COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

On 9 March 1952, a grandiose exhibition was opened about the life of the communist leader, Mátyás Rákosi.
It was organized on his 60^th birthday. The party was held at the Munkásmozgalmi Intézet (Institute of the Labour Movement), in the building that housed the Museum of Ethnography until 2018, and which had previously housed the Supreme Court that sentenced Rákosi to years-long imprisonment in 1937.
The exhibition had two parts: an eight-room presentation of Rákosi’s life, and twenty-five rooms of gifts given to Rákosi. These gifts were extraordinary because they showed the new form of Hungarian folk art, in which folk art symbols were mixed with the symbols of socialism. After the exhibition closed, the objects were not inventoried in the collections of the Museum of Ethnography. The museologist ignored them until the 1960–70s. In 2012, the Museum of Ethnography put the folk-art exhibition of the collection on display under the title Rakosi60@neprajz.hu. Curators worked to ensure that this exhibition presented the original objects in a memorial context to reflect the previous conception; they thought it important to show more interpretations of an exhibition that was surrounded by unspoken rejection.  
Here you can find a list of the exhibited objects: http://rakosi60.blogspot.hu/

The second phase of HSAE collection was much longer: 40 years, from 1953 to 1993. This collection was organized and supervised by Gábor Bodnár, mostly from his home in Garfield, New Jersey. This collection reflected the “second rebirth” of the Hungarian scouting movement worldwide in 15 countries on 4 continents. The central bodies and administration were consolidated and more and more printed materials, bulletins, scouting books, calendars, etc., can be found among the papers.

After the death of Msgr. Augustin Juretić in 1954, his legacy was inherited by his friends, Msgr. Pavao Jesih and Adil Zulfikarpašić. Msgr. Jesih gave his part of the inheritance to the Pontifical Croatian College of St. Jerome in the same year. According to the notes made by Reverend Andrija Lukinović in the General Inventory of the College Archives, the largest part of Msgr. Juretić’s legacy was inherited by Adil Zulfikarpašić and is now in the Bosniak Institute in Sarajevo. This information was also mentioned by Tomislav Jonjić in his article “On the attempt to establish a Croatian Committee in Switzerland in 1943: the diplomatic reports of Josip Milković of Senj,” which was published in Senski zbornik in 2011. However, the Bosniak Institute denies the possession of these materials, so their whereabouts remain unknown.

During 1957, Eginald Schlattner was subject of searches by the Securitate, which confiscated several manuscripts, letters and books. Some of the letters and manuscripts, in particular the story “Gediegenes Erz” (Solid ore), were used by the secret police as evidence of his alleged “subversive” literary activity. The Securitate officers argued that although “Gediegenes Erz” followed the formal rules of realist socialism, its ideological content was “counter-revolutionary” because it described the “mobilisation” of Saxon youth in Transylvania in order to preserve their cultural identity. After his release from prison in 1959, Eginald Schlattner received back the material confiscated by the Securitate, including this story.