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Hely:
- Praha, Prague, Czech Republic
Jáchym Topol is a Czech writer and poet. He came from a family of artists; his father was Josef Topol (1935–2015), a playwright and signatory of Charter 77, his brother was Filip Topol (1965–2013), a musician, lyric writer and frontman of the rock and underground music group Psí vojáci. He also performed with “Psí vojáci” at the beginning of the 1980s, and the band used some of his works for lyrics. Jáchym Topol was also the singer of the underground group “Národní třída”; the group was banned from performing and its concerts were, therefore, held in private flats. He had been kept under surveillance by the State Security (StB) since his youth because of his connections with the signatories of Charter 77. He was often detained and interrogated. Topol himself signed Charter 77 in 1986. He was also an activist in the opposition group “České děti” (Czech Children) in the second half of the 1980s. In 1988, he was prosecuted for illegally crossing the border with Poland and for possession of materials “hostile to the regime”. However, this was not pursued due to a presidential amnesty. In 1985, Topol, along with Viktor Karlík and Ivan Lamper, founded the literary-cultural magazine originally named “Jednou nohou”, which became known as “Revolver revue” after 1986. Many important political and cultural dissidents, including Václav Havel, Petr Placák and Zbyněk Hejda, contributed to the quarterly magazine, which was first published as a samizdat volume. The number of copies had reached 500 by 1989. Jáchym Topol was the magazine’s editor-in-chief until 1993. His first literary experience was writing poetry. His first work came out 1979 in the samizdat publication “79-1”. He contributed to several samizdat periodicals (e.g. “Vokno”, “Pražské komunikace”), as well as those published in exile (“Listy”). His poems, published before 1989 as samizdat volumes, were collected in the book “Miluji tě k zbláznění” (1991). Since the 1990s, Topol has been writing prose, for example his novel “Sestra” (1994) was very successful and influenced a whole generation. Jáchym Topol is currently the programme director and organiser of cultural events and lectures at the Václav Havel Library in Prague.
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Hely:
- Praha, Prague, Czech Republic
Veljo Tormis was an Estonian composer whose long creative period was in Soviet times. He was born and grew up in interwar period Estonia. During the Second World War he learned to play the organ under several teachers. After the war, he studied conducting and composition. He gained a diploma in composition from Moscow Conservatoire in 1956. After that, he worked as a teacher of composition at Tallinn Music School in 1956–1960, and as a consultant to the Composers' Union of the ESSR in 1956–1969. Later, in 1974-1989, he was deputy chairman of the union. Since then he was a freelance composer.
Tormis wrote mostly songs based on Estonian folk songs. Additionally, he used the folklore of other nations, mostly Finno-Ugric people, in his work. In the 1950s, he used the national romantic style, and later turned to a modernist interpretation of folk songs. After 1970, he wanted to give a new life to Estonian folk songs in his work, but still to keep them as pure as possible. His most famous works are Maarjamaa ballaad (Ballad of Mary's Land, 1969), Raua needmine (Curse upon Iron, 1972), and Eesti ballaadid (Estonian Ballads, 1980). Some of his works are more or less openly socio-critical, such as Lenini sõnad (Lenin's Words, 1972) and Rahvaste sõpruse rapsoodia (Rhapsody of Peoples' Friendship, 1982). In the first, he used statements from Lenin which contradicted real Soviet policy, and in the second he composed a mixture of folk songs from different nations in the Soviet Union where a Russian song dominated all the others. He also wrote film soundtracks, for Kevade (Spring, 1969) and Suvi (Summer, 1976).
Since his work complied with the principle ‘national in form and socialist in content’, he was an acknowledged composer and won several awards. The Soviet authorities were unaware of or ignored the ironic and critical allusions in his work. Tormis was never openly critical, but did what he considered to be right.
William Totok, born on 21 April 1951 in Comloşu-Mare (Romania) in a family of Danube Swabians from the Banat, is a writer and journalist, with an intense literary activity in 1972–1975 as part of the Aktionsgruppe Banat, a literary group considered subversive by the Romanian communist regime. During high school in Sânnicolaul Mare, Totok wrote and sent several unsigned letters to Radio Free Europe, criticizing, among other things, various aspects of Romanian society at the end of the 1960s. These letters were addressed to Cornel Chiriac, a famous journalist and radio producer, who had just emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany, where he continued his very popular music show Metronom at Radio Free Europe. As a result of these letters being mentioned during some shows in 1969, the Securitate started looking for their author (ACNSAS, I 210 845, vol. 1, f. 32). After extensive investigations, Totok was identified as the author and interrogated by the Securitate, but he was not imprisoned. Subsequently, during his mandatory military service in Baia Mare (in northern Romania), his house was searched and a series of his poems were confiscated by the Securitate. He was again put under investigation for the letters sent to Radio Free Europe. The communist authorities chose to expose him publicly instead of sending him to a military court, at a time when the use of repressive measures was decreasing. His public exposure with a view to re-educating him took place in February 1971 in front of the entire military unit (ACNSAS, I 210 845, vol.1, f. 1).
William Totok was a precocious poet. His first poems were published by the magazine Neue Literatur in 1970. Totok was one of the initiators of Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of unconventional writers whose literature was critical towards “actually existing socialism” (Bahro 1978), and took inspiration from Bertolt Brecht’s creations and the literature of the “Vienna Group” (Wichner 2013, 6). From a political point of view, they were supporters of neo-Marxism assimilated through readings from the works of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School. Starting from this ideological foundation, the group members delimited themselves from the values of their parents’ generation, marked by the remnants of the Nazification of the German minority in Romania in the period from 1939 to 1944 (Totok 2001, 14). The group was active from 1972 to 1975, when it disintegrated as a result of the repressive actions of the communist authorities. For his unconventional literary activity Totok was initially attacked in the local press, which labelled him as a “long-haired parasite” (Totok 2001, 14). The attacks in the press against the members of the group were aimed at reducing their increasing influence over the younger generation in Timișoara.
Through their intense activity, the group, which dominated the student literary circle called Universitas, drew the attention of the Securitate, which started to recruit informants from among those who attended the meetings. Even group members were targeted by Securitate, among them Totok himself. He decided to agree to collaboration with the Securitate, but to only divulge the information that the young writers wanted to convey to the Securitate and to inform the others about the actions of the secret police (Wichner 2013, 7). As part of this plan to manipulate the Securitate, Totok became a “source” for the secret police and supplied a series of pieces of general information which the Securitate officers considered without “operational” value. In Totok’s opinion, the organization in May 1975 of an anniversary meeting to mark three years of group activity including a public reading of a series of poems, whose title “Frantic applause from everybody” was an allusion to Nicolae Ceaușescu’s personality cult, was perceived by the Securitate as a provocation (Totok 2001, 26). The arrest of William Totok’s brother, Gunter Totok, in the summer of 1975, on the grounds that he had expressed critical opinions concerning the regime, gave the Securitate the pretext to search the family home in Comloșu Mare and to confiscate a series of writings by William Totok: his diary for the period 1970–1973, two notebooks of poems, letters, and a series of notes (Totok 2001, 30–33). However, as Totok mentions, these were not mentioned in the Securitate’s search minute as stipulated by the law.
In the fall of 1975, during a trip to Comloșu Mare, William Totok was arrested along with other members or sympathizers of the group, including Richard Wagner, Gerhard Ortinau, and Gerhardt Csejka (Wichner 2013, 7). Because Comloșu Mare was close to the Yugoslav border, they were initially accused of fraudulent border crossing. The investigation showed that the real reason for the arrest was different. The Securitate intended to accuse the arrested young writers of activities undermining the regime. The investigation focused on certain texts considered subversive because of the irony in the subtext aimed at Ceaușescu’s political regime, for example, a text by William Totok entitled Rumänisches Lied:Februar 1973 (Romanian song: February 1973) and Gerhard Ortinau’s poem entitled Die Moritat von den 10 Wortarten der traditionellen Grammatik (The street ballad of the ten parts of speech of the traditional grammar) (ANSAS, P 054927, f. 55). During the investigation, the local party representatives learnt that there were plans to raise serious charges against the writers. According to William Totok, because they wished to avoid complications which might have resulted from the conviction for political reasons of these already well known young writers, they asked the local representatives of Securitate to release them (Totok 2001, 47–48). The measure that the Securitate subsequently adopted was to destroy the group and to discredit it in the public eye by spreading rumours. Consequently, the arrested writers were released after around a week of interrogations. However Totok was arrested again in November 1975 because the Securitate considered him to be the most dangerous member of the group, most likely due to the letters he had sent previously to Radio Free Europe. He was subject to investigation over more than eight months and only released when newspaper articles about his case were published in the Western press (Iorgulescu 2006, 422). An article concerning the Totok case, published in the West German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau in July 1976, mentioned ironically that a series of “ethnic Germans with Marxist convictions” were disturbing the “revolutionary peace of the ‘socialist’ state” (Totok 2001, 79). During the investigation, Totok was expelled from the University of Timișoara, probably because of pressures exercised by the Securitate.
Totok sent many petitions to the local authorities requesting to be allowed to continue his studies and to get back the manuscripts confiscated by the Securitate. In the end, he received most of his manuscripts in 1977, and in 1979 he managed to finish his studies in German and Romanian philology at the University of Timișoara (Totok 2001, 88–89). Gradually, William Totok resumed his literary activity.In 1977 he was present at the meetings of the Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn literary circle in Timișoara, where most members regrouped at the end of the 1970s. At the beginning of the following decade, Totok was even allowed to publish his first volume of poems, entitled Die Vergesellschaftung der Gefühle (The socialization of feelings) at the Kriterion publishing house in Bucharest, and to work in the German language media in Timișoara. Amid deteriorating living conditions and personal rights in Romania in the 1980s, William Totok decided to emigrate and left the country in 1987, settling in Berlin. Here he continued his writing career and collaborated with radio stations such as: Radio Free Europe, RIAS, DS-Kultur, DLF, and Deutsche Welle. Subsequently, he founded with Johann Böhm and Dieter Schlesak the online academic journal: Halbjahresschrift für südosteuropäische Geschichte, Literatur und Politik. He has published many volumes of literature, memoirs, and essays in Romania and in Germany. He was a member of the Wiesel Commission, which studied the Holocaust in Romania, and co-author of the final report of this commission. For his prolific literary, journalistic, and academic activity he has received such distinctions as the Leonce-und-Lena-Förderpreis (1987) and the prize of the Henning-Kaufmann-Stiftung Foundation (1989), and in 2009 he was decorated by the President of Romania with the Order of Cultural Merit as Officer.
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Hely:
- Berlin, Germany
Jan Trefulka was born in Brno on the 15th May, 1929. After his graduation in 1948, he studied literary science and aesthetics for two years at the Faculty of Arts in Prague. He returned to university in 1953 when he again unsuccessfully attempted to finish his studies of Literary Theory and Czech Language at Brno. Jan Trefulka's professional life was very varied, including a working as a tractor driver (1950), a programme director of Dům umění (1954-1956), an editor of Regional Publishing House in Brno (from 1957), an editor (1962-1968) and later an editor-in-chief (1970) of Host do domu, a night watchman (1972), a binder (1973)ˇ, and writer without the guarantee of official publishing. Among the important activities he was also a secretary of the regional branch of Svaz československých spisovatelů, where he worked from 1964 until his dissolution.
Unusual, but significant for Trefulka´s life, was his double entry into the Communist Party, followed by a two-fold exclusion in 1950 and 1969. Trefulka´s critical approach to the Communist regime led him to sign the Charter 77 and to publish works only in samizdat or exile publishing houses. His novels O bláznech jen dobré, Zločin pozdvižení, Veliká stavba, Svedený a opuštěný came from this period. After 1989, Trefulka participated in literary and public activities. Between 1991-1995 he was Head of Obec moravských spisovatelů, and in 1992-1997 he was a member of Rada České televize. He was awarded the Egon Hostovsky Award (1983), the Brno City Prize (1999), and the Ladislav Fuchs Award (2009).
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Hely:
- Brno, Czech Republic