COURAGE

connecting collections

Václav Havel (1936-2011) was an important Czech playwright and essayist, a critic of the communist regime, one of the initiators of Charter 77, a founding member of VONS (The Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted), a political prisoner and later president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. The collection consists mainly of materials of his dramatic creation and its dissenting effect.

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.