COURAGE

connecting collections

Bogdan Radica was born on 26 August 1904, in Split. He was a writer, publicist, journalist and historian and one of the most prominent Croatian emigrants after 1945. After he finished classical gymnasium in Split, he attended studies at Ljubljana University (1923-1924). He left for Florence where he continued studying history and law. His first job position was in Paris in 1928, where he was a reporter for Obzor, a daily Zagreb newspaper. The following year he became the pressman for the Belgrade Avala. In 1930, he went to Athena as an emissary for the press at the Royal Embassy of Yugoslavia. He was also active as a member of the PEN Club and when he came to Geneva as a member of the Yugoslav delegation at the League of Nations (1934-1939). After the foundation of Banovina Hrvatska in 1939, he settled in Belgrade, where he worked at the State Office for the Foreign press. At the end of 1940, he relocated to Washington and since 1941 worked in the press bureau of the Kingdom Yugoslavia in New York. At that time, he also started writing for the American press. The reason why he had moved to the USA was his book Agonija Evrope, printed in Belgrade in 1940, which was very critical of national socialism and fascism. Morover, his family ties with Guglielmo Ferrero, who was a dissident of Mussolini's regime, caused a diplomatic pression from Germany and Italy on Yugoslavia which finally caused his his departure to the United States.

In distancing himself from the Yugoslav Government, which was placed in exile, he advocated for the Partisan movement. He collaborated with the movement for the purpose of gaining recognition of Tito as the Allies' only partner in Yugoslavia. Immediately after the end of the war, he came back to Belgrade where he worked a time in the Ministry of Information. After travelling to Zagreb and Split, disappointed with the consequences of communist revolution in Croatia and Yugoslavia, he decided to settle permanently in the USA, as an intellectual with bourgeois views. In his writings, he expressed his opposition against the communist rule, and also Yugoslavia as a state, becoming after the war a defender of the idea of Croatian statehood. Politically, he favoured the Croatian Peasant Party, and in his articles in the American press he shared his experience of living in Communist Yugoslavia. He was attacked by Yugoslav Communist authorities, President Tito and his minister of Internal Affairs Aleksandar Ranković on account of his writings. Before a committee of the American Senate in 1947, he gave a lecture on the Yugoslav brand of communism, insisting that the US not send aid to the regime.

Due to his previous ties with the communist regime in Yugoslavia during and after the war, he received American citizenship as late as 1957. He worked as professor of modern European history from 1950 to 1974 at Fairleigh University in New Jersey. During the years, he became a fruitful publicist in the diaspora press, especially in Hrvatski glas and Hrvatska revija, for which he wrote dozens of articles on cultural and political issues. Some of the diaspora newspapers in which he was involved were: Nova Hrvatska, Journal of Croatian Studies, Slobodna riječ, Danica, Hrvatski dom and many others. He also wrote a large number of essays and articles in American reviews and newspapers on various topics concerning Yugoslavia and communism, such as The New Leader, The New Republic, Chicago Tribune, The American Mercury, The Reader's Digest, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, The Commentary, The Freeman, The Challenge, Journal of Central European Affairs and others.

The author had a great number of essays and several books, among which were Sredozemni povratak (1971), Hrvatska 1945 (1974) and Živjeti nedoživjeti - Uspomene hrvatskog intelektualca kroz moralnu i ideološku krizu Zapada (Knjiga I, 1982; Knjiga II, 1984). All of these books were forbidden under the communist regime, as they had criticized the Yugoslav political and social system. During his life in exile, he liaised with many outstanding Croatian political emigrants (Vinko Nikolić, Jure Petričević, Bruno Bušić, Mirko Vidović, Nikola Čolak, Ante Kadić, Jakša Kušan, Zlatko Markus), and also with dissidents from Croatia and Yugoslavia (Franjo Tuđman, Milovan Đilas, Mihajlo Mihajlov). On a number of occasions, he participated in TV discussions on Yugoslavia and at the meetings of American historians. He was a member of a number of international organizations such as: The International PEN Club, The International League for Human Rights, The Comittee for the Free World, Liberal International and others. He was also an active member of the Croatia Academy of America, Hrvatsko narodno vijeće (Croatian National Council) and the Committee to Aid Democratic Dissidents in Yugoslavia. After 1945, Radica visited Croatia for the first time in July, 1990. President Tuđman appointed him to a commission for the new, democratic Constitution of Republic of Croatia. At the time of Yugoslav crisis, he defended a peaceful solution and the creation of the independent Croatian state. He died at 89 on 3 December 1993 at St.Luke's Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan, New York City.

Jiří Rambousek was a Czech historian of literature. During the 1950s, he taught at several elementary and high schools in Czechoslovakia. Between 1962 and 1964, he worked at the Pedagogical Institute in Jihlava. From 1964, he taught Czech language and literature at the Pedagogical Faculty of the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Brno. However, after 1970, he was forbidden to teach and in 1973 he was dismissed for political reasons. Then, he could be employed only as a manual worker. Despite his dismissal, Rambousek managed to save Ivan Blatný’s papers that were located at the university and hide them in his flat. In the 1990s, Rambousek taught at the University in Brno again, and Ivan Blatný’s manuscripts, hidden in Rambousek’s flat, finally became a part of the Ivan Blatný collection at the Museum of Czech Literature in the 1990s.

Ainė Ramonaitė is a professor of political science at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science of Vilnius University. Her main research areas are political elections and political sociology, and (non)Soviet society and its legacy and impact on today’s democratic system. Professor Ramonaitė is the organiser of the academic discussion social platform Socforumas, which holds annual conferences for young researchers. She is the author of several books and many articles on the process of democratic elections in Lithuania. After 2009, she initiated and headed two research projects on ‘non-Soviet’ society. The main aims of these projects were to look at networks of people who were not involved in either the anti-Soviet dissident movement or pro-Soviet activism, but rather stood between the two.

Although Ramonaitė was not involved in the anti-Soviet movement, her parents, who worked in academia (her father was a physics professor, and her mother was a Lithuanian literature and language professor), were involved in the non-Soviet ethnographic movement. This kind of activity inspired Ramonaitė as well, and carrying out research on this theme in history became a kind of personal moral determination. Contrary to the prevailing statements in Lithuania about the weak opposition to Soviet rule at that time, Ramonaitė thinks that this ‘invisible’ society was larger and more closely interconnected than is usually imagined.

Stjepan Razum, a priest, Catholic theologian and Church historian, was born on 16 December, 1960 in Konšćica, Samobor Municipality, Croatia. He attended primary school in Sveti Martin pod Okićem, while he attended the archdiocesan classical gymnasium attended in Zagreb from 1975 to 1979. He graduated from the Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Zagreb in 1986. He also earned a degree in diplomatics and palaeography at the Vatican Archives in 1994, and he earned a doctorate in Church history at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1995. Since 1995, he has been employed in the Croatian State Archives, with an office at the Archdiocesan Archives of Zagreb, which is a department of the former.

He has been the head of the Archdiocesan Archives of Zagreb since 1996. In 2008 he gained the title of a senior archivist, and later he was appointed archival consultant in 2010. He is a member of the editorial office of several scholarly and cultural journals, and a number of initiatives involved in the promotion of historical and cultural research. He did not engage in politics in life, but on a personal level he opposed to the then communist regime as a divinity student and then young priest.

Ion Raţiu (b. 6 June 1917, Turda – d. 17 January 2000, London) was born into a Greek Catholic family belonging to the Transylvanian gentry. His family became known during the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century because of their involvement in the Romanians’ movement for civil and political rights in Austria-Hungary. His father, Augustin Rațiu, was a member of the National Peasants’ Party and mayor of Turda in interwar Romania. After he obtained his degree in law from the University of Cluj in 1938, Ion Raţiu worked at a law firm. In February 1940, he was employed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and two months later he was assigned to the Romanian Legation in London as a “chancellor” (cancelar diurnist). At that time, the Romanian Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the United Kingdom was his uncle, Viorel Virgil Tilea, a diplomat and a leading figure in the National Peasants’ Party. Known for his hostility towards Nazi Germany, Tilea was revoked from his position in September 1940, after the rise to power of the National–Legionary State. Raţiu resigned from his position at the Romanian Legacy in London and requested political asylum in England. Continuing to live in Great Britain after his resignation, the young Ion Raţiu earned a scholarship at St. John’s College in Cambridge, where he studied economics during the following three years. In 1957, Raţiu started his own business in the field of maritime transport.

After the rise to power of the communist regime in Romania, Raţiu decided not to return to his country as long as it remained under dictatorship. Starting from the 1940s, he became involved in the organisations of Romanians living in exile in the West. He was a member of the executive committee of the Movement of Free Romanians, an organisation which after 1940 opposed from exile the alliance between Romania and Nazi Germany. He was the founding president of the Association of Romanian Students in Great Britain. Later on, he was one of the founding members of Amnesty International, which played an important role in the fight against the violation of human rights by the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. He was one of the initiators of the World Union of Free Romanians, created in exile, and was elected its president in 1984 at the first congress of the organisation held in Geneva. This organisation of the Romanian exile became known for its opposition to violations of human rights by the communist regime in Romania, and attempted to unite the organisations of Romanians in exile around democratic values. During the Romanian revolution of 1989, Raţiu launched a campaign to support Romania, which was emerging from a period of severe poverty and suffered from shortages not just of consumer goods but also of medicines. After 1989, Ion Raţiu chose to return to his native country and to take part in the democratisation of Romania. He contributed to the recreation of the National Peasants’ Party, a historical party of the interwar period, under the title of National Christian Democratic Peasant Party (PNŢCD). In 1990, he ran for President of Romania as the PNŢCD nominee, but without success. However, he was elected to the Romanian Parliament in 1990, 1992, and 1996.

At the start of his exile in Great Britain, Raţiu began his activity as a journalist and in the 1940s he was correspondent of the American news agency International News Service. Between 1940 and 1951, he also collaborated with BBC radio, and in the years 1952–1955 he was a programme assistant at the BBC. During the 1950s he also worked for other Western radio stations, such as Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. In 1955, he started to publish a weekly news bulletin in English entitled Free Romanian Press, with the aim of informing Westerners about the situation of Romania. Raţiu was appreciated as a political analyst of the communist regime in Romania and on topics relating to the Eastern Bloc in general. His expertise in the problems of the communist regimes is reflected in his work Policy for the West published in 1957, a critical analysis of Western policies towards the Soviet Bloc. In 1975, when Ceauşescu still enjoyed the goodwill of Western countries, Raţiu published the essay Contemporary Romania, in which he contested a series of positive clichés through which the Western press and political milieus perceived the Ceauşescu regime. One of Raţiu’s most appreciated works entitled Moscow Challenges the World was published in 1986 at the Sherwood Publishing House in London. The work, drafted for the first time at the end of the 1940s, represented a complex analysis of the political, economic and social system of the countries in the Soviet Bloc, as well as of its ideological origins, and a plea for democratic values.

As the GDR was founded in 1949, Brigitte Reimann was 16 years old. After graduating from high-school in 1951, she began work as a teacher. Her authorial debut came in 1955, in works which expressed enthusiastic support for the development of socialism. With publication of her short story, "Ankunft in Alltag" in 1961 she was celebrated in the GDR as a pioneer of a new literary current, the so-called "arrival literature". However, it was not before long that she encountered difficulties arising from the narrow-mindedness and dogmatism of many party functionaries. She was alarmed by the growing militarization of society, and ultimately repulsed by the suppression of the Prague Spring in August 1968. She desired to coexist in true socialism oriented along human needs.  From her birthplace of Burg (near Magdeburg) she moved in 1960 to Hoyerswerda before finally settling in Neubrandenburg in 1968. There, she devoted herself entirely to writing "Franziska Linkerhand ", one of her most notable works. In 1973 she succumbed to cancer.

Martin Reiner (formerly Pluháček) is a Czech poet, writer and publisher. He attended military grammar school, and then studied at the military university. However he did not finish his studies. After he refused to participate in a military exercise, he spent eight months in prison. Reiner has dealt with the life and work of Czech poet Ivan Blatný over a long period of time. He got acquainted with Blatný’s poems in 1986, at a time when Blatný’s books could not be found in Czechoslovak libraries. As Reiner later stated, Blatný’s poetry “bewitched” him. Reiner was so fascinated by Ivan Blatný, that he eventually visited him in England in October 1989, shortly before the end of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. In 1990, he arranged the transfer of Blatný’s manuscripts written in exile to the Museum of Czech Literature. A quarter of a century later, Reiner finished a voluminous book dealing with Ivan Blatný entitled Básník: román o Ivanu Blatném (Poet: A Novel about Ivan Blatný) which received the Czech award “Magnesia Litera” for the best book of the year in 2015.

Kęstutis Remeika is the deputy director of the Lithuanian Special Archive. He has been working at the archive since 1995, when the archive was founded. Before that, in 1993 he joined the group of archivists established by the Lithuanian government that took charge of the files left in Lithuania by the KGB (the Working Group on Special Archive Files of the Lithuanian Archive Department). Remeika is a key figure in providing archive policy towards the structure of the collection.

As deputy director, Remeika is involved in taking decisions about the structure of the collection. He was not involved in any anti-Soviet activity or opposition to Soviet rule. According to Remeika, it is hard to define what ‘cultural opposition’ means. The notion could include a wide range of activities: from talking in the kitchen while listening to Western radio programmes to participation in anti-Soviet activities. There were only a few people in Lithuania who stood up openly against the regime. The Lithuanian Special Archive does not make any further efforts to find material about cultural opposition: writers and members of the intelligentsia are not subjects of the archive. The work of archives in Lithuania is divided according to the subjects (authors) of documents, and for this reason the Lithuanian Special Archive holds only files on KGB activity.

Smiljana Rendić was a Catholic journalist, writer and poet, born in Split on 27 August 1926. From 1933 to 1940, she attended primary school and after that the gymnasium in Split, where she joined the Croatian Catholic Movement before the outbreak of World War II. In 1948, the communist authorities in Split expelled her and her widowed mother from their flat because of the family's opposition to the new regime. In the 1950s, she worked in the factory Jugoplastika in Split and in 1960 moved to Rijeka. There she was employed in the administration of the maritime affairs magazine Pomorstvo, where she worked until forced retirement in 1972.

In Rijeka she also worked for the magazine La voce del popolo. However, after being discovered as a practical believer, she was dismissed from the magazine, as it was under the control of the Communist Party. In 1963, she began collaborating with the bi-weekly newspaper Glas Koncila, the most prominent Catholic publication in socialist Yugoslavia. In the beginning, she published stories with an autobiographical character under the pseudonym Berith (Heb. covenant), in which she narrated her personal life and the lives of her contemporaries at a time of overall atheisation and the erasure of national identity. Also in 1963, she began working as a journalist for the periodical Glasnik sv. Antuna Padovanskog, writing under the pseudonym Vjera Marini.

Due to the article “Izlazak iz genitiva ili drugi hrvatski preporod“ (‘Departure from the genitive or the second Croatian national revival’) published in 1971 in the journal Kritika, she was prosecuted by the communist authorities under Article 118 of the Criminal Code. During her trial in 1972, she was prohibited from appearing in public and writing for a year, and was sentenced to one year in prison. The next year, after an appeal process, Rendić's verdict was commuted by the Supreme Court to a conditional sentence of one year in prison, but she was still punished by a one-year ban on writing and public activity, with mandatory retirement.

As of 1973 she lived as a retired person in Rijeka, but continued her journalistic and literary work primarily in Glas Koncila. Interestingly, at the time of the emergence of the Polish Solidarity Movement at the beginning of the 1980s she was the first journalist who reported on Poland in Croatia and Yugoslavia, where such processes did not suit either the regime or the media under its control.

In 1988 she was granted a special prize by Glas koncila, the   ‘Golden Quill’. Although not formally educated, Rendić acquired deep theological knowledge through her intellectual work. It may be said that Rendić was among the most important Croatian Catholic journalists in the second half of the 20^th century.

She died in Rijeka on 26 May 1994  at the age of 68.

Andriy Richytsky was the pseudonym for Anatoliy Andriyovych Pisotsky, a Ukrainian politician, journalist, and literary scholar. He was born into a family of comparatively well off peasants, and studied at the Petrovsky agricultural academy in Moscow though he did not finish his fourth year. In the early days of the revolution of 1917, he joined the ranks of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers Party and became the organization's representative in the Ukrainian Central Rada. He maintained key positions despite the vicissitudes of the civil war period and in 1919 helped found the Ukrainian Communist Party, which acted independently of Ukrainian SDWP and also Russian communists. 

In 1924, along with other members of the UCP, Richytsky joined the Communist Party of Ukraine (Bolshevik faction), finding common cause with Mykola Skrypnyk and vocally criticizing not only historian and politician Mykhailo Hrushevsky but also the writer Mykola Khvylyovy. From 1925 onward, Richytsky held a variety of editorial positions, taught at the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism, and in 1930 began work on the Soviet Ukrainian encyclopaedia. In 1931, he edited what would become a controversial edition of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar, illustrated by the artist Vasyl Sedliar. The images included alongside Shevchenko’s poems drew on universal existential issues of the human condition under oppression. Nevertheless it would seem that both Sedliar and Richytsky were keenly aware of the famine raging in the Ukrainian countryside, making the content of the images politically problematic if not subversive. Richytsky was directly involved in grain procurement in Odessa in 1932-1933 and would have seen the crisis unfolding first hand. In June 1933, he was severely reprimanded by the party and he was removed from working on the Soviet Ukrainian encyclopaedia and his post on the editorial board of the paper Bilshovyk Ukrainy. In September 1933, he was arrested for alleged involvment in a Ukrainian military organization and active counterrevolutionary work aimed at toppling Soviet rule in Ukraine. In March 1934, Richytsky and seven others were tried in the same village in Odessa where he had been involved with grain procurement. He was sentenced to death and executed after a failed appeal, while the others were given long sentences in hard labour camps.

Józef Robakowski (1939) is one of the most significant neo-avant-garde figures in Poland. He was born in a gentry family. In the 1960s he studied history of art and museology on Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, then he moved to Łódź, where he graduated from Direction of Photography and Television Production Department in The National Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre. He found art groups Oko (1960), Zero-61 (1961-1969), and Krąg (1965-1967) in Toruń. From 1960 to 1966 he was also a member of the Students' Creative Film Club ‘Pętla’. But his essential group – Workshop of Film Form (1970-1977), affiliated with the film school – was established in Łódź. He has also been a lecturer in the film school, from 1970 till nowadays, with a break in the period of 1981-1995. In 1978, together with his wife Małgorzata Potocka, in their private flat he launched the Exchange Gallery. In the 1980s he participated in Going Dutch Culture activities.

Robakowski from the very beginning of his career endeavoured to set his creativeness in outputs of Polish pre-war and post-war avant-garde, in particular groups Jung Jidysz, a.r., Tytus Czyżewski, Stefan and Franciszka Themersons, Władysław Strzemiński, Katarzyna Kobro, Henryk Stażewski, Witkacy, but also soviet constructivism. He referred equally strong to contemporary international neo-avant-garde, especially Fluxus movement, and other post-conceptual artists who explored new media. His early experiments with the medium of photography with the Zero-61 group in the 1960s unfolded to the inquiry in materiality and structure of film image, which resulted in the conception of the ‘expanded cinema’. At the same time Robakowski studied relations between  film and a cameraman’s body, observed traffic outside his window, and documented his own private life: on this basis, the ‘personal cinema’ conception has emerged and was developed in the 1980s. After the martial law Robakowski got interested in the alternative culture, punk bands, street happenings. His attitude during this period was called ‘positive nihilism’. In the 1990s and later Robakowski unwound his conception of ‘energetic art’. Apart from the changes in aesthetic ideas, he was known for an absurd, neo-dadaist sense of humour, a pressure on art and an artist’s autonomy, and astute observation of social phenomena, or even interventions close to the applied art practices. His attitude was shaped by his aversion towards conceptual avant-garde rather than resistance to the socialist authorities. Wiesław Borowski, the influential conceptual theoretician, in his famous essay from 1975 called Robakowski and his colleagues the ‘pseudo-avant-garde’. This pejorative nickname became popular as a synonym of post-conceptual neo-avant-garde movement, which preferred to call itself  ‘progressive’ or ‘radical’ artists. Robakowski is still active as an artist, teacher, collector, and commentator of cultural events.

An agent with the cover name “Rolf Jenő” was recruited in January 1977. He worked as a photo laboratory assistant in a company in Cegléd. He undertook the service from patriotic commitment, so he was categorized as a so-called secret commissioned person. He photographed street actions in 1989 in Budapest. However, in Hungary, the freedom of assembly was guaranteed by the law as of January of 1989, but the secret police functioned by following old methods. The agents still observed an event by taking photos of the participants and their banners. These photos are kept in the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security (Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára – ÁBTL).

A classic of Polish photography, known mostly for capturing the atmosphere of Warsaw in the 1950s and 1960s –  the everyday life on the streets, the cultural and artistic life, as well as the fashion of the time – in his photoreports, portraits and sessions.

Tadeusz Rolke was born in a well-to-do bourgeois family in Warsaw. His father was an administrative director in the Warsaw Town Hall, a descendant of small-time nobility from Kresy (the easternmost regions of Poland), and was born in Tbilisi. He died in 1932, when his soon was 2.5 years old. His mother, a protestant “German-Jewish bourgeois”, had no education, but secured a post in the administration of the City Council. This, however, did not protect the family from a lower quality of life (Purzyńska Małgorzata 2008).

The Second World War broke out when Rolke was 10, and ended when he was 16. He survived the bombings of Warsaw in 1939, when his family home was destroyed. He joined the underground, clandestine boy scout organization “Szare Szeregi” (Grey Ranks). He took part in the Warsaw Uprising. After its conclusion, like many inhabitants of Warsaw, he was deported to Germany, where he did forced labour in agriculture, as well as dug trenches and anti-tank trenches.
During the war, he came in contact with photography for the first time: in occupied Warsaw, he watched  high-quality black-and-white pictures from the front in German propaganda magazines.

Having returned to Poland, he photographed war damage and the reconstruction of Warsaw. In 1949, his application to the University of Warsaw was rejected due to his “bourgeois background”. He worked in office jobs, i.a. in the “Społem” (Together) cooperative, which managed a chain of groceries. He started studying philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin, but quickly switched to art history.

In 1952, he was arrested and charged with conspiracy to “overthrow the state”. The case started with his friend’s academic lecture on the possibility of synthesizing capitalist and socialist economy – a very controversial issue, due to the association with the economy of Tito’s Yugoslavia, which was insubordinate towards the USSR at the time. As a matter of fact, there was no conspiracy – it was made up by the SB (Security Service). However, after a Stalinist show trial, Rolke was sentenced to 7 years in prison. Overall, he was incarcerated for almost two years, including the time he spent under arrest. He was freed during the amnesty of 1954, but was banned from all university studies.

He found a job in a state-owned phototechnical laboratory and started working as a photographer. Shortly afterwards, he started collaborating with popular, state-sanctioned socio-cultural press: the youth magazine Świat Młodych (World of Youth) and Stolica (The Capital). The latter initially focused on efforts to rebuild Warsaw, but soon shifted its attention to the city’s cultural life. He got his first full-time contract as a photographer at the prestigious Polska monthly – a “showcase for the Polish People’s Republic”, presenting a positive picture of the country’s scientific and cultural achievements, published in five foreign languages and in Polish. This gave him an opportunity to meet journalists from Western Europe and to start publishing in German and Scandinavian press. He also collaborated with Ty i Ja (You and Me) and the famous Cracow-based weekly Przekrój (Cross Section).

In 1966, the avant-garde “Galeria Foksal” was founded. Rolke met its co-founders, art critics Wiesław Borowski and Anka Ptaszkowska, in the '50s, during his studies in Lublin. Rolke associated himself with a group of artists involved in the gallery. Some of them, such as Henryk Stażewski, Tadeusz Kantor, and Edward Krasiński, are among the most acclaimed figures of the art world of that time. He photographed ephemeral artistic events they organized, including pioneering happenings, environments or installations, which are now a part of the history of Polish art. Together with his friend and colleague from the press Eustachy Kossakowski, he was the co-author of the visual documentation of this group's activities. In this period, he also photographed sculptor Alina Szapocznikow at work.

In the following years he also shot pictures of international celebrities, such as Joseph Beuys, Oskar Kokoschka or Gerhard Richter. In Poland, he photographed cultural stalwarts from other disciplines of art, such as director Andrzej Wajda or cult actors – Małgorzata Braunek, Beata Tyszkiewicz, Kalina Jędrusik, Zbigniew Cybulski. Later in his career, he maintained contact with the art world. He shot artists who made their debuts in the 1980s and 1990s – such as Leon Tarasewicz, Edward Dwurnik, Zbigniew Libera or Paweł Althamer –  for Western press.

As a result of an antisemitic campaign orchestrated by the communist authorities and the participation of the Polish army in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Rolke decided to emigrate. “I could not stand this atmosphere” – he said in an interview in 2008. “This was no longer a country one could live in” – he added (Purzyńska Małgorzata 2008). However, he did not get a passport, as he had been blacklisted due to his contacts with foreigners and a recording of a private conversation made by the SB (Security Service), where he was critical of the authorities. In 1970, he left for an art scholarship in the German Federal Republic and did not return. For 10 years, he lived in Hamburg and married a German woman. As a freelancer, he worked for leading press titles in Western Europe, i.a. Die Zeit, Stern, Der Spiegel, Deutsche Allgemeine Sonntagsblatt, as well as with Art – a prestigious Hamburg-based art magazine (with which he occasionally collaborates to this day). During that time, he created series of photoreports – about the Fischmarkt market in Hamburg, as well as about a commune and addiction therapy centre founded near Hamburg ran by a countercultural organization of former drug addicts.

In the mid-1970s he started visiting Poland, and made photoreports for Western press during the “carnival” of the first “Solidarity” in 1980, although he did not get to the Gdańsk Shipyard and never worked in political photography. After the introduction of martial law on December 13^th 1981, he decided to stay in Poland, choosing to migrate in a direction opposite to large groups of Poles at that time. As he said in an interview with Hanna Maria Giza, he was overcome by “inertia”, hence not many photos are left from that time. However, interesting documentation of street clashes between protesters and state Militia was preserved.

In the 1980s, he photographed alternative culture. He shot sessions i.a. with Kora Jackowska and the new wave band Maanam.
In the 1990s and 2000s, he briefly worked for Gazeta Wyborcza, taught at the Faculty of Journalism at the University of Warsaw and at the Warsaw School of Photography. He created series of photographs on the Jewish past of Polish towns, including some that focused on the Hasidic movement: Hasidim and We Were Here. He had many individual exhibitions, documentaries about his work were also made.