COURAGE

ryšiai tarp kolekcijų

The Collection of Political Transition, founded and owned by József Marelyin Kiss, contains both private and public documents. Beginning from the year 1985, the collection is unique for its enormous volume and content concerning political organizations and groups as well as the cultural opposition of the late 1980s. The main parts of the collection are documents of the Hungarian opposition parties, documents of urban and rural sociological research, and a library with 3-4,000 books.

The Marian Zulean personal collection is an illustration of the fact that any act of cultural opposition is dependent on the societal context that generates it. It implicitly highlights the fundamental difference between Romania and other communist states in the last years of the period 1980–1989. The more than 400 newspapers, magazines, brochures and books, originating especially from the Soviet Union in the Gorbachev period, epitomise a reformist political discourse that had become relatively official in the rest of the Soviet bloc, but was considered dangerous by the Romanian Securitate.

The collection contains documents of the Masaryk Society, citizens' illegal initiatives, which originated in Brno and Prague in 1988. The society organized events for the return of Masaryk's name to the public space and cultivated the regime of suppressed knowledge and awareness of the philosopher and first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk.

The collection belonging to the Memorial to the Revolution of 16–22 December 1989 in Timişoara brings a distinct and quite remarkable civic and ethical dimension to the institutionalization of the memory of the recent past of Romania. The monuments, exhibition spaces, objects, documents, photographs, and personal testimonies included in this collection illustrate the authenticity of the popular revolt that began in the city of Timișoara. To be more precise, the collection illustrates both the huge scale of the armed repression in those days and the extraordinary citizen resistance that the authorities were faced with in this key city for the fall of communism in Romania. The Memorial also includes a research centre and a publishing house, ensuring that there is constant scholarly and editorial activity aimed at developing the potential of the historical resource that it administers.

The Memory of Nations is an extensive online collection of the memories of witnesses, which is being developed throughout Europe by individuals, organizations, schools and institutions. It preserves and makes available the collections of memories of witnesses who have agreed that their testimony should serve to explore modern history and be publicly accessible. The collection includes testimonies of communism resistance, holocaust survival, artists of alternative culture and underground and many others.