COURAGE

connecting collections

This essay about the situation at the University of Zagreb after the Second World War is deposited in the Dinko Tomašić Collection. Tomašić consulted it in his research into Yugoslav communism. Stjepan Kuhar, a medical student, escaped from Croatia, and on that occasion wrote a short essay in Graz on events and circumstances at the University of Zagreb in 1952. Kuhar was convinced that the communist revolution was not only a simple change of elites at the top of society, but also an attempt to forge a “new man,” which was supposed to be one of the centrepieces of education “according to the law of dialectical and historical materialism,” i.e., in line with the new ideology of communism.

In the process of converting the universities into communist universities, Kuhar highlighted three obstacles that stood in the way of the communist government:  the lack of teaching staff and textbook materials to promote communist doctrine, and resistance by students and professors themselves to the ideologization of university courses and university life. Something that intensely characterized life at the post-war universities was the “dictatorship of Partisan students” who tended to abuse their privileges, not respecting the standard university hierarchy and internal rules. Their “purges” of political opponents affected not only students but some professors from the Faculty of Medicine (Rikard Hauptfeld, Zvonimir Kušević), which entailed their withdrawal from the university.

This essay is an integral part of the Dinko Tomašić collection. He also used it in his sociological research. Nowotny's account of journalism under communism criticizes the actions of the authorities which eviscerated journalism all professional criteria. Nowotny, as a former member of the counter-intelligence service, emphasized in the introduction to the essay that there were very few journalists in Yugoslavia before the war and revolution devoted to “advanced ideas” or communist ideology. As a result of emigration, and because many journalists were killed or jailed, while others were fired because of their “petit-bourgeois attitudes,” professional journalism virtually disappeared during the course of revolutionary events.

Those few remaining journalists who were even loyal to the communist government were under constant and strict control by the authorities and had to exercise self-censorship out of fear, so that in any new journalism after the revolution, any criticism of both political authority and the state was entirely excluded from society. Nowotny cited the case of cartoonist Andrija Maurović, who joined the Partisans in 1943. After the war, he refused to join the Party because of his disappointment with the regime. He personally confided to the author of this essay that he was thinking about leaving the country due to “false socialist policies.” Although Maurović propagated the Partisan communist movement very much, in the late 1940s he came under regime criticism because his artistic work demonstrated “non-socialist” tendencies.

Augustinas Gricius’ letter to Justas Paleckis, written in 1953. The Lithuanian writer Augustinas Gricius (1899–1972) informed Paleckis that the gravestones of well-known Lithuanian cultural activists (the composers Stasys Šimkus, Sasnauskas, the writer Kazys Binkis, Professor Jaunius) in Kaunas city cemetery had been destroyed. The graves of Darius and Girėnas (Lithuanian pilots who flew across the Atlantic) were in especially bad condition. Gricius also criticised the Kaunas city authorities, who had shown no interest in preserving the gravestones of famous Lithuanian cultural activists. Augustinas Gricius was a journalist, writer and public figure.