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, or the 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 that will share us their experience with working with this fascinating archive.
In our second episode, we explore the permeability of the Iron Curtain. Politically, the divide was real. Yet unofficially, ideas, books and people kept finding small cracks to slip through. This paradox, in turn, led György Péteri to argue that, at least from a cultural perspective, the metaphor of the Iron Curtain should be replaced by that of a Nylon Curtain.
In our conversation, we focus on a fascinating story that started in 1978, when the Czech dissident Julius Tomin sent a letter to Oxford, Harvard, Freiburg and the Freie Universität Berlin. Within this text, he described the hardships endured by Czech academics. The response came quickly. Some philosophers responded and decided to travel to Czechoslovakia.
They arrived with the intention to teach philosophy. As they could not lecture within the university premises, scholars moved instead in private apartments. Visiting academics, including Jacques Derrida, held apartment seminars that became not only space of intellectual academy but also the foundation of later dissident networks.
As Bethan Winter argues in our podcast, these seminars became much more than acts of symbolic solidarity. Over time, they contributed to the formation of broader dissident and intellectual networks that connected Eastern European opposition circles with Western academics and institutions. She also emphasizes throughout this case that détente was not only negotiated by diplomats and statesmen, but also enacted from below through personal relationships, educational exchanges, and fragile forms of intellectual cooperation.
Throughout her Visegrad Fellowship at the OSA Archivum in Budapest, she reconstructed this remarkable story. In our podcast, she discusses her archival findings on the apartment seminars, particularly a specific folder on Julius Tomin and Zdena Tominova, where she found documents about their police harassment, articles written in support of them, but also articles written by themselves and published in the West. Other broader topics completed her work: files on Czechoslovak culture, Czechoslovak dissidents, links between Czechoslovakia and the West, which opened broader questions about cultural and intellectual exchanges. Together, these sources illuminate not only the history of the apartment seminars, but also the wider networks through which ideas continued to circulate across Cold War Europe.
Bethan Winter is Assistant Professor in Modern European History at the University of Sussex. Prior to this position, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. Bethan completed her PhD at the University of Oxford. Bethan Winter’s research has shifted from Cold War cultural diplomacy through music to studying underground intellectual networks connecting Western philosophers and Eastern European intellectuals in the 1980s. Her doctoral work examined East German cultural and musical diplomacy, analysing how the German Democratic Republic engaged with countries across the East, West, and Global South through music and artistic exchange.
Adrian Matus led the conversation. Lilit Hakobyan edited the audio file.
