COURAGE

łączymy kolekcje

The document issued by the Securitate, the original of which is to be found in the Alexandru Călinescu private collection, is written by hand and now quite hard to read because of its deterioration over time. It is entitled “Minute of home search,” with a clear mention of the date on which this search was carried out: 18 May, 1983. The report has four pages, each of them signed by each of the three representatives of the communist secret police, by those whose home was searched, Alexandru Călinescu and his wife, and by two witnesses. It is mentioned that the search began at 07.00 and finished at 12.45. It is interesting to observe that, as Alexandru Călinescu recalls, similar searches began simultaneously at the homes of other authors who published in the magazine Dialog articles that had been deciphered by various informers and drawn to the attention of the Securitate as failing to conform to official ideology. For it to be seen that so-called socialist legality was respected, the document also mentions that following the search no objection or any form of opposition was expressed by the person searched, namely Alexandru Călinescu.

The minute presents schematically a record of the objects confiscated as a result of this search by the secret police. The materials that aroused the suspicion of the secret police were grouped in thirty-two categories. Most of the objects confiscated consisted, in the order in which they are mentioned in the document issued by the Securitate, of: 1) various hand-written or typed manuscripts; 2) foreign, especially French, newspapers and magazines – a diverse range, from Le Monde to Le Canard enchaîné and from L’Express to Le Nouvel Observateur; 3) books in foreign languages, but not necessarily of an anticommunist character, as can be seen from the example of the two volumes taken from the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller; and 4) audio cassettes. A critical reading of this minute gives an idea, with abundant examples, of the scale of the constraints imposed by the communist regime in Romania in the 1980s. The moment of the search is very important in the economy of the Alexandru Călinescu private collection: it was on this occasion that many materials that made up the collection disappeared, as with the exception of the cassettes, none were every returned. This record of the search constitutes the only testimony to the existence of these objects – manuscripts, periodicals, books – in the collection.

Youth Park of Balokányliget, 21 May 1983 

In Pécs, this was the first major public presentation of alternative music. In the first part of the program, four new bands competed with one another for the “Rock cup.” One of these bands was from Pécs and three were from Budapest. In the final show, “Európa Kiadó” (Europe Publisher) and “Bikini” of Feró Nagy gave their concerts. The documentation of the events, which includes archival photos, slides, posters, sound recordings, and a report on the program, is a unique and important part of Koszits’s collection.

Extraordinary events in the collection's history include the various publications which have arisen from the collection. A first important example of this came in 1983 when a selection of extracts from Reimann's letters and diaries, which Elisabeth Elten-Krause and Walter Lewerenz gathered from Reimann's holdings in the Neubrandenburg Literary Center and the Neues Leben publishing house was published. The publication in 1993 of Brigitte Reimann's correspondence with Christa Wolf (Sei gegrüßt und lebe. Eine Freundschaft in Briefen und Tagebüchern 1963-1973), edited by Angela Drescher, who was also the editor of the Berlin based Aufbau publishing house, and was equally responsible for the publication of Brigitte Reimann's diaries in 1997 (Ich bedaure nichts. Tagebücher 1955-1963) and 1998 (Alles schmeckt nach Abschied. Tagebücher 1964-1970) was likewise of immense value. The publication of the diaries was not only important for academics, but also received by the general public as a significant literary event.