COURAGE

connecting collections

Born Karl- Heinz Tanzyna, he was adopted by the Jena family Hahnemann shortly after his birth. He never met his biological mother. From 1965 to 1970 he studied architecture in Weimar and began using the name Gino. Having finished his studies, he began working for Hermann Henselmann, one of the best-known GDR architects.

While still working as an architect he received an offer to work as a model. Soon he quit his office job and became one of the few state-approved menswear models in the GDR. He also worked as a costume- and stage designer in theatres in Berlin, Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. He was the last stage designer at the Palast der Republik in Berlin.

He was open concerning his belonging to the LGBT communities, wrote poetry and prose and is considered to be one of the first GDR writers who openly dealt with homosexuality in his works. He saw himself as part of the artistic “Underground”. In the 80s his poetry and prose appeared in underground magazines like „Schaden“, “Entwerter/Oder”, “U.S.W.”, der „Ariadnefabrik“ and many more.

During the same time he experimented with and sought to test the boundaries of Super-8 filming. He filmed his own scripts as an independent director. According to the historian Claus Löser, without Hahnemann’s contributions, the independent film scene in the GDR would have developed much differently. As film-maker, he was also part of the “Underground” and showed his own, independent view of the GDR-reality with his movies.

He showed his work at single- and group exhibitions organized multimedia performances and readings. He published self-made artist’s books, developed set scenery and remained a writer and cultural figure even after the fall of the wall. In 1993 he initiated as an author, programme director and presenter the yearly “Bildsalon” at the Literaturforum im Brecht-House Berlin. He translated works by the American poet John Eppstein into German, took part in exhibitions like "BERLIN-MOSKAU 1950-2000” and also contributed works to the “3. Biennale for contemporary art” 2004 in Berlin.

He received a number of scholarships: from the Berlin Senate, Academy Castle Solitude Stuttgart and the Villa Massimo in Rome, as well as the Alfred-Döblin-scholarship of the Berlin Academy of Arts.

Gino Hahnemann died on April 17th 2006.

Poet, performer, visual artist. Born in Budapest as Tibor Frankl, in an intellectual family. "I have documents about it. I can prove it with these, if required. However it is possible that these documents are goldbricks." - disseminated suspicion concerning his origin in his autobiography written in 1974. His poems regularly appeared already in the journal of the high school, than he started his upper level studies at the English department of ELTE in 1965. A year later, at the age of 19 he was accused with "continually comitted agitation" as the secondary defendant in the trial of the so called "downtown gang" (fabricated by the police) and sentenced to one and half years in jail. After his release he could not continue his university studies, so he took a job as a purchasing agent of a wood- and paper-industrial cooperative.

Some of his poems and essays appeared in periodicals and anthologies (1968, 1974, 1976). In this period he started to publish under the name Tibor Hajas (his collected writings released in 2005 contains 460 pages without bibliography). Paralel to this he turned to visual arts, created conceptual works (Prosthesises, 1974-76; Analysisdetonation 1-5, 1976; Tattooed slide, 1976), photo-actions (This wall does not exist, 1974; Letter to my friend to Paris, 1975; Living comics, 1975). Participated in the Chapel Studio exhibitions in Balatonboglár, the exhibiton "Exposure" in the Lajos Hatvany Museum thematizing the use of photograps in visual arts. Regularly exhibited also in the Club of Young Artists, where he was awarded in 1975 and 1976.

From the middle of the seventies he held theoretical lectures (sometimes combined with actons) on film, photography and visual arts. His collaboration with János Vető from 1974 resulted in significant body art actions, photoperformances (Flesh painting I-IV, 1978; Surface torture I-III, 1978; Image whipping I-III, 1978-79; Make up sketches, 1979), experimental film (Self-fashion show, 1976), and videos (The guest, 1977; Jewels of the night, 1978). "Beside the total activity called 'art' I am mainly interested in cigars" - phrased his orientation in his autobiography dated 1976.

From 1978 he produced high-impact performances. He is called the begetter and the most significant practicioner of the genre in Hungary. His demand toward totality menifested best in his performanes, where he often played with hazard and pain ("he shocked on visceral level, creating stress in order to let the viewer feel adrenalin in hir throat" - as a critic worded it). The performances executed with the help of assistants were carefully designed in every detail. He often operated in full darkness, with flashing magnesium to let the viewer record the moment in his memory. "I have written and published poems, and forgot them; I participated in local and international exhibitions, and forgot them; I held lectures actions and performances, and forgot them with a few exceptions" - reflected on his activities in his autobiography dated 1979.

"The freedom and complexity of raising a problem, which was the privilege of art until now, has to step into our fate: feudalism is over, art is not a sattelite and not an outspoken jester, but an undomestificably specific mode of human cognition bearing a vote in every brain, which is unseparable from the reasoned definition of freedom, the »free deployment of all human capabilities« - as he phrased in an essay on art published only twenty-five years after his death. He died in a car accident in 1980, at the age of 34. Following his death several memorial and retrospective exhibitions of his oeuvre were organized (King Stephan Museum, Székesfehérvár, 1987; Ernst Museum, Budapest, 1997; Ludwig Museum Budapest 2005). His photo tableaus were featured at the core exhibition of the 57th Venice Biennial (Viva Arte Viva, 2017).

Hungarian Széchenyi Prize-winning folk musician, teacher. Halmos supported the collections of folk music from the beginning. He is one of the founding members of Sebő Band; he was also a member of the band Kalamajka from 1990. 
He was born in Szombathely on 4 June 1946. His father, Béla Halmos, was an architect; his mother was Rozália Szabó M. He learned music with his four sisters, and he studied classical music. He married Katalin Gyenes in 1969. 

Halmos spent his childhood in Gyula, and it was also in Gyula that he began to study classical music. He graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the Technical University of Budapest in 1970 as a design architect. Between 1970 and 1972 and 1979–82, he worked at the City Planning and Design Institute [Városépítési Tudományos és Tervező Intézet] as an architect. In 1969 he appeared in the “Röpülj, páva!” [Fly peacock] with Ferenc Sebő. They sang folk songs with guitar accompaniment. Halmos also competed as an individual and won.

He and Ferenc Sebő founded the Sebő-Halmos Duo and, in 1974, the Sebő Band. Thankfully, the best ethnomusicologists (Lajos Vargyas, György Martin, Zoltán Kallós, László Vikár, and Bálint Sárosi) knew about the folk music. Halmos traveled to Transylvania to listen to traditional folk music, and he tried to learn it too. He traveled to Szék (Sic, Romania) and saw the traditional dance house which became the model of the Hungarian dance houses. In 1972, he and his friends organized the first private dance house in Budapest where young people could learn folk dances and folk songs. Halmos became the main character of the dance house movement.

In 1975, he began to publish on Transylvanian folk music, and he started to work at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Musicology. Halmos collected folk music and folk songs from Ádám István. Halmos established the Folk Dance House Archive in 1999. The Hungarian Heritage House got the Archive in 2001. His bequest is also available at the Hungarian Heritage House as the part of Lajtha László Folklore Documentation Library and Archive.

Halmos got many prizes, and he was the main character among the organizers of dance houses from the 1970s.

Karel Haloun is an artist and designer of posters and LP covers for several music bands in 1980s and 1990s in Czechoslovakia. He collaborated on the decoration of the “Junior klub” in Na Chmelnici, Prague. He is a non-playing member of the music bands Jasná páka and Hudba Praha, very popular bands of the club scene of Prague in the 1980s. The Popmuseum in Prague has his rare poster to the first concert of the Rolling Stones in Prague in 1990, which, in the end, was not used to promote the concert. Karel Haloun teaches at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague.

Gábor Hanák is a historian, documentary filmmaker, public collection specialist, and head of the Cseh Tamás Archives. After finishing secondary school, he obtained a qualification as a studio technician at Hungarian Television (MTV) in 1963. He completed a degree in Hungarian Literature and History at Eötvös Lóránt University of Budapest in 1968. He worked at Hungarian Television from 1969 to 1984, where he ended up as editor-in-chief of the programs related to the social sciences.

At MTV he was mainly involved in creating popular historical programs, the most memorable of which included Krónika/Pergőtűz (“Chronicle/Running Fire”) and Századunk (“Our Century”), to which he contributed as editor and dramaturgs. He began making contributions to “Our Century” as a university student, and his talents were quickly discovered by Péter Bokor, the creator of the program. Bokor and Hanák worked together for decades, and by 2006 they had released some 500 episodes.

For these television programs, he did several interviews with historians who were treated with suspicion by the Party (e.g. Domokos Kosáry, György Bónis, Erik Fügedi, Jenő Szűcs, and Elemér Mályusz) and who often challenged official historical narratives. Representatives of the Party at MTV, however, often censored the episodes. Therefore, the history of his oeuvre is entangled with the history of the Kádár era: it is a history of concessions and prohibitions, and of the evolving relationship between censorship and the public sphere.

In some cases, he had to wait a decade before a given work would be shown. For instance, his portrait film on Communist politician and sociologist Ferenc Erdei (1976-1980) remained in its film canister until 1986. Similarly, his video interview with political thinker István Bibó (1971-1975) was broadcasted ten years after it had been completed. In order to deceive the political censors, he sometimes used minor tricks: he submitted to supervision the portrait film on Domokos Kosáry together with that of Iván Berend T., the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at the time, hoping that the censors would accept the two in a pack. Still, the film was not presented until 1986.

Those portrait films, which were about key figures of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (such as Ferenc Donáth, Géza Losonczy, Miklós Gimes, and Miklós Vásárhelyi) were met with particularly strong interest. The Hungarian Revolution (which was referred to as a counterrevolution at the time) was one of Hanák’s primary topics, and he even did video interviews with Hungarian exiles in Austria. He also made films about the important personalities of the interwar period. Hanák preferred to balance on the border of what was acceptable to the regime, and sometimes his work caused fissures within the Party.

After leaving MTV, he was employed at the Budapest Film Studio (BFS), which he directed from 1985 to 1992. This firm was established as the successor to the former News and Documentary Factory (Híradó- és Dokumentumfilm Gyár) at the end of the 1950s. BFS evolved into a central scene for the renaissance of Hungarian film production, where the most significant directors shot films of various sorts, including movies and documentaries. One such example was Tutajosok (Raftsmen, 1988) by Judit Elek, a film which was based on the documents of the Tiszaeszlár trial in 1882 and dealt with the issue of anti-Semitism in Hungary. According to the director, who spoke at the 25th anniversary of the film, MTV withdrew its support for the film while it was still being shot. As Elek recalled, “Everybody started to panic because there was an unspoken but widely known view expressed by [cultural politician] György Aczél, according to which there have always been, are, and always will be Jews but nobody should speak about them.” She added that the film was saved by Gábor Hanák, who helped to make sure the movie was finished.

Together with Péter Bokor, Hanák thought that the preservation of the interviews made for documentaries was highly important, since they constituted raw material for filmmakers and a significant source for historical research. The recordings document personal histories of people who had little chance to present the narratives of their own experiences in the socialist period. Gradually, filmmakers learned that the system allowed one to record practically everything, even if only for the camera, i.e. without any actual chance of being released. In an interview, Hanák spoke about the recurring scandals that arose because they tended to spend more time shooting than was considered necessary for a film. In one case, they recorded approximately 30 hours for a one-hour program. The idea of archiving and preserving the recordings for posteriority (i.e. the idea of establishing of a video archive of sorts) was slowly taking shape in Bokor’s and Hanák’s minds.

The ban of the program Krónika in 1983 required immediate action on Bokor’s and Hanák’s part if they wanted to save the recordings. Because of the practices of film production at the time, many recordings were lost. There was no room to store the films, and no intention of archiving them, so Hanák and Bokor made efforts to set up a video archive, which by the mid-1980s had been established. The video archive became part of the collection of the Széchényi National Library (OSZK) in 1986, and Hanák became the director of the Collection of Historical Interviews (TIT) until his retirement in 2009.

The personal credibility of Hanák was a great asset in the quest to do new interviews and enlarge the collection. People trusted him and were more willing to tell their stories to him and in front of his camera. Interviewing required historical research, which became considerably easier when Gyula Juhász, the general director of OSZK, set up a special collection in the late 1980s named Collection of Prints Closed to the Public, where former closed stacks became accessible to researchers with permission. As a result, samizdat materials and émigré publications became available to interviewers, and this proved extremely important when the interviews were done.

The first interview in TIT was done with Irén Gróf, the widow of Sándor Haraszti in 1985, followed by interviews with Miklós Vásárhelyi, Zoltán Kallós, Péter Kende, Tibor Méray, and others. While doing the interviews, Hanák and his colleagues stressed that the recordings were made for posteriority and not for the contemporary public, so interviewees usually spoke about more controversial issues as well. As a consequence, the bulk of the material can be studied only with the consent of the interviewees or their relatives.

Gábor Hanák also played a key role in the process of OSZK acquiring the archive of the Hungarian Department of Radio Free Europe and the BBC. The materials produced during the two weeks of the revolution in 1956 are particularly significant for historical research. Some of the relevant materials, including radio recordings, are available online within the framework of the project Hungarian October (www.magyaroktober.hu).

Hanák has been the director of the Foundation for the Promotion of the Hungarian Motion Picture Treasure (MMMA) since 1992. This Foundation is still a main supporter of the TIT. Hanák was also the vice-director general of Duna Channel (Duna Televízió) from its foundation in 1993 until 1997.

In the last decade, the narrator of Századunk (Our century) was the well-known singer-songwriter Tamás Cseh, with whom Hanák got in touch and made friends in the early 1970s. After 2000, the documents Cseh’s life, which had been collected over the course of the years with the help of his mother, started to be digitalized. After Cseh’s death, Gábor Hanák led the creation of an interdisciplinary archive out of the manifold material of various formats. His aim was to foster comparative research on Cseh’s oeuvre and its era. The archive was operating first as part of the National Library. It then became part of the Hungarian National Archive, and later the Hungarian Art Nonprofit Ltd. (Magyar Alkotóművészeti Közhasznú Nonprofit Kft.).

Professor Branko Hanž was an employee of the National and University Library in Zagreb from 1951 until 1987, and was also assistant director in the period from 1972 to 1983. He is the founder of the Collection of the Press in Exile, later renamed the Foreign Croatica Collection.

His job was to take care of the collection items and he was also in charge of the D-lockers located in the director's office. He liaised with Croatians in the exile during the socialist period and after its collapse. In the 1990s, when the Collection was open to the public, he was in charge of its use and promotion, and also authored two catalogues of the Collection.

Željka Lovrenčić says that he viewed cultural opposition as “Croatian unity”, “where the Croatian people cannot be divided into those living in Croatia and those who are in some way evil and live in the exile. In a word, this equates to unification not only of the publications but of Croatia too – the Croatian exile and the Croatian homeland.” His opposition activities were revealed in his maintaining of foreign collection items at the National Library, and his correspondence with émigrés Vinko Nikolić, Karlo Mirth and George J. Prpić.

Haraszti’s father and mother fled Hungary during the Second World War and got to know each other in Israel, where they married and where Miklós Haraszti was born. In 1948, however, the family moved back to Hungary in the hope of a better life. They were committed communists, but did not pursue careers within the Party. Haraszti’s father remained a clockmaker. In 1964, he began his studies in philosophy and Hungarian literature at Eötvös Loránd University, and he published poems, songs, and literary articles. He was a key figure in the attempts to revive the political song in Hungary after it was entirely discredited by the Rákosi regime. He collaborated with the pol-beat band called Gerilla, which was originally founded to promote anti-imperialism during the escalation of the Vietnam War and which had the support of the Kádár regime. In 1969, he published an anthology of translated revolutionary poems and songs that included the Hungarian version of the American cultic song Sixteen Tons by Merle Trevis and Carlos Puebla’s Comandante, songs that had been sang by the Gerilla.

As Haraszti explained later in an interview, he belonged to a network of radical Leftist youngsters, who grew critical of all central power structures, including the Soviet Union. This was a reaction prompted by their perception that there was a sharp divided between Communist rhetoric and communist reality. While he remained ultra-Leftist until 1968 and Marxist until 1970, the repression of the Prague Spring was a formative experience for him, and he became interested in the human rights movements. In 1969, he was accused of having written a poem which gave expression to a concept of democracy “without shores.”

In the early 1970s, Haraszti was working as a machinist. He choose this profession because he wanted to write something in which he would interrogate the principal founding myth of the regime, namely that it creates a state for the workers. Based on his experiences, he wrote Darabbér (‘Piece-Wage’) on the exploitation of the working class. He circulated a number of typewritten copies among his friends, and tried to smuggle the manuscript out of the country. He was arrested in 1974 for these kinds of activities and sentenced to nine months in prison, but the sentence was suspended.

After moving into the Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood he took on various jobs. It was his work as a mail carrier that allowed him to venture through the city and capture various moments of everyday life. As he was not a state-approved photographer, his snapshots showed the GDR through his personal point of view. He documented a reality that was neither planned or approved of by the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). His work instead shattered the carefully arranged image that the SED attempted to create through propaganda. Hauswald fell under Stasi surveillance as early as 1977 under the codename der Radfahrer (the cyclist). Up until the end of the regime, there were almost 35 registered Stasi collaborators documented as having spied on him.

Once settled in East Berlin, Hauswald emerged as part of the alternative creative scene, participating in various photography exhibitions in private apartments, churches, and youth centres. From 1980 he was employed as a photographer for the charitable Stephanus Foundation. Soon after, a series of collaborations with GEO, Stern, ZEITmagazin, and Merian followed. The photographer managed to publish his first book East-Berlin in 1987, although in West Germany. It was only in 1988 that his photos were published in the GDR together with the magazines Sonntag and Das Magazin.

During the 1980s, Hauswald also worked as photography technician for the German Theater. Towards the end of the regime, Hauswald collaborated as a freelancer with the German Film Association (DEFA) and additional theatres. It was only in 1989 that he joined the Union of Artists of the GDR.
Soon after the German reunification of 1990, Hauswald co-founded the photography agency OSTKREUZ in Berlin. Ever since, he has contributed to various publications, exhibitions, nationally and internationally. In 1997 Harald Hauswald was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and in 2006 received the Civil Prize for the German Reunification.

Gábor Havas (1941–) sociologist, educator, MP, editor of Beszélő, and a founding member of Szegényeket Támogató Alap (SZETA), or the Foundation for the Provision of Support for the Poor.

Gábor Havas was born in late 1944 in London. He received his MA degree from Loránd Eötvös University Budapest in Hungarian Language and Literature and Adult Education. He started his career working as a program organizer in a rural cultural house and a secondary school teacher. In 1971, he became a research fellow participating in the nationwide sociological surveys led by István Kemény. Beginning in 1972, he launched other surveys together with Ottilia Solt.

From 1973 to 1990, he worked as a sociologist for the Adult Education Institution, Budapest. In the 1980s, together with sociologist Pál Juhász and Bálint Magyar and also working with film director Pál Schiffer, he took part in the ambitious video documentary project Changes in Hungarian peasants’ lives. He also made the documentary films Nyugodjak békében (Let Me Rest in Peace) and Kovbojok (Hungarian Cowboys), which won awards at national film festivals.

From 1979 to 1989, he took an active part right from the beginning in the Hungarian democratic movement, and he was one of the founding members of SZETA and the editor of the samizdat periodical Beszélő. In 1988, he was also a founding member of SZDSZ (the Alliance of Free Democrats), the Hungarian liberal party, of which he became an MP after the first free general elections in May 1990.

Václav Havel (1936–2011) was a Czech writer, dramatist, philosopher, dissident, politician, and important figure of the Czechoslovak alternative and counter-culture before 1989. Because of his bourgeois background, Havel’s access to higher education was limited. Already in the 1950s, Havel became acquainted with the milieu of the “second” culture and samizdat as he met “forbidden” authors associated with the poet and artist Jiří Kolář. Thus, as Havel stated later, already at that time he had “spontaneously and naturally entered among those who were active on the border of allowed, even more often beyond its frontier.” In 1955, Havel made literary debut in the magazine Květen, and until the end of the 1960s, his texts appeared in many Czech magazines. In 1959, he finished his first drama, the one-act play Rodinný večer (An Evening with the Family). In the same year, he was accepted as a stagehand at the Divadlo ABC (ABC Theatre) in Prague. In the following year, he took up work at the Divadlo na zábradlí (Theatre on the Balustrade) in Prague, first as a stagehand and later as an assistant director and literary manager. In December 1963, Divadlo na zábradlí performed Havel’s first full-length play Zahradní slavnost (The Garden Party). Another one of Havel’s play, Vyrozumění (The Memorandum), was performed by this theatre in 1965. Apart from theatre plays, Havel also wrote experimental poetry in the 1960s. At that time, he studied dramatic art theory at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, from where he graduated in 1966. Already in the middle of the 1960s, the Czechoslovak State Security started to take an interest in Václav Havel. In their reports, Václav Havel was labeled as someone around whom were a wide group of young artists who disagreed with the cultural policy of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (CzCP) and demanded “absolute creative freedom” was united. Havel criticised the cultural policy of the CzCP, for example at the Fourth Congress of the Czechoslovak Union of Writers in 1967, which led to his expulsion from the Central Committee of the Union.

Václav Havel played an active role in democratization and renewal of culture during the era of reforms, known as the Prague Spring. In March 1968, he, along with 150 other writers and artists signed an open letter to the Central Committee of the CzCP on the democratization process. In June of the same year, he became the chairman of the Circle of Independent Writers. At that time, Divadlo na zábradlí presented another one of Havel’s plays, Ztížená možnost soustředění (The Increased Difficulty of Concentration).

The Prague Spring ended with the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968. Václav Havel actively opposed the invasion and the resulting hardline Communist policies. As a result, his work was banned in Czechoslovakia. He moved from Prague to the countryside, where he continued his activities against the Communist regime, including hosting concerts of banned music. In 1975 he created the samizdat edition Expedice (Expedition) which issued a total of 232 volumes of “banned literature” including Czech prose and poetry, plays, philosophical texts and translations of important foreign works. Havel reflected on restrictions of cultural freedom in Czechoslovakia in his famous open letter addressed to the first secretary of the Central Committee of the CzCP and later President of the Republic, Gustáv Husák, in 1975. In this letter, Havel wrote about “cultural police,” banned books, abolished magazines and “plundered” exhibition halls. In November of the same year, Havel’s play Žebrácká opera (The Beggar’s Opera) was performed by an amateur theatre group. Although Havel was not officially mentioned as the author of the play, the group was later persecuted.

In 1976, Havel supported persecuted artists connected with the band The Plastic People of the Universe. Later, he co-founded Charter 77 and was one of its first spokespersons. Charter 77 was a civic initiative which, among other things, actively embraced alternative culture in Czechoslovakia. Thus, in 1983, it issued a report about the banned and restricted Czechoslovak rock music. In 1978 Havel co-founded The Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS) and became its spokesman. During the 1970s and 1980s, he continued to write plays. At that time, Audience (1975), Largo desolato (1984), Pokušení (Temptation, 1985) and many other plays were created. Havel was also known for his essays, especially Moc bezmocných (The Power of the Powerless) from 1978. Between 1977 and 1989 he was imprisoned several times for his beliefs, his longest prison term lasting from 1979 to 1983. This period is reflected in Havel’s letters to his wife, later published as Dopisy Olze (Letters to Olga).

Václav Havel was an important figure of the Czechoslovak alternative cultural milieu not only because of his plays, but also because of his support for other artists. Through recommendations and intercessions, he helped “unofficial” writers, visual artists, musicians or photographers, and in the second half of the 1980s, also creators from the audio-visual sphere. He supported, among others, the exile revue Paternoster and the samizdat magazine Revolver Revue, and initiated the foundation of an underground publicistic programme the Original Videojournal. He had subscriptions to magazines that were distributed in Czechoslovakia via diplomatic post from the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre in Scheinfeld, West Germany. Havel also often listened to “unofficial” music production, as the majority of his tapes were recorded “in flats, semi-secret concerts, exile, and cellars.” Thus, as noted by Czech historian Jiří Suk, alternative culture meant to Havel “his natural cultural milieu, where he felt well and free.”

In November 1989, Václav Havel co-founded the Civic Forum, and in December of the same year, he was elected the last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992). When Czechoslovakia split, he became the first president of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). After his presidency, he devoted his time again to theatre and literature, and he supported prosecuted and imprisoned human rights defenders around the world. In 2008, the Prague theatre Archa performed his play Odcházení (Leaving). Based on this play, Václav Havel made a film by the same name in 2011. Václav Havel died in December 2011. His state funeral was attended by many Czech and foreign politicians, artists, and other eminent figures.

Although Václav Havel was an important part of the Czechoslovak cultural opposition before 1989, he did not consider alternative culture as automatically qualitatively better than official culture. Sometimes, good texts could be published officially, and analogically, texts of poor-quality could be found in some samizdat volumes. Thus, the difference between official and alternative culture did not lie, according to Havel, in the fact that one of them was better than the other. It lied in its distinct and incommensurable values, styles, ideas, missions or meanings: “Parallel culture is not a guarantee of anything, it is neither a value nor a counter-value, it is not a style or some culturing principle, it is nothing but a fact.” Therefore, in Havel’s interpretation, the parallel culture was primarily not a field of artistic phenomena, but a social reality that could emerge only in a society controlled by a dictatorship which suppressed freedom of speech and required “total claim to the spirit of individuals and the society.” As pointed out by Jiří Suk, the official and alternative cultures were put in opposition not by Václav Havel, but by the dictatorship. According to Havel, restrictions of cultural freedom had far-reaching consequences, as so-called high culture – literature, theatre or visual arts – was part of the “self-awareness of the society.” Hence, interventions into the cultural and intellectual sphere influenced many more people than only those against whom they were originally directed.

Dagmar Havlová is a Czech actor. She studied at the Conservatory and at the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno, graduating in 1975. She was given her first important film role while she was still a student. Her filmography includes more than 50 feature-length films and more than 300 television productions. Dagmar Havlová is also involved in the theatre and from 1979-1997 was a member of the drama group at the Vinohrady Theatre. In 1997 she married the then president, Václav Havel, and temporarily suspended her acting career. In the same year she set up the Vize 97 foundation, which a year later was merged with the Václav and Olga Havel Foundation under the title of the Dagmar and Václav Havel VIZE 1997 Foundation. Dagmar Havlová was then the chair of its board of directors. In 2006 she went back to acting at the Vinohrady Theatre and later also returned to film and television screens. She was behind the establishment of the Václav Havel Library in 2004.

Olga Havlová (née Šplíchalová), was the first wife of the Czechoslovak and later Czech president Václav Havel. She apprenticed in the Bata shoe factory, where she worked afterwards. In the 1950s, she had a number of different jobs, such as shop assistant or accountant; she also was in an amateur theater performance. In the mid-1950s she met Václav Havel, and they married in 1964. In the 1960s she was employed as an usher in the Theater on the Balustrade, where Václav Havel also was working. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, she supported the dissident activities of her husband. After Václav Havel’s imprisonment in 1979, Olga was active in the samizdat publisher Expedice, together with her brother-in-law Ivan Havel, and participated in the Charter 77 activities (she signed Charter 77 in 1982). The collection of letters written by Václav Havel from prison to his wife Olga between 1979 and 1983 later became one of Havel’s most important philosophical works. Olga Havlová was active in the underground video-magazine “Originální videojournal” (“Original Video-Journal”), which reported on dissident activities and the then political and cultural situation in Czechoslovakia. She also helped with the distribution of samizdat newspaper Lidové noviny (The People’s Newspaper). After 1989, as the First Lady of Czechoslovakia (and later the Czech Republic), Olga Havlová mainly focused on charitable activities. In 1990 she co-founded, together with her friends from Charter 77, the Committee of Good Will, and in 1992, she established the Olga Havlová Foundation, which helps people with disabilities. In 1997 Olga Havlová was, in memoriam, awarded the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk for outstanding contribution to democracy and human rights.

Dušan Havlíček is a media journalist and theorist.

Havlíček graduated from the Prague Teaching Institute and from 1942 he studied conducting at the Prague Conservatory at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. But in 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo, and in the same year in Nuremberg he was sentenced to six years in prison. He was imprisoned for an illegal activity when he was in the student cell of the, at that time illegitimate, Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, having spread leaflets. After returning from prison in August 1945, he continued his studies, which ended in the summer of 1948. He then worked in several different artistic and concert organizations, such as the People's Art Concert Agency, and then for a while moved to the Artistic and Music Centre. He had engaged in different aspects of the cultural sphere from the circus, to café concerts, to television broadcasting.

At the end of the 1950s, he devoted himself to journalism, and for a short time he also worked in the cultural column of Rudé právo (a communist newspaper). He then went to the magazine "Hudební rozhledy". In 1963, he became editor of Cultural Works, where he dealt mainly with television and music. He also worked as a journalist focusing on culture, mostly about Switzerland. In the autumn of 1967, along with other editors, he left Cultural Arts in protest of the appointment of a new editor-in-chief, known for his ultra-conservative views. He joined the Institute of History and Mass Media Theory at Charles University in Prague.

In May 1968 Havlíček was approached by Čestmír Císař – then the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party – and offered the position of head of the press section. Havlíček finally accepted this position and in June 1968 he was appointed head of the press, radio and television section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. However, because he spoke about the meeting of the Bureau of the Central Communist Party of the Czechoslovak Communist Party of August 20, 1968, before occupation, in the Radio Free Europe, Havlíček became a target of frequent attacks by the members of the Communist Party of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. He remained in his post until March 1969, where he was sent as a correspondent of the Czech Press Agency to Geneva. It was all arranged at the last minute, since Alexandr Dubcek had to approve this position and he did so just before the departure. Havlíček refused to obey calls to return to Prague and in January 1970 requested political asylum, which he was granted. The fact that he did not obey the calls led to him being sentenced in absence to prison in Prague for twelve years. The indictment spoke of the damage of property, illegally leaving the republic and damaging its interests abroad.

Dušan Havlíček has lived in Geneva since then. By the mid-1980s, he was a researcher at the Swiss Broadcasting and Television Directorate in Bern. He was then responsible for audience surveys in Geneva's Swiss television in the mid-90s.

At the same time, Dušan Havlíček has worked for many years as a publicist and contributed political articles on Czechoslovakia to a number of Swiss daily newspapers and other foreign journals, and also worked consistently with the exile “Listy” magazine.

In 1956, András Hegedűs B. (1930–2001) was one of the secretaries of the Petőfi Circle, which organized a series of free public debates before the revolution, and in 1988 he was a founding member of the Committee for Historical Justice (TIB). In 1981, together with Gyula Kozák (1941–), he began to do oral history interviews with people who had participated in the 1956 revolution, which at the time was considered the number one political taboo in public discourse in Hungary.

Hegedűs studied economics at the Karl Marx University of Economics, and in 1953 he began to work as an assistant instructor at Eötvös Lorand University Budapest, a position he held for four years. As a secondary school pupil sixteen years of age, he became a member of the Hungarian Communist Party, which was later renamed the Hungarian Workers’ Party, and he took an active part in organizing the communist youth movement in Hungary.

His attitude towards 1956 was basically defined by the fact that he was an ambitious young man when it broke out, and he later became a researcher of the revolutionary events he himself took part in and also someone who worked to preserve documents of these events. In 1953, Hegedűs supported the reform line policy of Imre Nagy’s first government. In the spring of 1956, he began organizing public debates of Petőfi Circle, and in late October, he became an activist of the Revolutionary Committee of Hungarian Intellectuals. In an interview, he offered the following definition of his political “education”:  

“I deliberately avoid using the term ‘reform communist,’ because this was created only later. In 1956, we did not call ourselves reform communists, as at the time this designation simply had not yet been invented. I myself was a member of the Communist Party from at the age of fifteen, i.e. since 1946. I was for Imre Nagy in 1956, but he himself, of course, was a communist leader, who wanted to deconstruct the Stalinist dictatorship in Hungary. And by November 4, he had clearly become a devoted supported of the multi-party system and the independence of Hungary, which means he was no longer a communist. This is why I feel reluctant to use the term ‘reform communist,’ because many thousands of us went through this painful ‘political education,’ and we paid a heavy price for it later, as we were either imprisoned or forced to emigrate. This was really a cathartic process both mentally and politically. And we did not decide to become ‘reform communists’ deliberately, rather we suffered this as a later stigma.”  

In 1957, he was dismissed from his job at the university as a disciplinary measure. In 1959, he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to two years imprisonment. When he was released in 1960, he was unable to find a job for years because of his record. Later, he worked as an economist and sociologist for industrial research institutes, the Higher Education Research Center, and the Center for East Central European Academic Researches, until 1979, when he was dismissed again for having signed a declaration of solidarity with activists of the Czechoslovak Charta 77 movement who had been imprisoned.   

In 1981 and 1982, he hosted a good dozen of meetings known as “Roundtable talks on 1956” in his home. Working together with Gyula Kozák and Miklós Szabó, he also did a series of collective and individual interviews with twelve prominent participants in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. In 1985, in cooperation with Gyula Kozák, he established the Oral History Archives. He offers the following recollection of this: “We took the initiative to establish an independent archives in the early 1980s,  as we realized, simply, that more and more friends among the one-time participants in and witnesses to the events of 1956 were passing away and taking their precious memories with them.” In 1986, on the 30 anniversary of the Revolution, he was one of the organizers of another illegal conference held in the home of poet and stubborn ’56-er István Eörsi.  In 1988, Hegedűs hosted the illegal founding meeting of the Committee for Historical Justice (TIB), of which he was elected to serve as secretary and, later, as managing deputy director. In these capacities, he actively organized the public reburial of executed revolutionary prime Imre Nagy and his fellow-martyrs.