Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives
Press Room - 2021
Posted: 04/March/2021
From study trip to escape room: a digital education program.
In 2019, the Blinken OSA (CEU) received a grant for its project titled 89: Bringing it Home from the U.S. Embassy in Hungary, supporting the design and organization of two-day study trips for five groups of 15–19 year-old students to the Archives. The program aimed to create a unique learning experience focusing on the regime change in Hungary. On the first day, students would participate in a simulation game that recreated the dynamics of the Kádár regime, using primary sources; they would then have a walking tour that familiarized them with some of the most important events of 1988 and 1989. On the second day, students would form a “Creative Block” to express—through a diversity of workshops—their views on what they considered the most important takeaways of the trip.
Due to the outbreak of the COVIC-19 pandemic, only one of the five planned trips could be realized. Therefore, in October 2020, the Blinken OSA began redesigning the project to offer a similar learning experience, but this time online, making the program available for many more students even during the pandemic. The plan was to roll out a set of learning aids that would help teachers in exploring the era with their students in an interactive and immersive fashion.
Posted: 16/February/2021
Audience favorites from the most recent Verzió available for limited-time streaming.
Every spring, some of the best films from the Verzió Festival are rescreened at the Blinken OSA. This year, due to the pandemic, the films are made available online on the Verzió website. Audience favorites from the 17th Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival will be available from February 15 through April 30, in the frame of Re:Verzió. The fifteen films cannot be found elsewhere in Hungary, and for most, it may be their last chance to be viewed.
Tickets for these films are free of charge, or can be purchased for a symbolic price. All ticket sale proceeds will be used to purchase the rights for I Am Greta, for educational purposes and film club screenings. These films are only available for streaming within Hungary. Hungarian subtitles will be provided for all non-Hungarian-speaking films. A limited number of tickets are available for each film. When fewer than 100 tickets are left for a given film, viewers will be notified via the Verzió's Facebook page.
More information can be found at https://www.verzio.org/
Posted: 12/February/2021
The prize is assigned by The PLURAL Forum for Interdisciplinary Studies, a nonprofit organization based in the Republic of Moldova.
Anastasia Felcher, the Slavic Archives Specialist at the Blinken OSA, has been awarded the PLURAL Local Archives & Collections Research Prize. The prize is assigned by The PLURAL Forum for Interdisciplinary Studies, a nonprofit organization based in the Republic of Moldova, which aims at initiating and carrying out analyses and discussions of phenomena and social issues neglected or distorted in the public space, such as inequality, oppression, identities, cultures, power, and ideologies.
Posted: 09/February/2021
It is with great sadness that we report on the passing of A. Ross Johnson. A scholar who specialized in East European and Soviet security issues, Johnson fulfilled senior positions at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL, Inc.) over several decades: he was senior executive from 1988 to 2002, director of the RFE/RL Research Institute, acting president and counselor of RFE/RL, and recently History and Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, and Senior Adviser at RFE/RL.
Posted: 04/February/2021
A new fully digitized, fully processed collection was made available for researchers for the first time in Hungary.
Archival work never stops at Blinken OSA even amid a global pandemic. The AV Section of the Archives is happy to announce that a historically important visual collection is now fully digitized, fully processed, and available for the researchers and the wider public for the first time in Hungary.
The Collection is titled the „ Recordings of the Opposition Roundtable Negotiations” which was a widely-known phase during the Transition period of 1989. The events were documented by the Black Box Foundation, the first independent media group in Hungary (since 1988). Contrary to the state-controlled media, Black Box was a fresh and independent voice in Hungary during the Transition, they extensively documented and even participated in the events of the peaceful Transition.
The five-part documentary films about the negotiations can be found at HU OSA 305-0-2
The Collection is in Hungarian.
Posted: 26/January/2021
The Blinken OSA launched a blog series at 444.hu, one of the leading independent news websites in Hungary. The blog entitled Forrás. [meaning source and, with the dot pronounced, boiling point] consists of posts written by the Blinken OSA staff, revolved around archival sources and their archival, historical, and contemporary context. As 444.hu is in Hungarian, English translations will be published here, at the Blinken OSA website.
Posted: 25/January/2021
The Archives contributes to the program in the form of an internship and a course titled Memory in Public Spaces (Including Archives)
About the History in the Public Sphere (HIPS) program:
HIPS is a 120 ECTS English-language program awarding a Multiple Degree.
The program description says, “History in the Public Sphere is a two-year master program that focuses on the ways the past is represented, contested, and negotiated in the public sphere, exploring various contexts from the early modern period to the present in a comparative and transnational way.”
Posted: 20/January/2021
Blinken OSA offers the three-credit course Archives, Evidence, and Human Rights to CEU students.
Teaching has always been an essential part of the activities at Blinken OSA, and for many years, a variety of courses were launched to CEU students. We are happy to announce that despite the challenges and the CEU’s move to Vienna, the Archives continues its popular course Archives, Evidence, and Human Rights, offered to the Human Rights Program of the Legal Studies Department, cross-listed to the History Department.
About the course:
This course aims at looking at the roles and uses of human rights documentation in the context of preserving recorded memory and the history of human rights. Establishing facts by forensic methods, producing impeccable evidence to convict perpetrators, or understanding the roots of conflicts and working toward dialog and reconciliation are just a few areas where the availability of reliable records and archival activism can make a huge difference.
Course description and Syllabus
Posted: 15/January/2021
Cultures of Dissent in Eastern Europe (1945–1989): Research Approaches in the Digital Humanities – Online
Co-funded by the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and the New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent (CA 16213), a COST Action funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union (nep4dissent.eu).
Hosted by the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, Budapest, Hungary
About the Course:
The course is co-hosted by the Blinken Open Society Archives, CEU’s progressive hub for digital Cold War history and a natural home for scholarship conducted in this area. A previous course in 2019 already based its demo datasets on digitized content from the Blinken OSA collections: records of the Radio Free Europe Research Institute, and of RFE’s telex communication between New York and Munich in the 1960s. There are a lot of training schools in digital humanities methods around the world, but very few which are so focused on a particular subject area and dedicated to building collaborative digital history projects around a discrete set of topics. By basing the course and its follow-up activities at Blinken OSA, this program aims to seed a new wave of digital history projects that revolve around Cold War history and oppositional cultures.
Posted: 12/January/2021
Archives to the Rescue: Left-Wing Journals of Interwar Western Europe Arrive at the Archives
We are always delighted to share the news if our collection has been enriched with a special, new donation. Now, however, we have to report with a bitter taste that we had to transfer a part of the press collection of the Institute of Political History—recently cast out from its home—to the Archives, in order to avoid forced scrapping.
Posted: 08/January/2021
We are happy to announce that the evaluation of the last submitted Visegrad applications has finished and the final list of winners and reserves has been approved by the Council of Ambassadors.
For detailed information on the call, please check the official Blinken OSA Visegrad Scholarship website
The following candidates received full support:
• John/Jack Atmore (US) for his project Creating an Online Interactive Archival Documentary Platform with the Privát Fotó és Film Alapítvány Home Movie Collection
• Jelena Culibrk (Serbia) for her research Televising the Invisible Hand: The BBC and Postwar (Neo)Liberalism, 1968–1980.
• Svetlana Dimitrova (Bulgaria/France) for her research “Promoting Free Exchange Behind Closed Doors.” The Foundation for the Support of European Intellectuals in its Socio-Historical Context
• Samuel Finkelman (US) for his research How Soviet Jewish Intellectuals and Activists Mobilized the Past to Stimulate the Resurgence of Jewish National Consciousness
• Jira Janac (Czech Republic) for his research on Hydrosocialism
• Andrea Soós (Hungary) for her research on the oeuvre of László Rajk and his contribution to the social and political transformation of Hungary in the 1980s.
• Trinkle, Alice (Germany) for her research on “Understanding socialist economic reform as a global phenomenon.” Assessing exchanges between Europe and China and their influence on Chinese economic reform in the 1980s
The following candidates received partial support:
• Bewicz, Piotr (Poland) for his research Letters From The Inside. The Phenomenon of Experiencing Archive – The Open Society Archives Example
• Lilla Farkas (Hungary) for her research The Emergence of the Roma Rights Movement in the Last Years of Communism and its Immediate Aftermath
Posted: 04/January/2021
Blood/Witness
Szabolcs KissPál Documentary Radio Play
Radio Tilos FM 90,3 MHz
January 10, Sunday, 2021, 12.30–1.30 p.m.
The events that took place hundred years ago are still leading to sharp, heated debates: which events do we consider national tragedies from the turn of the 1910s and 1920s? Whom do we consider victims to be emphasized as mementos for the collective memory? Whose blood was spilling from, so to say, the wounds of the nation? The documentary radio play by Szabolcs KissPál explores this issue through, on the one hand, the microhistories of the everyman of the era—the Jewish victims of the Red and White Terror—, and, on the other, through the great national narrative—the history of the Monument of National Martyrs, inaugurated in 1934, toppled in 1945, and reconstructed in 2019.
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