Mihnea Berindei (b. 1948, Bucharest, Romania; d. 2016, Venice, Italy) was a Romanian historian specialised in Ottoman studies, public intellectual, and civic activist. After immigrating to France in 1970, he became a prominent member of the Romanian exile community in Paris. During the period 1977–1989 in particular, he was actively involved in the exile opposition movement against Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime in Romania, being an important intermediary between Romanian dissent and Western public opinion and political circles. He was born on 22 March 1948, as the son of Dan and Ioana Berindei. His father, historian Dan Berindei, came from an old boyar family originating from Wallachia, which had achieved a certain degree of prominence in the political and military affairs of the Romanian Kingdom in the nineteenth century. On his maternal side, his grandfather was Ioan Hudiță, a historian and university professor in Iași and Bucharest, but also a distinguished and active member of the National Peasant Party (PNŢ) during the interwar period. His family was subjected to the harsh repression of the newly installed communist regime in the late 1940s and early 1950s: both his paternal and maternal grandparents were arrested for their earlier political activity and for their membership of the outlawed democratic parties during the interwar period or for their “unhealthy social origins.” His mother was also incarcerated in Văcăreşti prison, where his sister, Ruxandra, was born in 1951. Between 1966 and 1970 Mihnea Berindei attended the courses of the Faculty of History of the University of Bucharest, being especially interested in the field of Ottoman studies. In 1970, as a fourth-year student, he managed to obtain a scholarship for a brief study trip to Istanbul. After a short stay in Turkey, he left for Paris, where he continued his studies at the Sixth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), which would later become the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). He graduated from this institution in 1972, and further pursued his specialisation in the field of Ottoman studies at the Fourth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations (INALCO). He later became a researcher at the EHESS and at the Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Between 1971 and 1991, Mihnea Berindei continued his research on the history of the Ottoman Empire. He was also a member of the editorial board of the historical journal Turcica (1980–1989) (Lența 2016). Until 1977, he focused almost exclusively on his scholarly interests. In the context of the emergence of the ”Goma Movement,” of the growing labour unrest in Romania, and of other manifestations of resistance to the Ceaușescu regime, Mihnea Berindei gradually became closely involved in the activity of the Romanian exile community in Paris. He took part in the multi-disciplinary research groups which were interested in the communist countries and the relations between Eastern and Western Europe. During a public lecture held in Iaşi in December 2011, he stated that he had “felt compelled to do something” for his country. In the late 1970s, he became one of the most important members of the anti-communist, democratic Romanian exile community in the West. He was a founding member of the French Committee for the Defence of Human Rights in Romania, created in 1977 with the explicit aim of supporting the “Goma movement.” When the French Committee for the Defence of Human Rights in Romania was converted into the Paris-based French League for the Defence of Human Rights (affiliated to the Fédération Internationale des Droits de l’Homme), he acted as its spokesman and vice-president. In the following period, until the fall of the Ceaușescu regime, he was directly and fully involved in the systematic monitoring of the situation of Romanian dissidents, as well as in organising demonstrations in favour of those persecuted by the authorities in Romania and other countries of the Soviet bloc. He was concerned in particular with the violation of human rights in communist Romania. He was one of the initiators of Opération Villages Roumains, the European-wide campaign of protest and solidarity against the destruction of villages threatened by the communist regime’s plan for the systematisation of the Romanian territory. Mihnea Berindei had close connections with exiles from other East European communist countries and with international human rights organisations (e.g. Amnesty International, Helsinki Watch, Human Rights Watch). An important direction and focus of his activities was the French press. Thanks to his systematic contacts with a number of French journalists, frequent news articles and analytical pieces about the situation in communist Romania were able to be published in important newspapers and journals, such as Le Monde, Le Figaro, Le Quotidien de Paris, and Le Matin. He also contributed to securing broadcasts on the same topics at Radio France International. Since 1978, he had a close relationship with the RFE/RL station, especially with the RFE Romanian language service, where some of Mihnea Berindei’s close friends and collaborators, such as Vlad Georgescu and Mihai Dim. Sturdza, were employed. Berindei also served as a permanent collaborator, author, or even co-editor of several periodicals devoted to the situation in Eastern Europe and printed in exile. These included, in particular, L’Alternative (1979–1985), La Nouvelle Alternative (1986–1990), and L’Autre Europe (1986–1990). Mihnea Berindei published rigorous informative and analytical articles on the situation in Romania in all these journals. He wrote several articles about dissidence, the fate of national minorities, and religion in communist Romania, and produced detailed analyses of the social, economic, and cultural policies of the Ceaușescu regime. He also facilitated the publication of the writings of Romanian dissidents in the pages of these two periodicals (Stoica 2016). He worked closely with several prominent representatives of the Romanian exile community in France, notably Monica Lovinescu, Virgil Ierunca, Dumitru Ţepeneag, Eugène and Marie-France Ionesco, Maria Brătianu, Sanda Stolojan, Constantin Cesianu, Matei Cazacu, etc., and also managed to attract significant support for the Romanian cause from a number of French intellectuals concerned with the region, including Catherine Durandin, Claude Karnoouh, and Anne Planche. Mihnea Berindei also got involved and participated directly in protest actions against the Ceaușescu regime. These included demonstrations in front of the Romanian Embassy in France, collecting signatures in support of dissidents persecuted by the communist authorities, gathering information about the opposition in Romania, and raising the awareness of the Western public about the fate of those who dared to protest against Ceaușescu and his policies. His activity was closely monitored by the Securitate. He even received death threats from an organisation called “The Sons of Avram Iancu” (Fiii lui Avram Iancu), which was one of the covert agencies of the Romanian secret police abroad. After 1989, Mihnea Berindei became enthusiastically involved in the efforts to democratise Romania and to report the abuses of the neo-communist regime in Bucharest. He made an essential contribution to the birth of civil society in post-1989 Romania, mainly as a co-founder of the Group for Social Dialogue (GDS) and the weekly paper Revista 22. Although he had never formally belonged to a political party, he was involved in constructing the political project of the Civic Alliance Party (PAC), which he saw as a democratic alternative both to the National Salvation Front and its successor parties and to the traditional “historical” parties re-founded after 1989. Berindei also worked tirelessly for the democratic consolidation of other societies in the region after 1990, especially in the case of the Republic of Moldova, Bulgaria, Kosovo, etc., using his extensive connections in French and European political circles for this purpose. Mihnea Berindei, however, continued to display a constant interest in the communist period in Romania’s history. Thus, in 2006 he became a member of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, making an important contribution to the drafting of its Final Report. From 2007 until his last years, he was involved, together with Armand Goşu and Dorin Dobrincu, in working on a collection of documents originating from the highest echelons of the Romanian party-state, which was published in several volumes under the heading The History of Communism in Romania. These volumes represent an essential contribution to understanding the functioning of the communist regime. The current collection reflects the variety of its creator’s interests and concerns, emphasising Mihnea Berindei’s civic and political engagement in exile, especially during the period 1977–1989. These activities mostly left his academic preoccupations in the field of Ottoman studies in the background, although he was planning to focus on them again toward the end of his life. His friends and collaborators (especially Monica Lovinescu) often noticed his altruism and his absolutely disinterested and sincere involvement in the activities of the Romanian exile community. He was attacked in the early 2000s by certain individuals and circles close to the former Securitate, being accused of collaborating with the Romanian secret services (a charge which was never substantiated). However, Mihnea Berindei remains an example of moral fortitude and constant civic engagement, qualities which were rarely to be found even among some opponents of the Ceaușescu regime. His political beliefs, which drew him closer to the left-liberal spectrum, remained constant both before and after 1989. In this sense, Mihnea Berindei represents a remarkable and impressive figure of the Romanian exile community in France and of the democratic opposition to the Romanian communist regime.
-
Lokalizacja:
- Paris, France
Horia Bernea (b. 14 September 1938, Bucharest – d. 4 December 2000, Paris) was one of the most well-known Romanian painters of the second half of the twentieth century. After being twice refused admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest, he turned towards various other disciplines, declaring in order to be admitted that his father, the sociologist Ernest Bernea, who was a political prisoner, was in fact dead. He prolonged his studies in order to avoid the military service that was compulsory in the communist period, and studied mathematics and physics at the University of Bucharest (1957–1958), and then at the Technical School of Architecture (1959–1962) and the Drawing Section of the Pedagogical Institute (1962–1965). Horia Bernea was a representative of the so-called Poiana Mărului school, named after the isolated mountain village where a number of painters withdrew in the 1950s and 1960s as a place of refuge away from the control of the censors. It was not a group with a well-defined aesthetic orientation, so much as “an informal and heterogeneous group of artists, with a fluctuating composition, who had shared preoccupations and affinities” (Popica 2013). Later, from 1985, Horia Bernea was a member of the Prolog group, along with de Constantin Flondor, Paul Gherasim, Horia Paștina, Cristian Paraschiv, and Mihai Sârbulescu.
According to Andrei Pleşu, Horia Bernea achieved in his painting “a sort of earthly paradise, in which the voices of the West and of Byzantium interpenetrate.” According to his own testimony, his return to the values of Eastern Christianity was not incompatible with the avant-garde, but an experiment that combined tradition with modernity in the specific context of the Ceauşescu dictatorship. “It was more a matter of re-sacralising the act of making than of bringing religious paraphernalia into painting. This began to change a little at the point when Ceauşescu began to demolish, when atheism began to manifest itself so strongly, as it still manifests itself. And I felt the need to bear witness through faith, church towers, the cross, the processional banner, iconostases, subjects that were almost untreated in painting, precisely out of the desire to manifest Orthodoxy in a direct way.”
In the course of his career, Horia Bernea took part in many solo and group exhibitions, both national and international, and received numerous prestigious awards in his field. After the fall of communism, he was for almost a decade the director of the Museum of the Romanian Peasant (Muzeul Țăranului Român – MŢR) in Bucharest. During his time as director, he managed to bring about a spectacular and beneficial metamorphosis of the institution, which had taken over the building of the former Museum of the Romanian Communist Party. “I am dominated by a strong belief in the values of peasant art, in its validity, and by respect for those people who were unable to defend themselves,” Horia Bernea confessed. Following its transformation according to Horia Bernea’s vision, the Museum was accorded in 1996 the distinction of European Museum of the Year. “When I stated that the Museum was subversive, I had in mind a subversion of the Christian type, one that makes you feel and believe that the world is good by virtue of its purpose, beautiful by virtue of its creation, complex by virtue of its life, and spiritual by virtue of its materiality,” reflected Horia Bernea, speaking of the metamorphosis that he achieved at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant.
-
Lokalizacja:
- Bucharest, Romania
Sándor Bernáth(y) was a painter, graphic designer, musician, founding member of the Bizottság (Committee) band, and member of the Vajda Lajos Studio. From 1975, he was an active participant of the avant-garde art scene. While he started his career as an autodidact painter, he was also tied to the underground music life from its very beginning: he designed street posters and book and record covers. For example, he was the one who designed the covers for ős-Bikini (ancient Bikini). From 1977, he was a member of the Leninvárosi Kísérleti Műhely (Leninváros Experimental Workshop), and in 1978, he joined Fölöspéldány csoport (Excess group). His first exhibition took place in 1981, at the Studio of the Young Artists’ Association. His paintings feature photographs published in various newspapers, enlarged, reinterpreted, and full of political and social criticism.
In 1980, András Wahorn, István ef Zámbó, and László feLugossy formed the band A.E. Bizottság (Committee), with Bernáth(y) as guitarist. During the initial period he was the one who organized many of the concerts, since he was the one with a telephone and an apartment in Pest, and they often built the equipment that was hard or impossible to acquire. While Bizottság became legendary over time, Bernáth(y) does not like to dwell on the past. As he put it in a 1997 interview: “I like to pay attention to the time I live in, I am interested in what I am doing right now. I do not even understand from where young people hear about Bizottság, and why they are interested in it.” At the time he was against re-releasing the two records as well. As he sees it, there were too many compromises: only a small portion of their repertoire was released, and even that was heavily censored. Meanwhile, Bizottság was more of a “a joke-dadaist artist band,” so their lyrics were not essentially political. Nonetheless, the process meant additional police reports, summons, and hearings. Due to their disagreement over the upcoming albums, after a concert where Bernáth(y) was deliberately playing on a untuned guitar and nobody mentioned a thing, he left the band.
Bernáth(y) was planning to give up his career as a musician altogether, but fate had other plans: shortly after he left Bizottság, he played in the bands Dr. Újhalnal, Matuska Silver Sound, and Szkárosi & Konnektor RT. While Matuska, launched in the middle of the ’80s, was not a particularly popular band, it was very important for Bernáth(y): with two of his friends, they started to make “machine music.” He was always interested in technology, and when he was a kid, he wanted to be mechanic, repairing and making radios. However, neither the public nor the authorities appreciated the music made with computers: for instance, one of the newspapers, Esti Hírlap (Evening Paper), wrote about it as an inhuman and antisocial phenomenon better avoided.
After the transition, Bernáth(y) had an important role in the development of Hungarian electronic music, and as such, he is one of the founding fathers of techno in Hungary. In the ’90s, he was the one who organized a “techno-tent,” Love Barricade, at the Sziget Festival. In 1994, he started a techno live act formation with his son, Zsiga, under the name Bernathy & Son, which is regarded as the first electronic live act in Hungary. They were active up until Bernáth(y)’s death in 2012, and performed at a number of Hungarian and foreign events. He also established the music club Supersonic, and later Vörös Yuk & Kék Yuk (Red Hole and Blue Hole). Around that time, he was the editor and art director of the art magazine Új Hölgyfutár (New Women’s Courier), and in the ’90s, he and his son were producing the art magazine Gépszava (The Machine’s Voice), focusing on techno culture. He also regularly appeared in documentaries about the topic, such as “Az egyén diadala” (The triumph of the individual) by Zsolt Füstös and “Patrik népe” (Patrick’s people) by Gábor Zsigmond Papp. In 2011, he has awarded the Mihály Munkácsy Prize.After the 1989 revolution, she got a compensatory pension granted to formerly dislocated citizens, and in the 1990s she established the Bethlen Foundation to support disabled people. Following the family tradition, she used her experience and financial resources to help those who suffer from physical disabilities. The foundation also operated a bookbinding workshop in Târgu Mureș. The Countess Bethlen reckons among the property of the foundation all the objects belonging to the collection.
-
Lokalizacja:
- Târgu Mureș, Romania
In 1938, he became a notary at the Budapest Court of Justice. It was at this time that he came into contact with the Márciusi Front (“March Front”), a left-wing association of so-called népi (populist) writers and university students. He became a member of the Philosophical Society, giving his inaugural lecture on “Ethics and Criminal Law,” and in 1940 he began giving lectures at the University of Szeged. From 1942 to 1944 he wrote a lengthy essay “On European Balance and Peace.” It was later influential, but initially unpublished. In this essay, he analyzed post-World War I social development in Europe. In 1944, following the German occupation of Hungary, he drew up “Plans for a Peace Proposal,” which was intended to serve as a framework for postwar domestic arrangements and for the redress of social disharmony. In 1944 and 1945, he handed out exemption papers to hundreds of Jews and other persecuted individuals, and for this he was arrested and forcibly suspended from his post. When he was released, he had to go into hiding.
In 1945, Ferenc Erdei, the Minister of the Interior in the interim national government (himself a sociologist and a peasant-populist [népi] writer), appointed Bibó as head of the ministry’s administration department. In this role, Bibó helped draft the new electoral law, and he wrote a memoir criticizing the expulsion of members of the German-speaking minority from Hungary. In 1946, he was appointed professor of political science at the University of Szeged, and a year later he became an administrator for the Institute for Eastern European Studies. Meanwhile, he published a series of incisive essays on the problems faced in Hungarian and East Central European societies. His essays “A magyar demokrácia válsága” ( “The Crisis of Hungarian Democracy”; 1945) and “Zsidókérdés Magyarországon 1944 után” ( “The Jewish Question in Hungary since 1944”; 1948) and his treatise A kelet-európai kisállamok nyomorúsága ( “The Misery of Small Eastern European States”; 1946) were recognized as cornerstones of modern Hungarian political thinking by the dissident intellectual movements of the 1980s. The communist regime, however, disapproved of Bibó’s ideas and activities, and in 1950, he was asked to retire. In 1951, he took up an independent position as librarian at the Eötvös Loránd University Library in Budapest.
During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Bibó acted as the Minister of State for Imre Nagy’s second government. When the Soviets invaded on November 4 and then crushed the revolution, he was the last minister left at his post in the Hungarian parliament building. Rather than flee, he remained in the building for another two days and wrote his famous proclamation, “For Freedom and Truth,” as he awaited arrest. Later, he also prepared a proposal for “a compromise to solve the Hungarian question,” which he intended to pass to the Soviet leaders through the mediation services of the Indian embassy and President Nehru. When he was arrested in May 1957, he was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment, but he was released in 1963 according to an amnesty. However, hundreds of his fellow-prisoners, mostly young 1956-ers, students, and workers sentenced to life in prison were not released under the allegedly “general” amnesty under the pretext that they were simple criminals and not political prisoners. For many years, Bibó tried to help them regain their liberty by sending letters of complaint to the High Court of Hungary and Party-Secretary János Kádár himself, and even by trying to persuade, through clandestine channels, his Western contacts to launch public solidarity campaigns for the liberation of revolutionaries who were still being held in prison. He put himself at great personal risk by doing this, but not with much success: most of the people in question were released no earlier than the early 1970s.
After having spent six years in prison, Bibó took a job in the Library of the Central Office of Statistics, and he lived a quiet family life. He remained under the close watch of the communist secret police for the rest of his life, and he was not permitted to publish his works in Hungary. However, a few years before he died, he managed finally to publish a book in England “illegally,” i.e. without the approval of the Hungarian censors: The Paralysis of International Institutions and the Remedies. The book was published by Harvester Press, Hassocks in 1976. Bibó was not permitted to travel to the West, though the University of Geneva, of which Bibó as a student was a grantee, offered him a research fellowship; his request for a passport was repeatedly rejected according to the standard formula: “Your travel would offend the public interests of the Hungarian People’s Republic.”
In the last years of his life, Bibó took a certain satisfaction in seeing that his earlier political studies were becoming more and more popular among some young historians and dissident intellectuals in Hungary. His friends and followers intended to publish a book in celebration of his 70th birthday. Preparations were well underway when, in May 1979, Bibó died of a heart attack, six weeks after his wife died.
-
Lokalizacja:
- Budapest, Hungary
Billy Graham (1918–2018) was an American evangelist and a prominent evangelical Christian figure. After graduating from Sharon High School (1936), he attended Bob Jones College. In 1937, Graham began pursuing studies at the Florida Bible Institute in Temple Terrace. In 1939, he was ordained by a group of Southern Baptist clergyman at Palatka. In 1943, Graham graduated from Wheaton College with a degree in anthropology. From 1943 to 1944, he served as pastor of the First Baptist Church in Western Springs. From 1948 to 1952, he was the president of Northwestern Bible College in Minneapolis. He organized many revival meetings in Los Angeles in 1949, and he became an internationally known preacher. From 1947 to 2005, he led more than 400 missions in 185 countries on six continents. In 1950, Graham founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in Minneapolis. He was a spiritual advisor to many US presidents. He was a close friend to Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon. He repudiated racial segregation, and he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to preach jointly at a revival in New York in 1957. He retired in 2005.
-
Lokalizacja:
- Buncombe County, Montreat, United States of America
- Charlotte, United States of America
- New Port Richey, United States of America
- Wheaton, United States of America
Painter. Studied at the University of Fine Arts, in Géza Fónyi’s class (1959-1965). Later, taught at the Secondary School of Visual Arts (1966-1984). In the early years of his career, he painted portraits, but he later rejected these pictures.
Around the end of the 1960s, he came under the influence of existentialist philosophy. In the 1970s, he was interested in French structuralism. In his art, this led him first to paint hyperrealist pictures and later to make conceptually motivated paintings.
In the middle of the 1970, orienting himself toward the underground scene, he gave up painting and turned toward the medium of photography. He became concerned with the picture as object and role. He was interested in three subjects: the situation of the picture (its relationship to the wall, the frame and, to viewer), the relationship between image and text, and the portrait.
He performed his famous lecture at the Rabinec sttudio at the beginning of the 1980s (Who is the victim? Who is the culprit? and What is to be done?), in which he declared that “avantgarde is dead,” and “we can rethink a lot of things.”
He started to paint again and integrated into the trend of New Painting, framed by “new sensitivity” theoretized and managed by Lóránd Hegyi. He painted gesture-based landscapes at first and then large-scale ellipses, positioned on divided panels.
At the end of the 1990s, he returned to realist painting. In these new pictures, he reflected on the “vital, communicative, amazingly rich, and very problematic photo-based world of images” (amateur, press, commercial, video, television, etc.).His works are featured in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, MUMOK, Vienna, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Neue Galerie, Linz, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Kiscelli Museum and the Hungarian National Gallery.
-
Lokalizacja:
- Budapest, Hungary
Marianne Birthler studied Economics with a focus on International Commerce, later working in the foreign trade sector in the GDR, while also engaging with ecclesiastical working groups. In 1976, she began training as a catechist and community assistant. During the 1980s, she worked actively with children and youth. She joined the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights and was among the founding members of the Solidary Church working group. She sat as a representative of the Bündnis 90 political party in the final People’s Assembly of the GDR. In Brandenburg, she held a position as the temporary head of the Ministry for Youth, Family and Sport. From 2000 until 2011 she was the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic.
-
Lokalizacja:
- Berlin, Germany
Alenka Bizjak is a Slovenian environmental activist, a lawyer by training, who was born in Maribor in 1937, to the parents who emigrated from Trieste to Maribor after the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. Upon graduating from secondary school in Nova Gorica, Bizjak worked at the Yugoslav Railways Directorate in Ljubljana (1958-1962), the Organization of Clubs of the United Nations in Slovenia (1962-1968), Institute of International Law and International Relations of the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana (1968-1972) and the administration of the School of the Medicine of the University of Ljubljana (1972-1990). In 1990 and 1991 she was a consultant in the Office of the Slovenian Deputy Prime Minister, Leo Šešerko, who was responsible for environmental protection and regional development.
Bizjak was active among Slovenian grass roots activists that established the Association of Environmental Protection of Slovenia in 1971, and she was the Association's secretary between March 1982 and December 1984 as well. Under the Association’s aegis, intellectuals of various professional backgrounds collaborated, while her role was writing press releases, preparing materials and writing articles. All of those activities earned her reputation and label by government as "someone who is blocking progress and development."
Bizjak's task was to draw the Slovenian public’s attention to environmental issues in Slovenia and Yugoslavia. The cases of the River Krupa in the Bela Krajina Region (1985), and then the Rivers Reka, Koritnica, Kamniška Bistrica and Krka should be mentioned. In all major cases, the common denominator was the plan to build hydroelectric power stations even in national parks (the Rivers Soča, Idrijca, Sava Dolinka) or on highly polluted rivers (Mura) or at the intermittent Lake Cerknica, and last but not least the construction of the Vršič and Triglav cableways. In the 1980s, she even participated in opposition to the use of electricity from the Krško Nuclear Power Plant due to the unresolved issue of nuclear waste.
Bizjak, together with her sympathizers, established the Green Party of Slovenia in 1989. In the first democratic elections in Slovenia in April 1990, the party won seats in the Slovenian Parliament, and afterward the party became part of the new Slovenian government led by Lojze Peterle. Despite its success, the party was torn apart due to infighting, and thus lost support and members, including Alenka Bizjak.
Following the formal introduction of democracy, Bizjak continued her environmental activism, warning the Slovenian public of the negative effects of the construction of golf courses on arable land, and the issue of illegal construction, even in protected areas. Since 2008, she has been active in the civil initiative Tržnice ne damo (We’re Not Giving Up Marketplaces), an initiative that opposes the construction of garages in the city centre of Ljubljana, and also opposes the support of the Slovenian government in setting up Magna Steyr, a paint shop at Dravsko polje near Maribor.
-
Lokalizacja:
- Ljubljana , Slovenia
- Maribor, Slovenia 2000
Ana Blandiana (b. 25 March 1942, Timișoara) is the literary pseudonym of Otilia Valeria Rusan (née Coman), well known as a poet, public intellectual, and president of the Civic Academy Foundation – indeed the personality from whom the image of this institution is practically inseparable. She is one of the personalities who, due to the experience of the family from which she comes, has campaigned actively in postcommunism both for the recovery of the memory of the victims of communism and for the punishment of those guilty of crimes committed under the former communist regime. Immediately after the installation of communism in Romania, her father, the priest Gheorge Coman, was arrested as an “enemy of the people” and subjected to a long period of detention, which he only survived for a short time after his release in 1964, when there was an amnesty for all political prisoners. The traumatic moment of her father’s arrest is recalled by Ana Blandiana for the television channel Digi24 as follows: “I was in the first grade, and I was alone with my father at home, because my mother and my sister were away, and a team came and searched the house and after that they arrested my father… Someone from outside was called to be present at the search – it was a form of hypocrisy to make everything as legal as could be. And one of the men who had come said: ‘I have to go and call a witness,’ and he went out, went away… he came back two minutes later and said he couldn’t open the gate… and my father went out with him to show him, and I didn’t have the courage to stay alone in the house with the others so I went with them to the gate.”
Ana Blandiana took her literary pseudonym from the name of her mother’s native village, in the belief that in this way she could bypass the chicanes of communist censorship. Despite this precaution, her right of signature as an author was withdrawn in three different periods: 1959–1964, 1985, and 1988–1989. In the first period of interdiction, the official motive for the decision of the communist authorities was that she was a “daughter of a political prisoner.” In 1985, the withdrawal of her right to publish was due to a poem that had appeared in the student literary magazine Amfiteatru. Entitled “Totul” (Everything), the poem consisted of a list of ordinary things connected to everyday life, such as: “leaves, words, tears / matchboxes, cats,” alongside things that reminded everyone of penury, such as “trams sometimes, queues for flour,” or of propaganda and the personality cult, such as “little flags, well-known portraits,” which were typical of the period of Nicolae Ceauşescu. It is said that it was the reference to “the boys on Victory Way,” in which all readers could recognise the Securitate officers guarding Ceauşescu’s daily route, that attracted the interdiction. This poem and the one entitled “Eu cred” (I believe), in which Blandiana speaks of the Romanians as a “vegetable people,” incapable of revolting, circulated in hand-written copies and became pieces of Romanian samizdat. The final interdiction, in 1988–1989, was the result of the publication of a parody of Ceauşescu’s personality cult in the form of a poem for children. Inspired by her own tomcat, Arpagic (Chive), the poem of the same name became a symbol of literature with undertones, such as was practised by many Romanian writers who wanted to test the limits of censorship. The tomcat Arpagic was described in Blandiana’s poem as a superstar who is acclaimed by everyone, greeted with the traditional bread and salt and with grand pomp wherever he goes, while all those around him obey his orders. This imaginary portrait reminded everyone of scenes familiar from newspapers or television, presenting Ceauşescu’s working visits all over the country, when people vied with one another to obey him and to follow his famous indications, even if these were pointless or even harmful. As a consequence of the publication of this poem in the volume Întîmplări de pe strada mea (Happenings on my street), during the last two years of communism Blandiana was forbidden to publish and her books were removed from libraries. The journal Index on Censorship dedicated a substantial article to her, starting from this episode of interdiction as a writer.
As for what the communist period represented in the history of Romania, of Europe, and of the world, Ana Blandiana remains faithful to the idea that the preservation of the memory of the victims of these undemocratic regimes is a fundamental duty of each society, and to the principle that the victims of communism and fascism deserve equal treatment on the part of those who manage the memory of the twentieth century: “We are turning defeated from the greatest illusion in history. Communism was that illusion, and it broke countless lives. I do not mean that it was an ‘illusion’ in the sense that it wasn’t properly put into practice, but in the sense that it couldn’t be put into practice. And every time the attempt was made to put it into practice, it produced monstrous, and often literally murderous results. One of the cynical conclusions that communism has left behind it is that people cannot be made happy against their will, by proposing and imposing on them a particular sort of happiness, the communist sort. You cannot impose mass happiness – when you try such a thing, as a rule, what results is the opposite to your initial intention. What results is something inhuman, antihuman. As I see it, the only correct way to regard communism and the truth of it is to do so from the point of view of the victims of communism. Because we must not forget: communism, together with Nazism, created the most monstrous century in the history of humanity. Not that there weren’t precedents – the French Revolution, for example, or the Inquisition. For the first time in the history of humankind, with communism and Nazism came mass killing. And the mass killing was in the name of ideas that promised supreme happiness in the name of a highly evolved ‘new humanity.’ I believe that it is decent, proper, desirable not to make a new humanity but to make the existing humanity love and not hate. And not kill. This history – which both communism and Nazism wrote in blood – was based on hatred. Class hatred or racial hatred. Red-brown.” Thus Ana Blandiana concludes her comparison of the two totalitarian systems of the twentieth century.
Ana Blandiana received the Herder Prize in 1982, thus becoming the youngest winner of this important distinction. Indeed, both as a writer and as a leader of opinion and an activist for civic rights, Ana Blandiana has received many awards, both national and international. She is also doctor honoris causa of numerous universities in Romania and an honorary citizen of the cities of Timişoara, Botoşani, Sighetu Marmaţiei, and Oradea. In 1990, she re-established PEN Club Romania, whose president she was until 2004; in this capacity, she participated in all the major conferences and congresses of international PEN and organised four regional conferences in Romania (1995, 1998, 2000, and 2001). Since 2004, she has been honorary president of this institution. In 2016, in Gdansk, she received the distinction “European Poet of Freedom.” She is the author of more than twenty public lectures, delivered both in Romania and abroad, and of over sixty volumes translated into more than twenty-five languages. She has participated in over forty-five international literary festivals in fifteen countries, and has given public readings in over twenty countries. She is a member of the European Poetry Academy and the World Poetry Academy (under the aegis of UNESCO). Her rich body of work enjoys a very generous reception, both at the level of specialised critics and among the general reading public. Since 2012, the Ana Blandiana National Festival of Creation and Interpretation for Pupils has been held annually in Brăila. In 2016, she became a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy. At the present moment, Ana Blandiana is one of the best-loved and most respected public figures in Romania.
She is a co-founder of the non-governmental organisation Civic Alliance, which she ran as president from 1991 to 2001, and has been president of the Civic Academy Foundation since its foundation in 1994. She is also the founding director of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance. Within this institution, she has carried out sustained research activity, and she played a decisive role in the creation of several of the rooms that make up the Sighet Museum ensemble: Room 42 (“Masters and Works Behind Bars”); Room 43 (“Repression Against Literature”); Room 50 (“The Piteşti Phenomenon”); Room 51 (“Poetry in Prison”); Room 77 (“Opponents and Dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s”); Room 91 (“Ethnic and Religious Repression”). Ana Blandiana is also the author of numerous studies, prefaces, and postfaces published in volumes published under the aegis of the Civic Academy Foundation. She has been actively involved in the Sighet Summer School, as a participant in discussion panels, as a speaker, and through her activity of fundraising and organisation together with the Civic Academy Foundation teams. She has participated and continues to participate in dozens of meetings with pupils and teachers in schools in Bucharest and all over the country, as part of activities to promote the Sighet Memorial. She promotes the image and the ideas of this institution through her participation in numerous public debates both in Romania and abroad, and for to the same end she has given hundreds of interviews in the Romanian and foreign press. Ana Blandiana is the author of one of the most famous formulations regarding how we should justly relate to the communist period: “When justice does not succeed in being a form of memory, memory alone may be a form of justice.” This formulation may be seen, very visibly, in several places, including the Sighet Memorial.
-
Lokalizacja:
- Bucharest, Romania