András Kovács (1947-) is a sociologist and one of the most significant researchers on the Hungarian Jewish community and Antisemitism in Hungary. He was a member of the democratic opposition and an active participant in the anti-communist movements and the dissemination of samizdat publications. He joined the project launched by Ferenc Erős and András Stark on second-generation Holocaust survivors and played a decisive role in the creation of this interview collection.
Kovács studied philosophy and history and completed his PhD in sociology at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. With his colleagues, he intended to renew the organizations of the Communist Youth League in the Faculty of Humanities in the early 1970s. Kovács was one of the intellectuals who was initially Marxist, but who became disillusioned in 1968, when the Soviet Union and other members of the Warsaw Pact invaded Prague to halt reforms. These young undergraduates no longer believed that the communist system could be reformed, and they gave voice to this opinion. The authorities launched proceedings against Kovács, charging him anti-state incendiarism because of his participation in the reform movement at the university.
After completing his degree, he worked in the editorial office of the Kossuth Publishing House. He continued his activity as a member of the intellectual opposition movement, and he attended numerous seminars held in private apartments. In 1977, the first significant samizdat-book, entitled Marx a negyedik évtizedben (“Marx in the fourth decade”) was published at his initiative. In this manuscript collection, 21 intellectuals gave voice to their (mainly negative) opinion of the relevance of Marx and Marxist philosophy. As a consequence, he was fired. Beginning in the late 1970s, he earned a livelihood by doing ad hoc translation and editing work. He was one of the figures of the important anti-regime movements, so among the authors of the so-called “Bibó Memory Book” and signatories to the Charta 77 statement, which was a protest against the suppression of and reprisals taken against the opposition in Prague.
Because of his Jewish family origins, he was interested in the issue of the Jewish community after World War II, the suppression of the memory of the Holocaust, and the ways in which the traumas of the Holocaust was passed on from one generation to the next within families. He was also motivated in his career as a scholar by fellowships and a research trip abroad. Kovács had opportunities to pursue research and teaching in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the USA. In the mid-1980s, he began to study Jewish communities and Antisemitism. He joined the project launched by Ferenc Erős and András Stark, and he became a key figure of the interview project on second-generation Holocaust survivors. Kovács has been active in this work since 1984. The interviews which were done on this officially taboo topic had an effect on the interviewers and the interviewees, but also on the larger aim to bring taboos to the foreground and foster discussion among professional audiences and the wider public on issues which were suppressed by the regime.
Erős and Kovács came up with the idea of doing interviews independently. They hoped that both the psychological problems which were of interest to Erős and the sociological issues which were of interest to Kovács could be examined from the perspectives of the stories of individual families. Because the topic of Jewish identity could not be discussed within the framework of official events, it was only discussed in oppositional forums. In December 1984, Kovács and Erős sattended a lecture on the issues faced by the Jewish Community. The lecture was held by the so-called Hétfői Repülő Egyetem (“Monday Flying University”), which was organized by the democratic opposition group. An agent report was written about this event, which took place in János Kenedi’s apartment. The “Flying University” was organized beginning in 1978. It had an audience of between 100 and 200 undergraduates and young intellectuals. Kovács was also invited to a series of debates organized by Csaba Könczöl, a literary historian in the “Fiatal Művészek Klubja” (Young Artists’ Club). Lecturers were asked who could speak about four sensitive topics, topics which according to the regime did not exist: the situation of the Roma, the Jewry and Antisemitism, the Hungarian minorities in the neighbouring countries, and the question of national identity. As Kovács said, this plan harmonized with the oppositional strategy to take advantage of every opportunity and extend the borders of the public sphere. The debate, however, was soon banned. Kovács decided that because he had not been permitted to speak, he would write the text as a samizdat. His paper was published in Zsidóság az 1945 utáni Magyarországon (“Jewry in Hungary after 1945,” a book edited by Péter Kende and printed by Magyar Füzetek or “Hungarian Brochures” in Paris). The publication of this study in the Hungarian periodical Medvetánc constituted big breakthrough (its title was: “Hogyan tudtam meg, hogy zsidó vagyok?” – “How did I find out that I am a Jew?”). The article met with considerable interest, and more and more people joined the project as interviewers or interviewees.Grzegorz Kowalski – creator of installations, performer, exhibition curator and famous educator. Professor at the Faculty of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Students of his studio include the most well-known and intriguing figures of Polish contemporary art, mostly members of the “critical art” movement of the 1990s.
Born to an intelligentsia family, he was raised by a single, widowed mother – an economist working in public administration. His father, an engineer, died in the Second World War, during forced labour in Germany. He spent his childhood in the ruins of Warsaw.
In 1959-1965, he studied at the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. During his studies, he attended the sculpture studio of Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz and the Solids and Planes Studio, led by Oskar Hansen, an architect, urban planner and a theoretician of visual arts. Working with them had a strong impact on his own artistic practice and didactics.
He graduated with honours and started teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts soon afterwards. In 1984, he took over the studio from Jarnuszkiewicz and continues to run it to this day, currently under the name of the “Studio of Audiovisual Space”.
Kowalski made his debut at the avantgarde Foksal Gallery – then a prestigious, leading Polish institution with contacts in Western Europe, concentrating pioneers of action art, happening and installations. There, he exhibited his “dynamic environments” and “audiovisual séances” – installations open to the participants' creative actions.
In 1968, he left for a sculpting symposium accompanying the Olympic Games in Mexico City, where he builds the monumental, geometric “Sundial”. Soon afterwards, he is awarded a scholarship and an internship at the University of Illinois in the United States. Kowalski stresses that the year 1968 is a turning point in his biography and self-understanding. He experiences the March '68 antisemitic campaign in Warsaw, the Tlatelolco massacre occurs during his stay in Mexico City and soon after that he follows the invasion in Czechoslovakia from across the ocean.
As he said in a biographical interview: 'While until '68 one would attempt to establish some sort of cooperation within the framework of this regime, simply in order to live and to do something positive... Some form of cooperation was accepted... After '68, there were no illusions anymore – this was a system that could not be reformed in any way, it had to be rejected'. 'I became a dissident' – he adds in reference to this moment.
During his travels through the United States, he also witnessed the explosion of the hippie movement in New York. This experience had a strong and lasting impact on him. He decided to abandon his ambitions of a career as a “symposium artist” and a sculptor of monumental forms, choosing to be active in a small community of people interested in art instead.
Kowalski got involved in a group of artists established by former students of Hansen and Jarnuszkiewicz, centered around a small gallery at the University of Warsaw and Warsaw's high street. Although the space was provided by the party-controlled Polish Students' Association, it had a decidedly “off” air and in time, actions in the gallery were increasingly political and critical toward the authorities. This culminated in participation in a student strike and an occupation of the university just before the imposition of martial law, which led to the closing of both the university and the gallery
However, for those involved in Repassage Gallery, the community itself and the deepening of relations in a small group of friends, a safe haven, were more important than reaching out to a wider audience and creating artifacts. They spoke of “the art of being together” and the primacy of experience before creation. Performative and processual actions co-created by participants dominated. The gallery did not declare a program and refrained from assuming aesthetic and ideological criteria in advance. This resulted in an opening to amateur and naive art, as well as in the rejection of the distinction between artists and non-artists. At the height of its activity, Repassage was led by Elżbieta and Emil Cieślar. Grzegorz Kowalski, who was involved with the gallery for all of its history, can be seen as an “éminence grise” of sorts.
In this environment, Kowalski starts to pose his “basic questions” which were to be answered by means of plastic arts or performances: “Could You and Would You Like to Become an Animal in Front of the Camera?” (1977-78), “Could You and Would You Like to Treat Me Like an Object?” (1979), and “Would You Like to Return to Your Mother's Womb?” (1981-87). Actions with people materialize as “photographic objects”, “tableaus” or “collections”.
In the words of art historian Łukasz Ronduda, Kowalski “attempted to saturate Hansen's quasi-scientific (objective and rationalist) discourse, as well as the paradigm of games and cooperations followed by the master and his students in a similar vein, with a human element: strongly existential, sensual, subjective, irrational, psychologizing, even spiritual”.
The didactic method at Kowalski's studio at the Academy of Fine Arts continues Jarnuszkiewicz's and Hansen's partnership-based approach, drawing from theoretical innovations and a set of exercises developed by the latter, from collective actions carried out by their students – such as Wiktor Gutt, Zofia Kulik, Przemysław Kwiek and the Cieślars – as well as from the countercultural spirit of the community around Repassage.
Kowalski emphasizes that he prefers “education” – developing autonomous artistic personalities – rather than “teaching” – imparting the rules of the craft and historical forms. At the same time, as Karol Sienkiewicz points out, Kowalski's didactic approach is characterized by a tension between the individual and the collective, it is a “search for balance between one's own problems, identity, personality, individual expression and interpersonal relations, events in collective memory and functioning in society”.
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Location:
- Warszawa, Warsaw, Poland
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Location:
- London, United Kingdom
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Location:
- Budapest, Hungary
Sociologist Gyula Kozák (1941–) was the founder and, until 1999, the head of the Oral History Archives. In 1981, together with András Hegedűs B. (1930–2001), he began to do oral history interviews with participants in and witnesses to the 1956 Revolution, which was considered the number one taboo in public discourse in Hungary at the time.
Kozák was born to a well-off bourgeois family in Budapest, though World War II and his parents’ early divorce shook the family. He witnessed 1956 as an adolescent, and the revolution had a deep impact on his mentality and his emotions. As a fifteen-year-old boy, he wandered around the city watching the events of the revolution: the demonstrations and street fights. In late November 1956, he left home and, together with the great flood of Hungarian refugees, managed to get to Vienna, but a month later, he returned to Budapest. In 1958, together with some friends, he found some hidden guns, and he resolved to start the fight against the regime again, but he and his friends were caught before could take action. He was arrested by the police and was held in custody for a month, but was then released. He had some trouble in school when he returned, and he was almost prohibited from being allowed to pass his matriculation exam.
He then went on to study at the Technical University Budapest, but he was far more interested in the social sciences than he was in engineering, sociology. However, higher education in sociology had been prohibited in 1949 by the communist system, and it was only reestablished in the early 1970s. Thus, instead of being able to acquire proper theoretical training, he was only able to participate in some sociological fieldwork. He took part as an assistant in surveys conducted by the National Cultural Institute and then by the Higher Educational Research Institute. In 1969, he managed to get a job for two years at the Social Science Research Institute, the strategic “think tank” of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. Here he joined the preparatory works for new nationwide surveys which examined the circumstances in which industrial workers, Roma, and the poor lived. The surveys were done under the guidance of István Kemény, a pioneering researcher of Hungarian empirical sociology. Kemény exerted a strong influence on Kozák’s way of thinking and, indeed, the approaches and mentalities of many young scholars, as he forced them to confront social realities and the simple fact that there were major social problems in communist Hungary, including a lack of equal opportunity and sufferings under the socialist system of the time. This critical attitude was strengthened when, in the mid-1970s, Kozák began to contribute, as expert and script writer, to a good dozen documentary film projects being done by the Béla Balázs Studio (BBS) and Hungarian Televison (MTV).
At the same time, he took an active part in some underground art movements and alternative cultural initiations, working for a while e.g. as a light master for the University Theater of Budapest. He had also several good contacts among dissident writers and intellectuals.
The activities in which he engaged brought him increasingly into conflict with the communist regime. In 1972, Kozák took part in the preparations for a conference on workers’ social problems. The conference itself was banned, and the book of relevant studies was confiscated by the police. In 1979, he also signed a declaration of solidarity with the members of the Czechoslovak Charta 77 movement who had been imprisoned, and he lost his job as a consequence of this. He was repeatedly harassed, threatened, and blackmailed by the secret police, which tried to force him to become an informant, but he resisted the pressure they put on him.
In 1981, Gyula Kozák began to work together closely with András Hegedűs B. They were both commissioned by the Economic Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Science to do oral history interviews with Hungarian business managers. At the same time, they began to do research on their own concerning 1956. They collected data and produced a historical chronology of the events, and they also organized “Round-table talks on 1956.” and a series of group and individual interviews with one-time participants in the Hungarian revolution. This collective work led in 1985 to the creation of the Oral History Archive and in 1989 to the creation of the 1956 Research Institute. Kozák was a leading founder of both. He is also the author of a number of books and editor of several other books and studies published by the Institute.
In 1979, Kozák began taking part in the Hungarian democratic opposition. He was one of the founding activists of SZETA, or the Fund for the Support of the Poor. He contributed to the publication of samizdat books and papers, and he wrote articles for Beszélő (“Speaker”) and Hírmondó (“Messenger”), and he took part in protests (e.g. in 1985 against the one-party system of the Hungarian general elections). In 1988, he was one of the founders of the Committee for Historical Justice (TIB), which fought for the public reburial of the executed revolutionary prime Imre Nagy and his fellow martyrs, which was to include legal and political rehabilitation of all the victims of the reprisals.-
Location:
- Budapest, Hungary