COURAGE

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Mihai Stănescu (b. 29 July 1939, Boldești, jud. Prahova – d. 14 aprilie 2018, Bucharest) was one of the most well-known and most influential Romanian cartoonists of all time. His work as a draughtsman with an out-of-the ordinary satirical sense made him extremely inconvenient to the Ceauşescu regime, and many of his drawings were banned in the last two decades of Romanian communism. For many years, Mihai Stănescu was kept under very close surveillance by the representatives of the repressive institution of Romanian communism, the Securitate. Mihai Stănescu graduated from the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest in 1966 and was posted to the Ministry of Tourism, where he we dealt with advertising graphics for several years. It is in this period that he designed the cover of Almanahul Turistic 1967, the most interesting cover of this publication. Starting from the 1970s, he enjoyed a prodigious career as a draughtsman and cartoonist. He won numerous national and international distinctions for cartoon, one of the most prestigious being the gold medal that he received in 1981 at the international cartoon competition of the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun. The theme of the competition was “Walls,” and his prizewinning cartoon showed a crowd of people surrounded by a high wall with a single door, which, however, opened onto a precipice, a subtle allusion to the constraints with no escape faced by those who lived in communist Romania. The cartoon was reproduced in the volume Umor 50% (Humour 50%).

The subtle criticism of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s communist regime in Mihai Stănescu’s cartoons led to many of his works being banned from exhibitions and the withdrawal of two volumes, one from bookshops in 1982 and the other from the printers in 1985. A Securitate note of 1985 mentions that: “In February 1983, Stănescu Mihai opened an exhibition in the Eforie Gallery in Bucharest. On establishing that he intended to exhibit some cartoons with tendentious content, the leadership of the Union of Visual Artists was informed, and, before the opening, they ordered the removal of the drawings in question and forbad the distribution of the catalogue of the exhibition. As a consequence of the withdrawal from bookshops of his album published in 1982 and the removal of some of his cartoons from his exhibition in 1983 or from among those proposed by him for publication abroad, the person in question has adopted the attitude of someone persecuted, displaying his displeasure that in this country he is supposedly not appreciated at his true value, while abroad he has been awarded over twenty international prizes” (Stănescu 2009).

Under communism, Mihai Stănescu put together and published two volumes of cartoons in Romania and another two in France: Mihai Stănescu (1982), Umor 50% (1985), Rire en Roumanie (1988), and C'est pas le moment (1989). Immediately after the change of regime he published the samizdat volume Acum nu e momentul (1990). His career as a draughtsman and cartoonist continued with numerous works of high quality after the fall of communism. Up until his death in 2018, he published in Romania a further eight volumes of cartoons from the communist and post-communist period. On 1 December 2000, the National Day of Romania, the then president Emil Constantinescu decorated him with the National Order of the Star of Romania, grade of Knight, in recognition of “exceptional merits for artistic achievements and the promotion of culture.” According to the art critic Andrei Pleşu, “Mihai Stănescu wrote, in recent years, the comic history of a tragedy. He managed to preserve the normality of laughter in a deranged world and to survive calmly in the midst of disaster. He helped us all to survive. He was the occasion of a permanent and salutary subversion. In his exhibitions we learned to smile complicitly to the stranger by our side, to show solidarity around an allusion to revolt, to preserve our inner health in spite of all the indigence that we were constrained to suffer. His jokes had become folklore, his presence – a guarantee (however precarious) of normality.”

Ivan Supek was a Croatian physicist and writer and one of the most prominent Croatian engaged intellectuals in the latter half of the 20^th century. He was born in Zagreb in 1915, where he graduated with degrees in mathematics and physics from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in 1939. At the end of 1940, he obtained his doctorate in physics in Leipzig, after which he became an assistant to Werner Heisenberg and worked on research into superconductivity and quantum electrodynamics. As a young man in the early 1930s, he joined the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia (SKOJ), and then the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ). However, at the end of the same decade, during the so-called “conflict on the left,” he refused to “inherit the dogmatically understood dialectical materialism which he considered incompatible with modern knowledge, freedom and creativity,” and when he refused to accept Stalin's infallibility, “he was excluded from the KPJ in 1940” (Kutleša & Hameršak 2015).

In March 1941, because of his anti-fascist attitudes and activities, he was arrested by the Gestapo, but after several months he was released at Heisenberg's intervention. Instead of continuing his work with Heisenberg, Supek returned to Zagreb and joined the anti-fascist movement in Croatia. As a member of the Presidency of the First Congress of Croatian cultural workers in Topusko in June 1944, he held the only speech on science, emphasising the potential danger of developing nuclear weapons (http://info.hazu.hr/en/clanovi_akademije/osobne_stranice/ivan_supek).

After the Second World War, he was the first professor of theoretical physics at the Faculty of Science and Mathematics (University of Zagreb), where he founded the school of theoretical physics. He was also the founder and the first director of the Ruđer Bošković Institute (IRB), founded in 1950 for research in the field of atomic physics. Supek was “the most prominent opponent of the political drive in Yugoslavia aimed at the development of nuclear weapons” (Ilakovac 2013, 37). That is why he was forced to resign from the IRB in 1958 (Ilakovac 2013, 16).

Besides his work in the field of physics, he made a significant contribution to the philosophy of science, striving to link the natural sciences with philosophy, art, humanism, religion and ethics. He was the first professor of philosophy of science at the University of Zagreb. In the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts (JAZU, today the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, HAZU), of which he was a full member since 1961 (he became a corresponding member in 1948), he founded the Institute for the Philosophy of Science and Peace in 1965. The foundation of this institute was a part of his efforts in the struggle for the principles of peace, prosperity and disarmament, which was then most actively promoted at the global level by the Pugwash Movement. He joined the movement in 1961 and initiated the formation of its Yugoslav branch. On this agenda, Supek developed intense international cooperation and initiated and edited the journal Encyclopaedia moderna, which was also based on the principles of the Pugwash Movement.

During the Croatian Spring, he was the chancellor of the University of Zagreb (1968-1972) and encouraged the establishment of the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik (1970). Because of his disapproval of the conclusions of the twenty-first session of the Presidency of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in December 1971, which condemned the goals of Croatian Spring, and because he expressed solidarity with the persecuted Croatian intellectuals after the fall of the Croatian Spring, he came under attack by the regime and in the 1970s he was marginalized as politically unfit. Then he turned to the literary work that had preoccupied him since his youth.

He wrote mostly novels and plays. In 1959, he wrote his first novel Dvoje između ratnih linija (Two Between the Firing Lines), inspired by the so-called “conflict on the left” before the Second World War and concerned with the fate of an individual caught between conflicting collectives. In the same year, he published the play Na atomskom otoku (On the Atomic Island), which was soon banned, because the censors realised that it was a critique of the secret nuclear bomb project in Yugoslavia (http://info.hazu.hr/hr/clanovi_akademije/osobne_stranice/ivan_supek).

In the 1960s, he wrote several historical novels and dramas, some of which may be seen as expressions of disagreement with the social and political system in Yugoslavia. The biographical-historical drama Heretik (The Heretic, 1968) was the only of his plays that was well received by audiences and critics. While telling the story of the Renaissance heretic Mark Antun de Dominis, Supek alluded to the status of dissidents in the latter half of the 20^th century. In this drama, he also alluded to his own position as a man acting against the dominant social streams (Senker 2015, 45), although at that time (in the 1960s) he still had a distinguished position in public life (interview with Marotti, Bojan). After the fall of the Croatian Spring, his works became undesirable to the authorities. The first edition of his novel Opstati usprkos (Surviving in Spite, 1971), was burned at the beginning of government’s clash with the Croatian Spring, and his novel Extraordinarius was withdrawn from sale in 1974 because of content that alluded to the Croatian Spring, (Kutleša & Hameršak 2015).

In the 1980s he fell into even greater disfavour due to his writing. The book Krivovjernik na ljevici (Heretic on the Left) had a significant impact. The book was published in Bristol in 1980. It depicted the most recent history of Croatia from Suepk’s perspective and criticised the repressive methods by which the Communist Party built its totalitarian rule in Yugoslavia. That is was why he found himself in the line of fire by dogmatic communists. These attacks intensified after 1983, when a portion of Supek’s memoirs was published in the book So Speak Croatian Dissidents (Norval: Ziral), and especially when he published his book Krunski svjedok protiv Hebranga (Crown Witness against Hebrang) in Chicago (in English and Croatian). Supek described the circumstances of Andrija Hebrang's murder and the role of the UDBA (State Security Service) in that act. The regime unjustifiably began to label Supek as an “Ustasha” and a “leader of hostile émigré communities.” He was called for interrogations by the police, and his passport was confiscated, which was particularly difficult for him as an internationally renowned scientist.

As the crisis of the communist system in Yugoslavia escalated, Supek renewed his public activity and welcomed the introduction of the multiparty system (Ilakovac 2013, 21). In 1991 he was elected president of the JAZU (which was soon renamed HAZU) and remained at its head until 1997. He was a vocal opponent of the military aggression against the Republic of Croatia in the early 1990s and sought support from the global public for Croatia's struggle for independence. He was also a harsh critic of all democratically elected Croatian governments, stressing certain negative social phenomena (Ilakovac 2013, 40-41).

According to some of his associates, Supek liked to act outside of institutions. Though he was a left-wing intellectual, the militant aspect of socialist regimes deterred him from fostering closer co-operation with communist rulers (interview with Marotti, Bojan). Bojan Marotti describes him in an interview for COURAGE as an individual who liked his heretical position, as a man who always walked in the opposite direction, who opposed the state and the prevailing currents in everything. Even after the collapse of communism, when Croatian patriotism became the dominant paradigm, he soon moved to a specific heretical position, although he was a Croatian patriot (interview with Bojan Marotti). Supek received the Ruđer Bošković Award for Science (1960) and the Republic of Croatia Lifetime Achievement Award (1970), and the Croatian Post Office issued a stamp bearing his image in 2015 (Kutleša & Hameršak 2015). He died in Zagreb in 2007. He was the brother of sociologist and philosopher Rudi Supek.

Croatian ethnographer Olga Supek was born in Paris on January 3, 1949. She graduated with a degree in ethnography and sociology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb in 1973 and earned her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan in 1982. She worked at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb (1976-1988) and the Department of Ethnography at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb (1988-1991). From 1991 to 2008, she lectured on cultural anthropology at the University of Texas, where from 1999 until 2006 she was the head of the College of Arts and Sciences Advising Center. Since 2009, she has taught ethnography and cultural anthropology at the University of Zadar. She is the daughter of renowned Croatian sociologist Rudi Supek, and one of his legitimate heirs. When arranging the Rudi Supek Personal Papers in the Croatian State Archives, and during the preparation of the collection’s analytical inventory, she helped to identify the persons in the photographs.

Rudi Supek (Zagreb, April 8, 1913 - Zagreb, January 2, 1993), a Croatian sociologist, philosopher and psychologist. As a student from 1933 to 1936, he was close to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) (Galić 1990). He graduated with a degree in philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb in 1937 and until 1938 he was a member of the leadership of the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia. At the end of 1939, he went to Paris, where he studied psychology. There he had a party mission to maintain a connection with the International Brigade Centre in Paris which organised the transport of fighters to the Spanish Civil War. He graduated from the Institute of Psychology of the University of Paris in 1940 and received the certificate of the National de l'Orientation professionnelle in the same year. During the Second World War, he was a member of the French resistance movement and a member of the Communist Party of France (CPF) since 1939. In 1942, he was arrested in Paris and detained in several prisons in the city. From January 1944 until the spring of 1945, he was interned in the Nazi concentration camp in Buchenwald, where he, as a representative of the Yugoslav prisoners, was a member of the camp’s illegal International Board. Buchenwald was the only Nazi camp where the detainees liberated themselves before the Allies arrived (Bosnar 2011). After his liberation, he was a delegate of the Red Cross on repatriation issues, organised a series of repatriation centres in Germany, and then returned to Paris to study psychology in 1946.

In 1948, after the Cominform Resolution against Yugoslavia, the leadership of the CPF demanded that Supek attack the CPY and its leader Josip Broz Tito. He refused, and as the editor of the two magazines, Nova Jugoslavija (New Yugoslavia) and Bratstvo i jedinstvo (Fraternity and Unity), he tried to reduce the impact of the Resolution on Yugoslav emigrants in France. In 1950, he returned to Yugoslavia. However, he received a Ph.D. in psychology from the Sorbonne in Paris in 1952. He worked at the Psychology Department at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb (FHSS) (1951-1958) and the Institute for Social Research in Belgrade (1958-1961). He was a professor of sociology at the FHSS in Zagreb from 1960 to 1979, where he founded the Sociology Department in 1963. He also lectured at other foreign and Yugoslav universities and colleges. Supek is considered the founder of Croatian, and also one of the founders of Yugoslav, sociology. One of the world’s most renowned sociologists, Jürgen Habermas, called Supek “the father of modern sociology.”

He is the author of over twenty scholarly books, primarily in the fields of sociology and psychology, but also the author of one of the first books on ecology in Yugoslavia (Supek 1989a). His works were translated into English, German, Italian, Czech, Hebrew and Japanese. He was the president of the Sociological Society of Croatia and the Yugoslav Society of Sociology.

Although he was a Marxist and a member of the CPF for a decade, after 1948 he never again joined another communist party. Although he requested the membership in the CPY in 1950, his application was rejected because he was considered politically unsuitable as a survivor of the notorious Nazi concentration camp in Buchenwald. Namely, to the Yugoslav authorities, the survivors of that terrible camp were unreliable precisely because they had survived, implying that they were collaborators (Bosnar 2011).

In his youth, Supek advocated Bolshevik policies. However, his post-war experiences, primarily his aspirations towards free academic research and his negative experience with the party bureaucracy, put him at odds with the Party (Interview with Marijan Bosnar, 18 Jul. 2017). His disagreement with the communist regime was based on his understanding of the position of intellectuals in society. He believed sociologists should be a critical counterbalance to the ruling system of power and that is why he moved away from dogmatism and uncritical idealism. He remained a Marxist but replaced dogmatism with the conviction that socialism cannot be achieved without democracy (Supek 1989b).

Supek's critical thinking was most visible in his editing of two respected philosophical journals, Pogledi (1952-1955) and Praxis (1964-1975), and through his leading role in the Korčula Summer School (1963-1974). In 1953, Supek published the article “Why is there no conflict of opinions in Yugoslavia?” in Pogledi, which provoked considerable criticism from many pro-regime intellectuals. Supek argued that there was no conflict of opinions because one group (the LCY) monopolised the entirety of social life. In 1954, Supek resigned as editor-in-chief, and after the next issue (1955/1), the LCY banned the journal (Interview with Marijan Bosnar, 18 7. 2017.). As a member of the intellectual circle gathered around Praxis and the Korčula Summer School, he criticised, from a radical leftist position, certain elements of the socialist system of the time. That is why the communist rulers obstructed the publication of Praxis and the work of the Korčula Summer School.

On the other hand, with his book Ova jedina zemlja: idemo li u katastrofu ili u Treću revoluciju? (This only Earth: Are we heading for disaster or the Third Revolution?), published in 1973, he was one of the first intellectuals in Yugoslavia to warn society of the environmental problems of modern civilisation. With this book, he moved from the then Marxist mainstream in Yugoslavia, which maintained that environmental issues were, in fact, a capitalist ploy to decrease the revolutionary potential of the working class. After the democratic changes in Croatia and Yugoslavia after 1990, he was critical of the new government.

He was the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the Honorary Doctorate of the University in Uppsala (1976), the French Prize for Achievements in the Field of Science (1984), and the National Order of the Legion of Honour (Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur) in 1989 (Supek 1989a). Since 2004, the Croatian Sociological Society has annually conferred the Rudi Supek Prize for achievements in the field of sociology. Since he was popular among students, every year the students of the Sociology Department of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (University of Zagreb)organise a freshman party called Rudi Supek Night. In 2013, a scholarly conference marked the hundredth anniversary of Supek's birth and fifty years since the establishment of the Sociology Department. The papers from that conference were also published (Cifirić et al., 2016).