COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

Václav Havel (1936-2011) was an important Czech playwright and essayist, a critic of the communist regime, one of the initiators of Charter 77, a founding member of VONS (The Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted), a political prisoner and later president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. The collection consists mainly of materials of his dramatic creation and its dissenting effect.

The Youth Subcultures Ad-hoc Collection at CNSAS comprises documents created or collected by the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, about the emergence and development of Western-inspired subcultures among the members of the younger generation in Romania, subcultures which the communist regime considered harmful for their education and whose influence it thus tried to counteract. This collection illustrates that young people even in an isolated country like Romania in the 1970s and the 1980s still became exposed via Western broadcasting agencies to Western cultural goods, especially to music, which made them adopt alternative life styles and wear provocative outfits in order to build distinctive collective identities. Out of the many young people who attracted the unwanted attention of the Securitate two cases stand out and are featured in this ad-hoc collection: Clubul Regilor Liberi (The Club of the Free Kings) in Brăila and Organizația Tinerilor Liberi (The Organisation of Free Young People) in Bistrița.

The Zagreb Gymnasium private collection consists of memorabilia from the 1985-89 period. The school was then named as the Educational Centre for Languages, and two of its classes, which retained the classical curriculum, were considered a peculiarity. It was highly exceptional at the time, because in the framework of the secondary school reform implemented by Stipe Šuvar in 1975-76, which promoted so-called “directed education,” all gymnasia in Croatia were transformed into some manner of vocational schools with the aim of preparing the students for the labour market. From the communist perspective, the classical education was deemed unnecessary petty bourgeois elitism, which prepared select students for the university and enhanced class inequality.