COURAGE

connecting collections

Jiří Lederer's personal memos are from the meetings, consultations and sessions, especially from the Union of Czech Journalists from 18 April 1969 to 22 August1969. The book ends with notes from the events of the 1st anniversary of the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops.

These notes capture the thoughts and encounters with various people during these dramatic days, as well as the feelings of Jiří Lederer, a prominent journalist, dissident and eventually an exile.

In the notebook remarks on Husak, Svoboda and Cernik, as well as known Czech writer Seifert, can be found in addition to short notes on the "silent demonstration" on Wenceslas Square on August 21. These notes serve as a unique example of journalist scriptures from the dramatic August events of 1968.

In the decision of the Belgrade District Court on June 28, 1968, it appears that the court banned the further distribution of “Student”, and furthermore could not decide what to do with the already confiscated issues. However, several weeks later on 18 July, it was decided that all confiscated samples of the journal would be destroyed “by being processed by the paper factory in Belgrade, with the appropriate compensation that will be put into the budget of the city of Belgrade as […] surplus income” (Kv. 752/68). Although the original document containing a detailed explanation of the ban is missing, it is still possible to reconstruct events by inspecting the available materials. This file also contains an appeal to the District Court, stating that the court's decision was unfounded because facts were incorrect, and the court “extracted incriminating sentences, individual expressions, and even only certain words from the articles so that the resulting conclusion was completely different than the original information”(Kr. 93/68, Belgrade District Court). One of the accusations of the court was that the texts in this issue suggested “a severe revolt against the working class and other working people in our country,” which is cited in the appeal as absurd.

Other documents reveal that the appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court on the grounds that usually, “an article in the press is absorbed by the reader as it was written without any additional explanation by the writers of the article.” (Kr. 996/68). The Supreme Court's ruling indicated that the writers of the article were, “stressing certain negative phenomena, and such generalization of these phenomena, which depict our socio-political system entirely as backward, hopeless and stale, cannot be understood differently than to express and disseminate such distorted news and insights in order to cause peoples' unrest”.

Particularly problematic is the last sentence in the article Mystery and Hysteria by Nebojša Popov, which says “who can not listen to a song, will listen to a storm,” which can be interpreted as spreading of alarming news to threaten  “public order and peace” and as a “threat of new unrest” (Kr. 996/68).

Among the court materials, the District Court's decision to terminate the investigation against Nebojša Popov and the chief editor Đorđija Vuković of “Student" can be found who were charged with the criminal offense of spreading fake news through the press (Article 292 of the Criminal Law). The basis for suspending the investigation against Vuković was that the incriminating article Mysteries and Hysteria was written by Popov, and had no connection to Vuković. The investigation against Popov was suspended on 25 June, because the problematic text had been seized. Thus, the charge of “spreading fake news” was dropped (see Kr. 927/68).

The tape on which are imprinted the voices of two personalities of Romanian culture, Lena Constante and Harry Brauner, is today in the Zoltán Rostás private collection and contains an extensive interview taken with the couple in 1985. Harry Brauner (1908–1998) was a Romanian folklorist and ethnomusicologist of Jewish origin, who came from a family that included other notable intellectuals: his brothers were the surrealist painter Victor Brauner and the photographer Theodore (Teddy) Brauner. Lena Constante (1909–2005) was an artist and folklorist of Aromanian origin, and the author of a number of well-known postcommunist volumes, which were well received by readers of memorialistic literature. The couple were involved in a famous political trial, which had as its central figure Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, an intellectual of Marxist orientation and an important political leader after 1945, arrested in 1948 and executed in 1954. This political trial was to have been a show trial, like those of László Rajk in Hungary and Rudolf Slánský in Czeschoslovakia, but in the end it was orchestrated behind closed doors, on the basis of false testimonies squeezed out of some of those included among the accused, as in similar cases in the Soviet bloc. In 1954, Harry Brauner was sentenced by the communist authorities to 15 years in prison and Lena Constante to 12. Both were released in 1962, after 12 years, but Brauner had to remain in “obligatory domicile” on the Bărăgan plain until 1964, when all political prisoners were released. The two only got married after their time in prison, while Brauner was still in forced domicile. In 1968, both were politically rehabilitated by Nicolae Ceauşescu, who had initiated a belated de-Stalinization and was reviewing some of the political trials orchestrated by his predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, in order to gain political capital. After 1989, the Pătrăşcanu trial was one of the most visited subjects out of the whole period of Romanian communism, owing to the political and intellectual eminence of those included among the accused. The interview carried out in 1985 by Zoltán Rostás also includes the couple’s testimonies about political imprisonment and forced domicile, subjects that were and still are of maximum interest for the majority of historians of postcommunist Romania. Here is an extract from Harry Brauner’s reflection on the significance of his experience of incarceration, remarkable for the way in which he synthesizes the essence of the absence of the rule of law under communism in a period in which there was effectively no access to professional analyses of undemocratic regimes: “ZR: Were you really so dangerous that after you had come out of prison they also gave you obligatory domicile? HB: Yes, it seems that I was very dangerous. Much more dangerous than I imagined. But at the same time, I was a good example for all the others, don’t you think? ZR: In what sense? HB: Ah, you haven’t understood what I mean. I was a good example for intellectuals, for artists, for all those who could see an example of what could happen to a man who had done nothing.” The aim of the 1985 interview was broader, however. The recording includes discussions referring to the beginnings of the couple’s relationship, to intellectual life in the interwar and postwar periods, and above all to many details of their contribution to the researches of the Gustian sociological school. “It was, I remember, a single meeting, but quite a long one. Lena Constante spoke significantly more than Harry Brauner, as he preferred to be very concise in the answers he gave me. By the way, he was a character in himself, with a voice and a ceremony of speaking that were quite distinctive. Indeed he is the character in a well-known novel by Marin Preda,” says Zoltán Rostás, recalling the meeting of which the dialogues are preserved on the magnetic tape in his private collection.

The book "The Performance Lesson: Game Method of Inclusion in Literature" was published shortly before Sevdalina Panayotova's death on 27 September 2014. Sevdalina Panayotova was the founder of the "Spectacular Lesson" method for teaching literature through theater.

The book contains a description of the "lesson-spectacle" method developed by Sevdalina Panayotova, and six scripts for dramas adapted from Bulgarian and classic word literature. Sevdalina Panayotova's reading of the literary works is unconventional: she enriched the scenes with descriptions of the time period, she used forbidden literature (works of symbolists, for example), and she directed attention to forgotten or forbidden stories about authors such as the proletarian poets Hristo Smirnenski and Nikola Vaptsarov. Through her works, she taught critical thinking, and civic responsibility.

She began writing theatrical scenes in 1960s and they developed over the years. Each class performed The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; About the Letters, based on texts of medieval Bulgarian literature; Vaptsarov - Eternal and Contemporary and The Mansard of Dreams from verses by symbolists, and other works. Her productions enjoyed great success among her students. The performances of these scenes were innovative, highly artistic, acknowledged by lecturers at the Krastyo Sarafov Higher Institute for Theater Arts (now known as the National Academy of Theater and Film Arts) and directors, and commissions which reviewed amateur theater. Nevertheless, her works also drew the suspicion of the state authorities.