COURAGE

connecting collections

Before founding AL (Artpool Letter), Artpool had been taking efforts to establishing and sustain an alternative audience and public forum in order to break a lack of information in the Hungarian art world. Pool Window, a one-page Mail Art newsletter running 30 issues, was the first periodical issued by György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay. They used it to distribute actual Mail Art calls from the international network among Hungarian artists. Their goal was to inform and motivate them to join the Mail Art network. Pool Window inspired some Hungarian artists and artist groups (András Lengyel, Group Xertox, Group Inconnu, etc.) to create Mail Art works and to start circulating their own calls and projects in the network. As the newsletter genre proved to be insufficient for its this function, Artpool stopped the production and started to work on AL, one of the first Hungarian art samizdat periodicals.

Encouraged by the surprising success of the charity auction of artworks held before Christmas of 1980, in the summer of 1981, literary editor Ferenc Kőszeg called for another SZETA (Hungarian Fund for Aiding the Poor) to organize a similar event again and to publish a non-censored anthology of works by contemporary Hungarian writers and visual artists entitled In Black (Feketében). The poems, stories, essays, and artworks were collected by Kőszeg and sociologist Gabriella Lengyel. All in all, it contained a valuable array of works by 38 writers and 21 artists, however the publication of the book took nearly two years due to some technical problems and repeated intervention by the police. In Black was printed in 300 copies for prominent intellectuals and well-to-do collectors of rare books, but two-thirds of the copies ended up the hands of the police. Still, the book launch “Down and Proud” was solemnly held at Kőszeg's apartment in February 1983, and the bibliophile samizdat anthology remained a reminder of social solidarity and cultural resistance during the last decade of communist Hungary.

Herta Müller’s informative surveillance file (dosar de urmărire informativă) contains several informative notes given by the Securitate’s German-speaking sources about her first book Niederungen (Nadirs). These notes are important as the arguments put forward by their authors were used by the Securitate’s officials to begin their informative surveillance of her. The note chosen as a feature item of the collection was signed by the source “Voicu” on March 1982 before the opening of informative surveillance against Herta Müller. He focuses on three of the short stories contained in Niederungen (Nadirs) to underline their “hostile” content towards the communist regime. Stating that Müller’s prose lacks any “positive, optimist elements,” “Voicu” shows that “Das schwäbische Bad” (The Swabian bath) and “Meine Familie” (My family) picture the moral degeneration of the Swabian family in the countryside. Moreover, according to his opinion “Dorfchronik” (The chronicle of the village) sheds a negative light on the local administration and living conditions in rural areas. Müller, he says, underlines that the local officials are all related and support each other to maintain their domination over the village. The mayor holds mandatory meetings but their participants not only ignore him and smoke carelessly but also arrive drunk and continue to drink even during meetings. Public buildings have also lost their officially ascribed meaning, so that, for example, the local house of culture hosts weddings instead of cultural activities. Things are no better in the local agricultural farms, where one of the engineers instead of focusing on his job takes pictures of the surroundings and enters photography competitions. 

In a cooperation with other artists, the song theatre group “Karl’s Enkel” performed their programme “Hammer-Rehwü” for the first time in 1982 in Berlin. Apart from countless buffooneries and poetry, it also contained “jaunty songs about the present” as Jürgen Schebera described it in his contemporary critique (http://www.hdjt.org/hammerrehwue/). Behind the scenes, there had been a back-and-forth between cultural officials because the performance was seen as disparaging the “values of socialism”. The Archive for Song and Social Movements has collected countless materials about it, including video recordings of the performance.

Part of the Jiří Ruml Collection contained in the National Archives is a leaflet defending the imprisoned poet, journalist and significant member of the Czechoslovak underground Ivan Martin Jirous (Magor) with the title Vězněn za své přesvědčení (Imprisoned for his belief). The leaflet contains basic biographical information about I. M. Jirous and information about his prior imprisonment. The leaflet is a reaction to Jirous being placed in the 3rd reformatory educational group in 1982; for his participation in the creation of the unofficial magazine VOKNO, and as an allegedly very dangerous criminal, he was sentenced to three and half years in prison, followed by two years’ probation . He served his sentence in the notorious Valdice prison near Jičín. There is a picture of Ivan Jirous on the leaflet.