original manuscript remained unreleased until the unabridged new edition was published in 1998.

[Transcription of the scanned masterpiece]
He was only as fair as a man could be

(…) Consideration (…) his judgement. They bound the two drafts on the table – Kowalski and his humpbacked little pal had submitted a collective work -, and Schafheutlin insisted (…) his estimation, that they, although somewhat hampered, since the voice of the boss remained unwavering, revealed no inkling as to whether he approved or rejected the work.

Fr. had lost the duel, before she even entered the competition.

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.

The Securitate’s informative surveillance of Lucian Pintilie also resulted in the recording of his private conversations. This was the case of his discussion with the actor Paul Sava on 15 November 1972 in one of the halls of the Lucia Sturdza Bulandra Theatre, where Pintilie worked at the time. During their dialogue Lucian Pintilie complains about the fact that the Romanian cultural authorities are making his life difficult as they are trying to prevent him from continuing his film projects in Yugoslavia on the grounds that “no one knows what I’m going to do there.” Without their approval, he could not get the service passport that would have allowed him to travel and work in neighbouring Yugoslavia. Asked by Paul Sava why he does not want to work in Romania, Pintilie replies that he wants to work at home and has already approached the authorities with a plan to stage Chekhov’s play The Seagull. However the censors are reluctant to agree to his project as they are afraid of a new scandal after the banning of his theatrical production of Gogol’s The Inspector General in 1971. Pintilie denies that he had any sort of hidden and subversive agenda in staging Gogol’s play and says that he chose this play because it represented his “moral and aesthetic creed.” He adds that he will use his personal contacts with some of the highest Party leaders in order to speed up the issuing of his passport and to get official endorsement for the staging of Chekhov’s play. At this point in the conversation, Paul Sava intervenes and asks him why he does not want to accept any kind of compromise with the political authorities, why he does not try to “understand some interests, some political points of view” given that no one can “survive outside politics, without the knowledge of it.” Pintilie’s reply contains the argument behind his refusal to compromise with the political authorities and his determination to oppose them in the cultural sphere. He mentions that the only politics he understands is “the art of the performance through which I serve the people.” Paul Sava goes on to ask if his artistic work can be called politics and if indeed it serves the interests of the people as he claims. Pintilie replies that he does not want to know anything about politics because he considers his artistic work to be separated from it. From his point of view, Nicolae Ceaușescu is “a political genius and he deals with politics” while he (Pintilie) has “a genius for the performance” and he deals with that. He also adds that he is sure that the Romanian communist leader does not even know about his work. Consequently, those who are to be blamed for banning his work are cultural activists seeking to please the leader in order to avoid losing their positions. The two interlocutors leave the theatre and before saying good-bye Sava wishes Pintilie would gain “a bit of wisdom” and reconsider his uncompromising position in cultural matters and in his relation with the authorities (ACNSAS, Informative Fond, File 52 vol. 1, ff. 107-110, 111 f-v).