COURAGE

connecting collections

The most significant event in the history of the present collection was the donation of Mihnea Berindei’s personal library to the A.D. Xenopol Institute of History of the Romanian Academy in Iași. The library (comprising over two thousand book titles, various excerpts, and over thirty periodicals) was donated by its founder to this institution in 2016. A special donation agreement was concluded between Mihnea Berindei and the A.D. Xenopol Institute, according to which Berindei’s library was to be inventoried, catalogued, and preserved as a separate book collection (fond de carte) at the Institute’s library. At the time of the library’s transportation to Iași, the printed materials fitted into eighty-eight boxes of various formats. Dorin Dobrincu’s role was crucial in this phase, as he personally oversaw the transportation of these papers to their destination in Iași. Although the storage facilities at the Institute’s library are adequate, the materials are currently still in the process of being inventoried and catalogued. Over 80 % of the titles have already been inventoried. However, due to lack of personnel this process is likely to take several more months. The collection should be soon accessible to the interested researchers.

The project ˝Web archive Anti-museum VD Trokuts˝ was the undergraduate thesis of Sanja Kuzmanović submitted for her degree in design from the Faculty of Architecture. Her supervisor was Ivan Doroghy. Darko Schneider, the director of the Anti-museum and general director of the Vladimir Dodig Trokut Anti-museum Foundation chose one hundred characteristic works for the web-archive.

The collection is divided into several sections: The No Art Collections, Ethnomythology, Design and Tourism, Through Everyday Life, Eroticism, Subject Nature, Games, and Toys. The project was attended by Branka Prša and Pavel Posavec.

The provisional selection of one hundred works will be supplemented over time, because it is a museum in the making. In time, a complete chronology of the Anti-Museum’s activities from 1968 to today will be added, with all actions, performances, video films, agitation, proclamations, elaborations, lectures, and seminars, including the wundercammere workshops.

The volume Rock sub seceră și ciocan (Rock under the hammer and sickle), which came out in a first edition in 2016 and was republished in 2017, is the first part of an ample project of mapping the rock music movement in Romanian. As the author himself presents it, Nelu Stratone’s book is an invitation to go on “a journey in time, in search of the roots of the rock spirit in Romania, in which freedom was countless times suppressed or censored in the face of a merciless authoritarian regime, but triumphed through strength and creativity, laying the foundations for one or more generations of people who have made their mark on our culture and our collective memory.” The volume is indeed valuable also because the story of rock in Romania is intimately interwoven with the author’s own story: he confesses that he was impelled to write the book because “I have accumulated quite a rich experience, so I have decided to share with others something of my knowledge.” The period covered in this first volume is the last three decades of Romanian communism, from 1960 to its collapse in 1989. The main chapters of the book are entitled: “Rock and Roll, comrades!” which describes the penetration of rock music into the Romanian space in the period 1960–1971, “The personality cult and rock music,” which follows the evolution of this music after the delivery of the famous anti-Western Theses of July 1971, “The underground movement,” which shows how indigenous Romanian rock flourished after 1977 in spite of the restrictions imposed by the regime, and “The situation as a paraphrase,” which covers the last period of communism in Romania, from 1985 until the Revolution of 1989, during which the song whose verses are quoted in the epilogue was composed: “Azi în Timișoara, mâine-n toată țara” (Today in Timişoara, tomorrow in all the land). Numbering over 470 pages, the book is the most significant and rigorously documented synthetic study of Romanian rock music in the communist period. On top of that, the magazine Dilema Veche included it in their list of the most important books published in Romania in 2016.

This special issue of Caietele CNSAS (CNSAS Notebooks), the academic publication of The National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS), the institution with custody of the Securitate archives. This special issue gathers contributions dealing mostly with the situation of various religious denominations in Romania under communism, especially the relationship between the state authorities and the denominations.