COURAGE

connecting collections

The exhibition was organised by CNSAS (Romanian acronym for National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives) at Western University of Timișoara. The event deliberately coincided with the conference 40 Jahre Aktionsgruppe Banat: Akteure und Texte – Mitstreiter und Begleiter (40 years since the creation of Banat Action Group: Actors and texts – supporters and followers), organised by Institute for German Culture and History in South-Eastern Europe (Institut für deutsche Kultur und Geschichte Südosteuropas e.V.), which is affiliated to Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich, and Western University of Timișoara. The exhibition displayed old photos of the members of this non-conformist group of Romanian-German writers, manuscripts and publications of the writers of the group, and documents from the surveillance and investigation files issued by the Securitate. The official opening of the exhibition took place on 26 April 2012. 

The film was made on the basis of the book by Slavko Golstein, 1941: The Year That Keeps Returning and produced by Croatian Radio Television in 2012. The story is about the Goldstein family in Karlovac during the first year of World War II. A letter from Ivo Goldstein, who was in prison, to his son Slavko was found in the Vinko Nikolić Collection.

This edited volume of Žarana Papić’s writings between 1977 and 2002 represents the work of Žarana Papić from the start to the end of her research activity. In addition, the editors intended to include a wide range of issues Papić dealt with, as well as how these issues changed throughout the time she worked on them. That is why each text is briefly put into the social and cultural context in which it appeared. This brief introduction can be read as a short summary of her works.

The compilation also includes a complete bibliography of Žarana Papić’s works and two interviews with her. In the bibliography it can be seen that Papić’s texts were published in Serbian, English, German, French, Albanian, Slovak and Norwegian.

This book can be read as a comprehensive chronological representation of Žarana Papić’s theoretical work. It is significant that while reading the selected texts, from the first one in 1972 to the last in 2002, it becomes clear that the texts weave through different histories: the history of feminist movement, history of (Yugoslav/Serbian) sociology and anthropology, and ultimately the history of a fallen political system and its transformation.

Although the context and theoretical interests of Žarana Papić changed, there is a common thread linking all of her texts: the feminist perspective. In this sense this selection can be understood as an attempt to fully present the authentic testimony of a person who was feminist in thought and action and to present the development of feminism in the territory of the former Yugoslavia.