Attack Against Academic Freedom in the Shadow of Revolutions
It was one of Blinken OSA’s longest, most anxious and difficult years. Everything we created or contributed to, as well as the values and principles we stood for in the past two decades, including first and foremost the promotion and protection of human rights, democracy and rule of law, and respect for human dignity and diversity came under unprecedented attack.
At the end of March, the Hungarian government proposed and eventually passed amendments to the law on higher education. While it seriously curtailed academic freedom for international universities operating in the country, the law made it near to impossible for our mother institution, the Central European University (CEU), to function legally in Budapest. The prescriptions and conditions set forth in it were clearly discriminatory against CEU, and constituted part of a larger government sweep targeting institutions founded by George Soros, and the NGOs funded by them, respectively.
Firmly convinced that its academic freedom was at stake, CEU disagreed with the new law from the outset and voiced its concern on many domestic and international fora. A series of street demonstrations organized by local supporters and an extraordinary solidarity campaign (#istandwithceu) followed, in which over 600 higher education institutions, research centers, individual faculty and students, civil society organizations, and private persons, as well as government agencies and politicians across the globe, expressed their support for CEU. Even so, the future of the university in Budapest remains uncertain.
To demonstrate our belonging, solidarity, support, and exposure we created a bold timeline (#OSAisCEU) of our 22-year history, highlighting Blinken OSA’s most relevant collections, academic events, and teaching and public programs within CEU in the heart of the capital city of Hungary. And we began to actively archive the domestic and foreign electronic media coverage of the crisis.
***
The Archives and Refugees Project remained in the focus of our activities in 2017. The dedicated online collection on Hungarian refugees in the US after the 1956 revolution was complemented with two photo galleries showing both the refugees’ life from arrival in the largest collection and distribution center at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, to their eventual resettlement, and the tireless work of processing 1,600 Hungarian student refugees and obtaining scholarships for 800 of them at one of the 600 American colleges and universities participating in the World University Service carried out by Gary Filerman and his colleagues in 1957. For the first time, we also hosted an internship program of George Mason University, during which an undergraduate student from the US worked on creating a refugee focused, map based, visual catalog for our relevant documentary films from the Film Library and a database of online projects and archival literature dealing with the current global refugee experience.
Blinken OSA’s online presence and backend technological infrastructure improved throughout the year. The records of our library were finally integrated into the CEU Library Catalog, meaning that our reference books on Communism, the Cold War, international human rights and the archival profession, extensive collections of periodicals and small-circulation regional publications, and documentary films became more easily available to a much broader audience. The Archive’s online catalog and digital repository was further enriched with two collections of significant size: several thousand new records were added from the Published Samizdat series, as well as Subject Files and Biographical Files from the Samizdat Archives, and 11,000 new records from the Digital Cold War Collection of Encrypted Telex Messages of the Free Europe Committee. By the end of the year, we finished and launched in-house the beta version of our long-planned Archival Management System (AMS), which finally integrated all stages of the archival work, from accession through creation of archival description to publishing catalogs online into one, easy-to-handle system. Following an internal testing period, AMS will be fully deployed in the spring of 2018.
Our acquisitions came mainly from domestic donors and included digital collections focusing on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and material on the early years of the Hungarian environmental movement. Among them, the historian Béla Nóvé’s unique research collection on Hungarian refugees who joined the French Foreign Legion in 1945-1956, containing interviews, letters, diaries, memoirs, photographs and moving image material from both private and corporate sources, and nearly 50 hours of uncut footage together with the final version of his documentary film Patria nostra: Minor Hungarian Refugees in the French Foreign Legion. We also received raw, unedited film and sound recordings from the filmmaker István Jávor, produced for his documentary films related to the 1956 revolution in Hungary, and the documentation of the sociologist Gábor Vági's research projects on local administration, regional development, social structure of localities, and questions related to the Roma. János Vargha, the founder of the Danube Circle, donated his collection of scientific research material and documents on the political-environmental activism of the organization related to the controversial Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros dams on the Danube.
Despite all difficulties, we managed to broaden our educational activities across CEU, and beyond. In addition to the regular courses, and a few new ones, offered to students in history, law, human rights, sociology and culture heritage, we started our long-due Archives and Evidentiary Practices Specialization, a program providing students with theoretical grounding and practical skills in working and pursuing research in a contemporary and innovative archive. We also participated in CEU’s Open Learning Initiative Program, which aims at giving access to higher education for refugees and asylum seekers in Hungary. We taught four classes in the Weekend Program on tools and methods in archival research, visible thinking and preserving memories via digital storytelling. Beginning with this Academic Year, we launched the Research Data Management consultation service, which is intended to help students develope research data strategies while planning, researching and writing their theses.
Another important new element of our teaching efforts was the state accredited, continuing education program for teachers. Entitled Scopes and Constraints in 20th Century Hungarian History, this free course was geared towards high school teachers of history and ensured the professional exchange of ideas through lectures, panel discussions and source analysis. Through their teachers, we tried to reach out to high school students, too, who increasingly became one of our most pivotal audiences. In the frame of our recently launched Education Outreach Program, we managed to involve over 2,000 K-12 level students in workshops, contests, film screenings and debates that ran in conjunction with our public programs.
Speaking of public programs, 2017 was marked by the centennial of the Great October Socialist (Bolshevik) Revolution, during which Blinken OSA presented a unique program series (What’s Left?) including exhibitions, film programs, an international symposium, public debates, and the Hungarian premiere of a revolutionary theater play. Heiner Müller’s Mauser, a one-act drama on personal historical responsibility and the complex relationship between political goals and tools inspired partly by the 1956 Hungarian uprising, which was banned in the German Democratic Republic in the seventies, was staged by making use of the entire archival space, from the stacks to the second floor gallery, and by involving the audience to form an ad-hoc community of active participants within it. The international symposium entitled Spectrum of Communism aimed at bringing together historians, social scientists, filmmakers, activists and art historians to address the artistic and intellectual legacy of 1917 and dynamics of left-wing political thought and artistic practice in a transnational context.
The symposium, in conjunction with the 14th edition of the Verzio International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, also hosted screenings of thematically relevant films. In addition, many other films were shown in the year-long Shooting the Revolution series, including classics such as Sergei Eisenstein’s October (1928) and Dziga Vertov’s A Sixth Part of the World (1926), as well as Soviet animated propaganda films, or more recent productions like Leninland (2013) by Askold Kurov.
We had several major exhibitions related to the history, heritage and representation of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Symbols of Socialist Art presented a spectrum of interpretations and re-evaluations of communist iconology based on a canonic Hungarian art history dictionary, while Red Africa: Things Fall Apart, produced in international cooperation offered interdisciplinary reflections on African connections to the Soviet Union and related countries. The exhibition entitled Somewhere in Europe: Gaudiopolis, presented several brave and enthusiastic attempts to create children’s republics, smaller, self-governing postwar communities within which just and equal societies could be established.
The What’s Left revolutionary program would have been incomplete had it not involved the most important audience: high school and undergraduate students. Whether in the form of workshops, public debates or film screenings, we managed to invite quite an impressive number of them to express their views and debate the history, meanings and current interpretations of socialist symbols and moral questions related to revolutions, or use their skills in physically building tools and objects used in the most prominent Hungarian children’s republics, Gaudiopolis
***As in previous years, the general public always found Blinken OSA’s doors open. We were delighted to have large groups of visitors during the Night of Museums, when we scheduled special, English- and Hungarian-language guided tours of the Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empires: The Soviet War exhibition, which explored the continuing global consequences of the last major international armed conflict of the Cold War, accompanied by Afghan food and music. During the European Heritage Days, the home of Blinken OSA, the Goldberger House was again open from the basement to the roof. To whip up our outreach efforts within the CEU community, we introduced longer opening hours in the Research Room on every Thursday of the week in the fall, and organized our first ever Ask An Archivist evenings, where professional staff of Blinken OSA assisted researchers by answering questions on research methodology and archival collections.
We marked Human Rights Day by remembering in a lengthy blog post and online gallery the unfortunate closure of what was once Europe’s foremost human rights watchdog, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, in 2007, and by celebrating the 80th birthday of its long-time chairman and the protector of human rights defenders and dissidents under Communism, Karl von Schwarzenberg.
To end on a positive note, we closed this turbulent year by launching a campaign to find the good person of 2017 (#goodperson2017): any inspiring, charitable person who did something good, memorable and made a difference in her/his own smaller or larger community. Despite all odds, making notable local impact remains one of our most important goals.