COURAGE

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The volume made up of the records of local presbytery meetings in the period from 1977 to 1983 reflects the difficulties faced by the parish of the Honterus Evangelical community in the restoration of the Black Church. Using the 1977 earthquake as a pretext, Ceaușescu dissolved the Directorate for Historic Monuments (Direcţia Monumentelor Istorice) because it had previously been opposed to demolishing the Enei Church in Bucharest, a historic monument from the eighteenth century (Panaitescu 2012, 224). After the dissolution of this institution, which had been responsible for financing and coordinating the restoration of historic monuments, the restoration of the Black Church was interrupted. Because of the complex restoration works which had been started, the church could no longer be used by the community. The record of the presbytery meeting of 27 January 1979 reflects the discussions of this management forum after it was informed by the High Consistory of the Evangelical Church of Romania that the restoration funds granted by the state had been stopped. At this meeting the presbytery members discussed the strategy that the community should adopt. It was decided to draft reports addressed to the authorities underlining the importance of the Black Church, one of the largest Gothic buildings in South–East Europe. Also, the architect Schuller proposed to send the authorities documentation including photographs of the construction scaffolding around the Black Church in order to emphasise the danger for the city’s population of stopping the works (Black Church Archives and Library, Presbyterium Protokolle 24 /1977–1983, 7).
After state funding was stopped, the curator Otmar Richter initially requested the financial support of the High Consistory, the management forum of the Evangelical Church of Augustan Confession of Romania. Because the church lacked the financial resources to continue the restoration project from internal sources, it resorted to private donations and obtained the support of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland (Federal Republic of Germany). Richter visited the board of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland in the autumn of 1981 and obtained the financial backing to continue the restoration works. The fact that the regime tolerated this initiative can be explained by the importance of economic relations between Romania and the Federal Republic of Germany, but also by the foreign debt crisis which meant the authorities wanted the foreign currency donated by the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland to be spent in Romania and to enter the national budget.
In addition to the records of the meetings of the Honterus parish presbytery, this file also includes historical and technical documents drafted by historians and architects concerning the structure of the building and its evolution in time. These documents were used in making decisions about the technical solutions to implement in the restoration process in the period 1981–2000. The documents of the volume describe one of the key moments in the Black Church restoration process, when the radical change of the Ceaușescu regime’s policy concerning historic heritage endangered the local initiative started in the 1930s, whose purpose was to save one of the most important monuments of the historic heritage of the city and of the community. The fact that the Black Church restoration was successfully resumed illustrates the existence of the grey zone of tolerance which local communities could use to promote their own interests, even when these conflicted with the official communist policies.

Géza Domokos (1928-2007) graduated in Moscow from the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute. After returning to Romania, he served as editor at several journals and newspapers, and in 1961 he became editor-in-chief of the minority department of the Literary Publishing House (Editura pentru Literatură). In 1968–1969 he was deputy editor-in-chief of Előre (Forward), a nationwide Hungarian-language Party newspaper. From 1970 until August 1990 he was the director of the minority publishing house Kriterion. For a time, he was the vice-president of the Writer's Union of Romania, and between 1969 and 1984 he was an alternate member of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party. Géza Domokos was probably the most active Hungarian intellectual in a senior position in those times. After the 1989 revolution, he was among the founders of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, the minority party of which he served as first president until 1993.

The Kriterion publishing house was founded in 1969 in Bucharest with the aim of publishing books in the languages of the minorities in Romania (including translations from world literature) and translations from the literature of minorities into other minority languages and into Romanian. The works were both classic and contemporary. Topics included literature, history, philosophy, and graphic art. For Hungarians in Romania, this publishing house was the most important intellectual workshop outside of the university sphere.

The voluminous Securitate files of Domokos Géza contain a total of ca. 18,000 pages included in 33 volumes of about 500-600 pages each. Four of these volumes contain notes, reports, analyses and other types of documents issued by the Securitate, while the other 29 volumes consist of the minutes of discussions intercepted at his home and workplace, the Kriterion publishing house. These Hungarian-language discussions were translated into Romanian, and they are sometimes presented in a condensed manner and sometimes transcribed verbatim.

In 1988, Vantzeti Vassilev fled to Serbia, from where he moved on to Italy and, eventually, to New York in 1989. During his escape, Vassilev managed to bring out a copy of the manuscript Semenata na straha [The Seeds of Fear]. Another copy of the manuscript remained hidden at home, in the ceiling of his old barn, where he recovered it in 2016. In New York, Vantzeti Vassilev became an author of autobiographic novels. He also finished Semenata na straha [The Seeds of Fear] as a first-person account of the humiliation and impasse of a young scientist under the conditions of a totalitarian regime. The book was published in Sofia in 1991 with the financial support of Open Society Institute and then presented in New York.

A diagram The Stages of the Evolution of Art from 1972 is a graphic extension of the idea which Ludwiński presented two years earlier in the text Art in the Post-art Epoch. Ludwiński often used images and diagrams to better explain his thoughts on history and future of art. As a man of a spoken word, he rarely wrote and rather talked, discussed, and argued in an oral way, helping himself with some notes and sketches. On the other hand, Ludwiński’s drawings are a testimony for his visual imagination. In this case, the evolution of art is presented through overlapping of next rings, analogically to the rings visible in the tree’s section.  

The Stages of the Evolution of Art in a suggestive way show the dependencies and development directions between the main genres in the modern art, as well as design its forthcoming tendencies, through the conceptual and impossible art (thus the streams developed at the turn of the 1960s and the 1970s, all to the phase 0, when art is supposed to disappear in the reality of science, technology, and social life, acting through empathy and over-intellectual understanding).

Diagram is a repository of Zacheta Lower Silesian Fine Arts Association in the Modern Museum Wroclaw and it is presented on the exhibition in two languages: the original (Polish) and in English translation.