COURAGE

łączymy kolekcje

During the general assembly of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party held from 14 to 17 November 1968, the following principle was confirmed: “Press, broadcast, and television are in the first place the instruments of the enforcement of party and state policy [...] When the employees of the mass media are not loyal to the fundamental interests of the state and of socialism, and to their own organisation’s policies, it is necessary to draw organisational and individual consequences.” The November resolution became the first official authorization of the “normalization” policy.

The selected section of the SÚTI fund/collection monitors the gradual adoption of this “new orientation” of individual mass media and gives concrete examples of insufficiently following the “normalization” path. The section contains the set of very detailed assessments of the articles and reports published by official mass media. By this means, the collection points out another dimension of censorship, which was aimed not only at forms of open opposition, but concentrated also on continual “purges” of mass media from the “sediments” of unsatisfactory political involvement, ignorance of certain political events, lax approach to processed topics or, in Slovak case especially, inappropriate nationalistic tendencies or excessive influence of the Catholic Church.

The invasion of Warsaw-Pact troops and the defeat of the Prague Spring shocked Brigitte Reimann. At precisely this moment, she lost all trust in the leadership of the GDR. Reimann noted in her diary on the 21^st of August 1968:

 [Transcription of the scanned masterpiece]
Hoy[erswerda], 21. August 68.
Troops of the SU [Soviet Union] and five members of the Warsaw Pact have occupied the CSSR [Czechoslovak Socialist Republic]. Shocking. My phone has been ringing the entire morning, calls from all sorts of people who are horrified and drained. All day, I have sat next to the radio listening to the news. GDR-channels have not said a thing, repeating only the official TASS-release and the deceitful appeal of the SED-government to its citizens to show friendship, brotherhood and love to the Czech people, while at the same time tanks are rolling through Prague and Plzen and all of the other large cities of the CSSR. Once again German uniforms in Prague. Dubcek and the ringleaders have either been arrested or carried off, who knows, we have heard nothing about their fate. And what hopes we had for the ‚Model‘ CSSR! Unbelievable that Stalinism is still enforced with these methods. Supposedly, there is an “Outpouring of Declarations of Support” emanating from the GDR. We are so bitter, no longer able to trust (supposing we were ever able to trust this ‚sort‘.) My trip to N[eubrandenburg] has been delayed, I feel paralyzed.

Okulary Jerzego Ludwińskiego są jedną z rzeczy osobistych przekazanych w 2008 roku do kolekcji Dolnośląskiego Towarzystwa Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych przez Małgorzatę Iwanowską-Ludwińską, wdowę po Jerzym Ludwińskim. W okularach tych Ludwiński napisał większość swoich tekstów. Warto zwrócić na nie uwagę, ponieważ są one jednym z nielicznych przedmiotów związanych z życiem codziennym Ludwińskiego pokazywanych na wystawie, która skoncentrowana jest na myśli teoretycznej i krytycznej Ludwińskiego oraz jego działalności organizacyjnej.