On the morning of March 15, 1848, revolutionaries in Budapest visited the printing presses of Landerer and Heckenast and printed Sándor Petőfi's poem Nemzeti Dal (National Song) together with the 12 demands formulated by the leaders of the revolution. The first demand of this list was: We demand the freedom of the press, the abolition of censorship. The question of freedom of the press is one that today is still being contested both in authoritarian regimes and in liberal democracies where civil liberties seem to be increasingly under threat. The notions of freedom of the press and freedom of speech also impacts upon, and are interrelated with other areas such as censorship and self-censorship, the internet, copyright, intellectual property, the privatization of knowledge, protest and public order, public space, and human rights issues in general. Therefore, freedom of the press is always among the demands of movements that fight for open, democratic societies. In the framework of the exhibition, Blinken OSA presents a selection of its various collections of Hungarian samizdat publications.
These “unofficial” publications, including periodicals, books, and ephemera, as well as audiovisual documents signalled the first fissures in the communist system, cracks in which young intellectuals carved out space for a semi-autonomous cultural and political discourse.