According to the testimony of the Aktionsgruppe Banat members, the poem was the collective work of the entire group, which they assumed and published as such (Totok 2001, 22). The text was sent for publication in Romania in 1974, but the censorship prevented it. It was first published two years later in a changed form in the West German cultural magazine Akzente: Zeitschrift für Literatur (No. 6/1976; Totok 2001, 22–23).

The poem uses wordplays to suggest the omnipresence of coercion in the society they lived in and it represent a subtle critique of the state–citizens relation in Ceaușescu’s Romania. The authors played with the meanings of the German word Engagement which in the poem could be understood both as employment and (ideological) commitment. In the second part of the poem, the authors suggest overtly and ironically the coercive character of the state–citizen relation in the society they lived in and the impossibility of the latter modifying this relation either in ideological or in practical terms:

“I’ve been engaged for too long

I don’t want to be engaged anymore

I have also been engaged too long

yes

with you

also with you

I am no longer engaged

I am not engaged either

yes yes, me neither

in vain, who was once engaged

remains forever engaged.”

At the beginning of the 1970s, Ákos Birkás was experimenting with critical, grotesque, “bad painting,” targeting purposefully banal subjects. The theme of his work in the collection is four postcards available at the time in Hungary from English import.

On the pictures one sees plush animal toys in everyday situations (sawing, mountain climbing, gathering in a garden, picnicking). The painter juxtaposed the cards in two rows, thus creating a “picture in picture” situation, distancing the viewer from the “cuteness” of the animal toys and making it possible to compare visual analysis of the image promoted for children’s use.

Ivana Tigridová (1925-2008) was a journalist and human rights activist. She was one of the most distinguished personalities of Czechoslovak exile. In Paris, she founded two organisations supporting prisoners and persecuted opponents of the regime in Czechoslovakia and other countries of the Eastern Bloc.

In 1970, when in New York graffiti just was being born, 18 years old Włodzmierz Fruczek made his first works on the walls of Warsaw. Fruczek was a beginning artist working as a decorator in the Fish Central Office. He regularly crossed the district of Warsaw after the war known as the Wild West, located partially on the ghetto area: ruined, filled with debris, rumored to be a dangerous site of criminality and black economy. The landscape of ruins and dead walls must have a strong impact on the young artist who without any project or idea in a few days painted a set of figures on the walls of the buildings of Żelazna, Grzybowska, and Waliców street. The paintings, made with emulsion paint, depicted outlines of human bodies, sometimes only torsos or limbs. Some of the figures stayed calmly, even holding hands but many of them were outstretched in extreme postures. The painting on the photo, made on the wall on Waliców 14, showed the scene of execution and as the only one of the set had a title: Dance of Death. It was a spontaneous, emotional reaction of the artist on the remains of war and Shoah that he was surrounded by.Tomasz Sikorski took his picture about 1974. In his narrative, the Fruczek’s work is a symbolic beginning of the graffiti in Poland, independent from the American patterns of street art, artistically significant, and closely tied to the local history. For that reason, the photography of the Dance of Death opens the story about the post-war artistic graffiti in Poland.Source:Tomasz Sikorski, Marcin Rutkiewicz, Graffiti w Polsce 1940-2010, Carta Blanca, Warszawa 2011.

The poem Die moritat von den 10 wortarten der traditionellen grammatik (sic!) [The street ballad of the ten parts of speech of the traditional grammar] was written by Gerhard Ortinau and published in 1974 in the literary magazine Neue Literatur in a collage of texts created by the young Romanian-German writers from Aktionsgruppe Banat. The poem is made up of three parts entitled: schaltung (lining up), umschaltung (dealigning), gleichschaltung (bringing into line), which depict through metaphors how the political system worked in Ceaușescu’s Romania. Ortinau used in this poem seemingly absurd statements such as: “a pronoun was arrested” and “the adverb was cut off from the newspaper” to suggest practices such as political repression and censorship. The poem ended with a paraphrase, which represents an irony concerning the Ceaușescu’s dictatorship: “Die sprache c’est moi!” (sic!) [The language c’est moi!]. The non-conformist character of the poem can be seen also from the spelling, which avoided the usual capital letters for nouns, specific to the German language.

The publication of this collage of texts, Neue Literatur, was possible due to the relative liberalisation that took place in Romania during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For a short period of time, cultural institutions enjoyed more autonomy in their relation with the political decision-makers and censorship was less strict. In this context, Gerhardt Csejka, one of the editors of Neue Literatur, had a key role in promoting the texts of Aktionsgruppe Banat and helping them to pass the filter of censorship (Iorgulescu 2006, 419–421). The Securitate noticed the hidden message in this text due to the notes provided by informers from the German speaking literary milieu of the Banat, who gave to the secret police a detailed interpretation of its metaphors and word plays. For example, one informer explained to the Securitate officer in a note of September 1974 that the title of the third part of the poem was an allusion to the so-called Gleichschaltung, the process by which the Nazi regime imposed its control on all areas of German society (ACNSAS, I 210 845, vol. 2, 15 verso).