COURAGE

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“Enkel and other Folk - Upheaval in the 70”  (the Enkel is a reference to the group “Karl’s Enkel” - Karl’s Grandsons) is so far the last of the countless exhibitions of the Association Song and Social Movements. Before that only few people addressed the emergence, expressions and general history of cultural opposition in the GDR. But this exhibition explicitly examines this topic. It traces songwriters, song theatres and folk groups that developed in the mid-1970s, “looked for new paths and tried out what you could and couldn’t do”. It portrays, among others, the groups 'Karl’s Enkel', 'Brigade Feuerstein' (with its songwriter Gerhard Gundermann) and the Dresden song theatre group 'Schicht'.

“The night at the movies with a discussions about the films of Nikša Fulgosi and Luchino Visconti” was held in 2017 on St. Catherine's Island (near Pula) on the subject of the Hollywoodization and commercialization of everyday life. As a part of the thematic evening, two significant films were shown - Luchino Visconti's film Belissima (1952), and A Hundred Beauties per Day (1971) by Nikša Fulgosi.

The imperative of beauty (in women) is an interesting phenomenon of post-war European society. Visconti's film Bellissima is one of the most important achievements of Italian neo-realism. The protagonist is a woman from a modest Roman working family who is obsessed with movies, but also with the idea that her little daughter can win in the Most Beautiful Girl in Rome competition and become a movie star. The film shows an unscrupulous struggle for success.

Fulgosi in A Hundred Beauties per Day deals with the Yugoslav ideology, and as in other popular-cultural content, develops a complex attitude toward this phenomenon. The scenes of singing and acting stars who entered the lives of residents through magazines and television shows, helped to create the cult of popular personality in the western style. On the other hand, partly built according to the Italian model, the promotion of modesty was an integral part of the construction of the Yugoslav fashion and the beauty industry. Nevertheless, the contradictions of the Yugoslav system emerge in the beauty contests where socialist morality comes in contrast to the commercial success of the product, in this case feminine beauty.

Romii și regimul comunist din România: Marginalizare, integrare și opoziție (Roma and the communist regime in Romania: Marginalisation, integration, and opposition), which Manuela Marin edited and published in 2017, is based on more than two years of research on Roma people in communist Romania. It comprises over 1,000 pages of documents organised in two volumes. The documents were created by the state authorities, especially by the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, and approach various aspects of the life of the Roma between 1948 and 1989. Besides general topics relating to their social and economic situation, local structures of leadership, and traditions and customs, they also describe the activity of several Roma leaders, such as Nicolae Gheorghe and Ion Cioabă.

The selected documents which also form a great part of the Ad-hoc Collection show how Nicolae Gheorghe became preoccupied with the situation of Roma people, what the results of his researches were, and how with the help of his friend, Ion Cioabă, he lobbied the Romanian authorities to grant the Roma the status of a national minority. The volume also captures the way in which the issue of Roma marginalisation and discrimination in communist Romania brought Nicolae Gheorghe into close relations of collaboration with transnational Roma organisations. Consequently, it underlines how the leaders of these international organisations and renowned Roma activists, put additional pressure on the communist regime to cease its campaign of forced assimilation and to grant Roma people equal rights to those enjoyed by other national groups. Another topic that helped Nicolae Gheorghe and Ion Cioabă to build transnational ties was the compensation that Roma deported during World War II were entitled to receive from West Germany. Thus, Gheorghe, alone or with Cioabă, not only tried to convince the Romanian authorities to officially endorse their actions, but at the same time obtained the invaluable support of some international Roma organisations, which, in their turn, put pressure on West Germany to consider paying compensation to the deported Roma.