COURAGE

connecting collections

The Alenka Puhar Collection on the Human Rights Movement in Slovenia/Yugoslavia was mostly created in the 1980s and testifies to the struggle of Slovenian and Yugoslav activists to promote and protect human rights in Yugoslavia. Alenka Puhar was one of the key people in the 1983 campaign to abolish the death penalty in Yugoslavia, and in the organization of mass protests in Ljubljana in 1988 and in the Slovenian spring in the late 1980s. The collection documents the struggle and connections between Slovenian activists and other Yugoslav activists and dissidents who had the common goal of promoting and protecting human rights in Yugoslavia and ultimately the collapse of the communist regime.

The Alexandru Călinescu private collection epitomises the trajectory of an intellectual in an important university city who began to practise a camouflaged contestation, published in local student magazines, with a limited readership, and ended up in unequivocal public opposition, disseminated transnationally through foreign radio stations. The collection marks some of the key episodes in the movement of resistance to and contestation of the communist regime as it manifested itself in Iaşi, the historical capital of the region of Moldavia and the city with the oldest university in the Old Kingdom of Romania. At the same time, the collection and the personal story of Alexandru Călinescu illustrate a lesson in dignity in very difficult times, when there were few who had the courage to speak openly against the Ceaușescu regime.

The Andrei Pandele private collection is the most significant testimony in pictures, mainly black and white, to the demolition of historic monuments and districts in the Romanian capital in the period of late communism. Together with photographs that are essential for the preservation of the memory of a mutilated city and a vanished cultural heritage, the collection also includes a series of images capturing aspects of the degradation everyday life throughout the profound crisis of the 1980s. These suggest both the absurdity of the policies of the Ceaușescu regime and the grotesque mutations in the everyday routine of ordinary people to which these policies gave rise.