Challenging Archives is a new series of podcasts jointly organized between Review of Democracy and Blinken Open Society Archives, based in Budapest. We will invite scholars to discuss about their investigation in this archive.
The Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA), is a complex archival institution. On one hand, it is a repository of vast collections that document how power operated across the twentieth century. OSA holds 10,000 linear meters of archival material, 17,000 hours of audiovisual recordings, and 15 TB of digital records, as well as 150,000 photographs, 6000+ documentary film titles and 22,000 library items. Their catalogue is available online.
OSA is not only an archive. It is one of Europe’s leading research centers on the history of the Cold War, state socialism, human rights, and surveillance. The OSA Archivum also provides fellowships for promising researchers that want to investigate the archival funds. Particularly the Visegrad Fellowship supports scholars, engaged artists, journalists, scholars at risk who want to work directly with these materials. Since its start in 2010, the Visegrad Scholarship has been awarded to more than 290 fellows from over 65 countries.
In our series, we will invite the Visegrad Fellows to share their experience with working with this fascinating archive.
In our first episode, we discuss about Hungarian-language theater in socialist Romania with Eszter Szabó-Reznek. Her case offers a unique perspective into how ideology, culture, and bureaucracy intertwined.
In the early years of socialism, theaters met fundamental transformations. In Romania, private and market-based theaters were nationalized between 1945 and 1948. As our guest emphasizes, this had important implications. They transformed into a vast cultural machine, which in theorywas ought to be measured with the same bureaucratic precision as steel production. The case of the Hungarian State Theater of Cluj provides a good glimpse into this new situation. As Eszter Szabó-Reznek mentions,
„ a Hungarian theater in Romania can give a new layer to the theater history in Romania (…) The Hungarian Theater in Cluj is in-between state regarding the central periphery question because it was always a cultural center, an important theater, but not in an actual capital. Through historical changes we can see on the very micro- level what it meant to be a Hungarian theater in Sovietizing Romania.
Contrary to the popular belief, the decisions were not made only top-down. Instead, negotiations between the cultural stakeholders nuance this discussion. Literary secretaries played a crucial role in these moderations, as they played the role of the watchful eye of the Party, but also mitigated the central directives. The figure of Lajos Jordáki, who worked in the Hungarian Theater in Cluj, is a good example in this regard, as he created monthly questionnaires about their work, readings and everyday concerns. In such papers, the personal and critical voices of the actors “surface among the ideological discourse”, as the Visegrad Fellow emphasizes in our podcast.
Eszter Szabó-Reznek argues that archives, such as the OSA, preserve such contradictions. In our podcast, she explains her work with a mosaic of sources that in many cases contradict each other.
” I mostly used the Romanian Subject Files and the Information Items of the Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Liberty Research Institute and some audio interviews from the Lajos Erdélyi [from the Erdélyi Photo Collections and Personal Papers], an archive of a Hungarian photojournalist from Romania that arrived to the OSA recently.”
Each set of documents, from internal reports, literary secretary’s meticulous work journals, local newspaper, and the Radio Free Europe, use their own language. When read together, they reveal a scene far more complex than the official narratives of socialist cultural triumph or a world strictly dominated by censorship.
Working with such diverse sources might create unique challenges. Our guest mentioned that a specific resource was particularly relevant:
”for me, it was really helpful to read the recent special issue of East-Central Europe Journal, which is called Methodologies of Working in Cold War Archives and especially the introduction by Ioana Macrea-Toma and Anca Şincan on working with ideologically opposed sources and combining sources produced by different or opposed truth regimes”.
Eszter Szabó-Reznek is currently an Associate Lecturer at the University of Bucharest. She was a New Europe College Fellow in Bucharest. Her area of expertise is the social and economic history of cultural institutions, with a particular focus on Hungarian and Romanian theater.
Adrian Matus led the conversation, Alina Young edited the audio file.
