Mária Somogyi grew up in Sárbogárd, a rural town to the south of Budapest. She graduated from the local high school in 1954 and studied literature, history, and philosophy at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest (ELTE). She took a teaching position in the city of Székesfehérvár, but she moved to Budapest with her husband, biologist Pál Somogyi, in 1968. She started to work at the Library for Historical Studies (Történeti Könyvtár) at ELTE, and she did work towards a dissertation on the politics of education in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. She never completed her doctorate, however, as she gave birth to their first child and then found a permanent job to help her husband to make a living. Her friend, historian László Márkus, let her know about an open position at the National Széchényi Library (OSZK). In 1973, he joined the exclusive staff of the Closed Stacks Department (Zárt Kiadványok Tára), led by literary historian György Markovits.
Somogyi joined the Party’s branch organization (alapszervezet) at the National Széchényi Library, and as a new member, she was persuaded by the fellow party members to take the position of party secretary. She agreed, even though she admitted in retrospect that she was not a committed communist. She had a leftist inclination, but she did not identify with the ruling Party, and she was aware of the crimes committed by the Party and the lies it told. Criticism of the Party was an everyday experience in the household in which she grew up. As Somogyi recalled, her family listened to the Rajk trial on the radio and discussed the case within the family, and it was clear to at the time that Rajk’s trial was a political show trial. Accordingly, the first book Somogyi read in the Closed Stacks was Béla Szász’s Without Any Compulsion, a prison memoir by an author who was sentenced in the same series of trials as Rajk.
Somogyi’s family was then directly involved in the 1956 revolution. Her father had been elected (against his will) to serve as president of the Revolutionary Council in Sárbogárd, and he was subsequently sentenced to prison, though the sentence was suspended. It was always obvious to her that the official discourse on 1956 was untrue, and the uprising should best be regarded as a revolution, not a counterrevolution. Somogyi developed a good relationship with Miklós Vásárhelyi, one of the most significant figures of the political opposition and a former prisoner himself (because of his involvement in the revolution). She had regular discussions about 1956 with Vásárhelyi which were also formative for her. But Somogyi also learned to see the drawbacks to the revolution. In Sárbogárd, there was a Russian village in the neighborhood where people who were stationed at the military headquarters lived, and she witnessed that it was not safe for innocent Russian citizens during the uprising.
All in all, her personal experiences prompted her gradually to develop a very critical approach to all political movements or parties, but in the 1970s, she still clung to the hope that she could do more by taking an active role within the Party. Accordingly, she participated in discussions of professional issues at Party branch meetings, which was against the rules. She resigned as a party secretary in spring 1988, when Zoltán Bíró and three other prominent intellectuals were expelled from the Party, and since Bíró was an employee of the National Széchényi Library, the higher Party officials wanted Somogyi to lead the proceedings as the party secretary at Bíró’s workplace. She refused, and she gave up her position.
Somogyi began to play a key role in the late 1970s in introducing the practice of collecting samizdat. This initiative was tolerated by the directorate of the Library and the political police. As Somogyi revealed, she was never approached by the secret police to report to them, and her name does not appear in the reports, as she discovered when the relevant archives were opened. She remembered, however, that Markovits regularly had to consult with officers of the political police. When Markovits retired in 1983, Somogyi became the head of the Closed Stacks Department, and she gradually rose in the institutional hierarchy, ending up as a vice-director of the National Széchényi Library. Since 1982, the collection of samizdat became semi-official, since she acquired the materials using monies from the Library budget, and this required administration. She managed to build up arguably the largest samizdat collection in Hungary, comparable to the one located in the Petőfi Literary Museum.
Somogyi also made considerable efforts to bring Hungarian émigré collections to the home country. She spent a great deal of time abroad with stipends in the 1980s, and also because her husband took a position in Cambridge and she often visited England for family reasons. Her greatest catch were the papers of the Hungarian National Council in New York, but she brought home several personal collections as well, including the papers and library of émigré diplomat Mihály Hőgye, whose library ended up in the Ráday Library in Budapest. Somogyi also assisted in cataloging the papers of prominent émigré politician Ferenc Nagy at the Columbia University Archives. Other personal papers held in the National Széchényi Library include writings by literary critic Gyula Schöpflin, poet György Gömöri, and journalist Béla Szász. Somogyi is currently retired.-
Lokalizacja:
- Budapest, Hungary
Ülo Sooster was an Estonian artist. He began to study at the Pallas Higher Art School in 1943 during the German occupation. Soon afterwards, his call-up to the army interrupted his studies. He returned a year later, and studied at the National Art Institute of Tartu, where he formed a group of artists, the Tartu Circle. In 1949, some of its members, including Sooster, were arrested and accused of plotting against the state. He was sent to the Dolinka prison camp in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. He was freed in 1956. He met his future wife Lidia in the camp, with whom he moved to Moscow after being set free. He worked there as a freelance artist and book illustrator. Nevertheless, his connections with friends in Estonia remained strong. Sooster influenced strongly the work of the Tartu Circle. His work is Surrealist and abstract, forming an interesting part of Estonian art history.
George Soros (born in Budapest in 1930), an American businessman of Hungarian descent, is one of the world’s foremost businessman and philanthropists, having given away over $12 billion to date. His funding has supported individuals and organizations across the globe fighting for freedom of expression, transparency, accountable government, and societies which promote justice and equality.
His efforts have often focused on those who face discrimination purely for who they are. He has supported groups representing Europe’s Roma and others who have been pushed to the margins of mainstream society, such as drug users, sex workers, and LGBTI people.
Soros experienced intolerance firsthand. Born in Hungary in 1930, he lived through the Nazi occupation of 1944–45, which resulted in the murder of over 500,000 Hungarian Jews. His own Jewish family survived by securing false identity papers, concealing their backgrounds, and helping others do the same. Soros later recalled that “instead of submitting to our fate, we resisted an evil force that was much stronger than we were—yet we prevailed. Not only did we survive, but we managed to help others.”
As the communists consolidated power in Hungary after the war, Soros left Budapest in 1947 for London, working part-time as a railway porter and a nightclub waiter to support his studies at the London School of Economics. In 1956, he emigrated to the United States, entering the world of finance and investments, where he made his fortune.
In 1970, he launched his own hedge fund, Soros Fund Management, and went on to become one of the most successful investors in the history of the United States.
Soros used his fortune to create the Open Society Foundations, a network of foundations, partners, and projects in more than 100 countries. Its work and its name reflect the influence on Soros’s thinking of the philosophy of Karl Popper, which Soros first encountered at the London School of Economics. In his book Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper argues that no philosophy or ideology is the final arbiter of truth, and that societies can only flourish when they allow for democratic governance, freedom of expression, and respect for individual rights—an approach at the core of the work at the Open Society Foundations.
Soros began his philanthropy in 1979, giving scholarships to black South Africans under apartheid. In the 1980s, he helped promote the open exchange of ideas in the communist Eastern Bloc by providing photocopiers with which people could make copies of banned texts. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he founded Central European University as a space to foster critical thinking, a concept which at the time was alien to most universities in the former Soviet states. He funded cultural exchanges between Eastern Europe and the West, playing a pivotal role in helping the Soviet society he himself had briefly lived in open itself to the world.
With the Cold War over, he expanded his philanthropy to the United States, Africa, and Asia, supporting a vast array of new efforts to create more accountable, transparent, and democratic societies. He was one of the early prominent voices to criticize the war on drugs as “arguably more harmful than the drug problem itself,” and helped kick-start America’s medical marijuana movement. In the early 2000s, he became a vocal backer of same-sex marriage efforts. Though his causes evolved over time, they continued to harmonize with his ideals of an open society.
Over the years, Soros has supported paralegals and lawyers representing thousands of unlawfully held individuals, underwritten the largest effort in history to integrate Europe’s Roma, and provided school and university fees for thousands of promising students from marginalized groups. And he has reached beyond his own foundation, supporting independent organizations such as Global Witness, the International Crisis Group, the European Council on Foreign Relations, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Now in his 80s, Soros continues to take an active personal interest in the work of Open Society Foundations, traveling widely to support its work and advocating for positive policy changes with world leaders both publicly and privately.
But throughout Soros’s philanthropic career, one thing has remained constant: a commitment to fighting the world’s most intractable problems. He has been known to emphasize the importance of tackling losing causes. Indeed, many of the issues Soros has taken on (and he would be the first to admit this) are the types of issues for which a complete solution might never be found.
“My success in the financial markets has given me a greater degree of independence than most other people,” Soros once wrote. That independence has allowed him to forge his own path towards a world which is more open, more just, and more equitable for all.
Today, Soros is considered one of the 30 wealthiest men in the world, though he has lately donated two-third of his private fortune as down-payments for public humanitarian projects undertaken by philanthropic and human rights institutions worldwide. Although he continues to be passionately attacked by countless nationalistic propagandists and populist governments in several countries, he has remained a devoted defender of democracy, human rights, and social justice.
Soros has written several books, including: The Alchemy of Finance (1987), Soros on Soros (1995), The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered (1998), The Age of Fallibility (2006), The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means (2008), My Philanthropy (2012) and The Tragedy of the European Union (2014).-
Lokalizacja:
- New York, United States
György Soós (or Soosur Georgiosz, his nom de plume) is a painter, graphic designer, and former member of the underground bands Electric Petting and Art Deco, performing industrial music. Soós began studying art in the Secondary School of Visual Arts located at Török Pál Street. Later, he studied typography at the Hungarian University of Arts and Design, where due to the encouragement of his teacher, József Baksa, he also started to pursue painting in addition to his interest in graphic design.
After finishing his studies, he mostly worked in the field of applied art: posters, album covers, set designs, as well as trompe-l'œil and decorative paintings. Audiovisual work—pictures, music, theatre, design—was very important for his development as an artist. It was not only an organic part of the culture of the eighties, but these experimental artworks were a kind of physical manifestation of his “musical drives.” In Electric Petting he was making music together with György Bp. Szabó, his high school mate. Soós created several outstanding posters for underground bands, such as Ági és a Fiúk, ETA, and of course Electric Petting and Art Deco, but also worked on album covers for the state-run (and only) label, Hungaroton. As the art historian Anikó Katona observes, his posters exhibit an ironic play with the monumental qualities and favored themes of totalitarian aesthetics. It also relies on the tradition of Russian constructivism and the propaganda art of the 1920s. He often worked with socialist-realist elements and a strong, red and black color palette. In some of his posters, however, he is equally sarcastic about consumer society.
Today, Soós lives in the Hungarian countryside, where since 2005, he is a member of the artists’ colony of Szolnok. While he is no longer active as a musician, he still made it into the news recently, when it turned out that his one-time girlfriend, Eszter Pleva, under the codename “Krisztina,” was one of the most productive informants for the political police in the new wave scene in the 1980s. Besides his contribution to the underground scene of the eighties, Soós is also a founding member of the Society of Fine Arts in Szolnok (Szolnoki Képzőművészeti Társaság). Many of his works are part of private and public collections in Hungary and abroad, and can be found in the productions and archives of the Vienna Art Week, Berlin Atonal festival, Béla Balázs Studio, Mafilm, and the Magyar Televízió (Hungarian Television).-
Lokalizacja:
- Węgry
Sándor Soós, was born in 1939 to a worker family with four children in Budapest. When the revolution broke in Hungary in the autumn of 1956, he was a 17-year-old apprentice miner in Oroszlány. Together with some fellows, he came to Budapest and soon joined a group of freedom fighters defending the New York Palace, a hotel and press center in downtown Budapest, with a machine gun from the Russian tanks, and only fled to the West with the last group of insurgents one week after the second Soviet invasion.
From the refugee camp of Traiskirchen, Austria, he soon got to Germany, where he worked as a miner, and then to France, where in 1958 he joined the French Foreign Legion. He served under the French tricolor and the red-green banner of the Legion in Algeria, Djibouti, Corsica, and Orange 19 years in total before leaving the army and getting married. He became a French citizen quite early, in 1966, but could visit his native land, Hungary, for the first time only in 1985. As a civilian he took a job in Marseille as a port guard, and for many decades he was also the voluntary president of a residence community in Septémes les Vallons, a suburb of Marseille, where he has been living for a half a century together with his family. Sándor Soós has three adult children, and two grandchildren; together with his Alsatian wife, Marie-Thérese, he often visits Hungary.
He was the one, who, at the request of the researcher, described his 1956 memories in a twenty-page manuscript (the brief selection here is an excerpt), and then discussed his fighting experiences in detail on camera when visiting Budapest with László Eörsi, an expert of the freedom fighter groups of 1956. His testimony was all the more appreciated by the historian Eörsi, since there hardly any archival records left behind by the group that defended the New York Palace in Budapest.-
Lokalizacja:
- Bouches-du-Rhone, Septèmes-les-Vallons, France
Tamás Soós in 1984, along with Zénó “Kelémpájsz” Kiss and Tamás “Atom” Bernáth, started the band Csokonai Vitéz Műhely. Their intention was to tunnel Hungarian and European culture into the international sphere. However, due to the constant hampering of the Hungarian state, this ambitious goal could not be realized. Nevertheless, the band had some successes. Besides concerts, they were editing a samizdat magazine, and they also released a cassette in the German Democratic Republic. Meanwhile, Soós was the one who designed the posters for his band, characterized by striking colors, like pink and neon tones, dynamic graphics and montage. He particularly like to reference pop art and psychedelic rock posters. In 1988, the band received an invitation to perform in the Netherlands, and they stayed there for a few years, operating under the name Uralbeat.
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Lokalizacja:
- Budapest, Hungary
Árpád Spaller (b. Cluj, 22 June 1945) obtained his degree at Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca in 1970, in special education (health pedagogy) and Romanian language and literature. After graduating, in accordance with communist policy he was officially sent at first to Șimleu Silvaniei (Sălaj county), and from there to Popești and then Tileagd (both localities in Bihor county) where he worked as a teacher. Many circumstances contributed to his desire to “escape,” and in July 1987 he and his family moved to Hungary. After a short period in Budapest they moved to Tolna county as special education teachers (his wife having a similar qualification). After a year, mainly because of their children’s studies, they moved back near Budapest. First they lived in Gyál, then in Felsőpalkony, and then they were able to move to Budapest, where they managed to find jobs that suited their qualification. In 1989, as an attempt to offer the “newcomers” as much assistance and information as possible, he founded the Association of Hungarians from Transylvania. After the change of regimes, between 1990 and 1995, he edited under the auspices of the Association the journal entitled Vigyázó (Watchful), a quarterly with a selection of articles published in Hungarian-language newspapers in Transylvania. He is also the author of several articles published in Romanian and Hungarian professional journals(Interview with Árpád Spaller. 2008; Spaller and Spaller 2006).
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Lokalizacja:
- Budapest, Hungary
Karel Srp, a Czech music journalist, was born on 18 January 1937 in Beroun. He studied chemistry at a technical college and worked at the Research Institute of Asbestos Cement between 1959 and 1969. He worked as a manual worker from 1969 and as an editor and journalist at the Panton publishing house between 1972 and 1984. He began publishing articles in music magazines in the 1960s. Karel Srp was the vice-chairperson and then chairperson of the Jazz Section (1981–1983). Originally the Jazz Section was founded as an official branch of the Czech Union of Musicians in 1971. After his promotion to the position of chairperson, the section became more politically active and was also more open to other areas – from music to a more broadly understood definition of culture. From the outset, JS published, for example, “Jazz” (1972), a bulletin for its members, and later books about jazz, rock music, contemporary art, philosophy etc. in a series called “Jazz petit”. JS fell out of favour with the regime who viewed it as an “enemy” institution, and there were attempts to officially dissolve it from the beginning of the 1980s. Srp, who had been one of the section’s most significant members since its foundation, did not avoid being prosecuted (as well as other leading members of JS) and was sentenced to a 16-month jail term in 1986; he was released in January 1988. He attended a meeting of dissidents with François Mitterrand, the president of France, in December 1988. After November 1989, he became a department director at the Ministry of Culture (February – October 1990) and afterwards chairperson of Artfórum – the successor to the dissolved Jazz Section. Karel Srp was registered as a State Security (StB) collaborator between 1976 and 1982. However, the views of his colleagues and other contemporaries on this matter differ. Srp himself claims to have played a “double game”, informing the StB only about unimportant and easily verifiable facts to protect the Jazz Section. However, he was (together with Vladimír Kouřil) one of two members of JS who were sentenced during the trials to a custodial sentence.
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Lokalizacja:
- Praha, Prague, Czech Republic
Sruoga was a famous Lithuanian writer, poet, literary theorist and playwright. In 1914, he began studying literature at St Petersburg University in Russia, and later he continued his studies at Moscow University. In 1918, Sruoga returned to Lithuania. In 1921, he enrolled in the University of Munich, where he received his PhD in 1924 for his doctoral thesis on Lithuanian folklore. After returning to Lithuania, Sruoga taught at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas. He also wrote various articles on literature. From 1930, he began writing dramas. In 1939, he began teaching at Vilnius University.
Sruoga's best-known work is the novel The Forest of the Gods (Dievų miškas), based on his own experiences as a prisoner in Stutthof concentration camp. In 1943, he and forty-seven other Lithuanian intellectuals were arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis. Sruoga was freed by the Red Army, and returned to Soviet Lithuania in 1945. He wrote the novel The Forest of the Gods the same year. The manuscript of the novel was severely criticised by Party officials, and was first published in Soviet Lithuania in 1957.
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Lokalizacja:
- Kaunas , Lithuania
- Vilnius , Lithuania
Henri H. Stahl (b. 1901, Bucharest – d. 9 September 1991, Bucharest) was one of the most respected sociologists in Romania, a member of the so-called Bucharest School of Sociology, which, in the interwar period, developed under the guidance of Dimitrie Gusti the method of monographic study of villages with the help of a multidisciplinary team. At the same time cultural anthropologist, social historian, and rural sociologist, Henri H. Stahl became a key name in each of these fields. He was the son of the writer and historian Henri Stahl, who is known for his creation of an original system of shorthand and for founding the Romanian schools of graphology and palaeontology. The same family of Alsatian-Swiss origin, an unusual background even for pre-war Bucharest, produced another two very well-known intellectuals of the interwar period: the novelist Henriette Yvonne Stahl and the theoretician of social democracy Şerban Voinea, sister and half-brother respectively of Henri H. Stahl. Having graduated from the Faculty of Law in 1921, Stahl began his collaboration with the founder of Romanian sociology, Dimitrie Gusti, in 1930. As part of the famous monographic teams that roamed the villages of Romania, he made his mark as one of Gusti’s closest and most creative collaborators, working as his assistant in the Department of Sociology, Ethics, and Politics of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Bucharest. As a sociologist, he published numerous studies, especially about rural sociology, but also regarding methods of sociological investigation. In 1943, he moved to the newly founded Department of Rural Sociology, before going on to become head of the Department of General Sociology.
In 1948, with the full installation of the communist regime in Romania, the study of sociology was forbidden because the discipline was considered a “bourgeois subject.” Consequently, Henri H. Stahl was forced out of teaching, despite the fact that he was among the few genuine leftist intellectuals in Romania. As he himself put it, his convictions were purely theoretical and not political; in any case, their origins lay in Marxist tendencies, but not in Bolshevism: “I was convinced that historical materialism was an admirable tool of scientific research, but that was all. I wasn’t even particularly enthusiastic as a socialist. Kautskyist, Kautskyist, but I had read Bernstein too, not to mention many others as well. I was very impressed by Proudhon, by the French communist socialists; I wasn’t at all convinced that Marx was right when he said that we would inevitably arrive at a socialist society. And in any case, I wasn’t at all convinced that a socialist society would look like what the Bolsheviks wanted. I couldn’t go along with that business. […] I was up-to-date with all these debates. And I was convinced that the social democrats were right. Kautsky was for me a great teacher. […] Indeed that was one of the faults that was held against me when I was judged and put out of the Communist Party. As a social democrat, I was passed to the communists, and there I was judged and thrown out” (Rostás 2000, 14).
After being purged from the University, he had to work at the Institute of Urbanism in a marginal professional capacity, as a technical draftsman, until 1956, when he was forced to take early retirement. It was only ten years later, in 1966, after the reintroduction of sociology as a section of the Faculty of Philosophy, that he was called back to teaching. Starting from this period, he contributed to the revival of Romanian sociology, within frameworks well coordinated and controlled by the Romanian Communist Party, together with Miron Constantinescu, himself an important figure both in the political circles of the first three decades of Romanian communism and in academic circles. At the same time he had the opportunity to publish extensively on themes regarding rural sociology and research methods and techniques. Particularly deserving of mention is the volume Amintiri şi gânduri din vechea şcoală a monografiilor sociologice (Memories and thoughts from the old school of sociological monographs) (1981). This was initially rejected for publication in the format of a history of Dimitrie Gusti’s sociological school including a contribution by Traian Herseni, Stahl’s former colleague in the teams carrying out monographic studies of villages, an intellectual of the extreme right between the wars and a former political prisoner under communism. After Herseni’s death, however, Stahl managed to publish his contribution to this history in the form of a memoir under the title mentioned above. In view of this example of differentiated treatment of authors, it may be said that in the Ceaușescu period Henri H. Stahl’s pre-communist leftist convictions contributed to his rehabilitation by the regime. In 1969, he was elected a member of the Academy of Social and Political Sciences, and, from 1974 he was a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy. It was only after the fall of communism that he became a full member of that institution, in 1990. He was also a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.
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Lokalizacja:
- Bucharest, Romania