“We publish [the apology] in accordance with the decision of the Regional Court in Banská Bystrica ,”SME‘s publisher stated at the end of the apology text. Truban has sued the newspaper and is seeking 150,000 euros in damages. The editor-in-chief of SME fears that the court may approve the demand. For comparison, the sum is almost ten times the amount that in Slovakia is typically paid out in wrongful death cases.

Meanwhile, acting chief prosecutor Ladislav Tichý is demanding a similar form of repetitive apology for an article about the “Bonanno case” published by Nový Čas, the country’s most popular tabloid.

Over the past few years, Slovak journalists have found themselves in a strange position. In other countries, journalists regularly face persecution, harassment and violence. In Slovakia, public officials have instead chosen lawsuits featuring exorbitant demands as their main tool against the media.

It is normal for media outlets to apologize when they publish errors.  The recent charges against the press in Slovakia are, however, rather odd. The media faces the threat of high damage payments, but it is questionable whether they have made mistakes in their reporting.

The hunting trip article

In September 2009, SME reported that Truban had been hunting free of charge on the hunting grounds owned by a politician (normally a fee for such hunting applies). According to the court, the newspaper had besmirched the honor, dignity, reputation and privacy of the judge. Both the district and regional courts in Banská Bystrica agreed with Truban that the hunt could not be considered as an unethical gift, because the members of an association that runs the hunting grounds were in return allowed to hunt in another hunting ground owned by Truban’s father.

The Bonanno case

In June 2011, Nový čas published a photograph and an article about an October 2010 gathering of lawyers and judges at the Bonanno bar in Rajecké Teplicie. According to the daily, retired lawyer Tibor Péchy welcomed the guests. Péchy wore blue ear protectors and brandished a mock assault rifle, the newspaper reported. This was just two months after a mass murderer wearing blue ear protectors had shot dead seven Roma in Bratislava with an assault rifle. The daily criticized the gathering as unworthy of lawyers and judges. They also reported that no one had filed any official complaints about the incident and that no disciplinary action would be taken against those who attended the party.

After almost two years, several people who attended the party sued the newspaper. Acting Chief Prosecutor Tichý and four Supreme Court judges are among the group. Together, they are demanding 940,000 euros. Péchy, who was photographed wearing the blue ear protectors and dummy gun is also a claimant. The lawyers question the authenticity of some of the pictures from the meeting, as well as denying that Péchy’s display was meant to evoke the Bratislava slayings.

During a hearing, the judge overseeing the proceedings asked Supreme Court Judge Milan Lipovský why he had waited so long to sue Nový Čas, and whether he had demanded a retraction from the newspaper. Lipovský replied that he had been too shocked to respond.

Meanwhile, Tichý stated that he had dropped by the bar on his way back from a business trip to Žilina and claimed not to remember seeing a colleague wearing ear protectors or a gun. According to Tichý, the meeting had been a friendly gathering and the “Bonanno case” is meant to discredit him. Tichý is demanding 200 thousand euros because, he says, the newspaper linked him to the Bratislava shooter, Lubomír Harman. “The sum is appropriate given my status. My family and friends have been affected as well. Whenever I attend a social event, they immediately label me as the one from Bonanno,” said Tichý.

Tichý admitted in a hearing that he would be willing to compromise on the high damage demands if Nový Čas published an apology on its front page, bearing his photo and the text “Tichý did not imitate Harman during the meeting of judges and lawyers in the Bonanno bar.” The daily would have to publish the apology five times in the print and five times on the Internet.

The acting chief prosecutor claims that Nový Čas portrayed him as “playing Harman.” Júlia Kováčová, editor-in-chief of Nový Čas, rejects this assertion. “We published photographs and the language of public officials in the name of the public interest. We have not written a single time that Doctor Tichý played Harman,” she said.

These are not the first cases of judges filing lawsuits with huge demands for compensation. The most notorious ones are those of Štefan Harabin, the  former Minister of Justice and current Chairman of the Supreme Court.

International organizations criticize the prosecutions

Not surprisingly, this new media intimidation technique has alarmed Slovak and international groups and individuals interested in protecting press freedoms.

“The lawsuits of judges and prosecutors in the Bonanno case and the court ruling against the SME daily in the Judge Truban case directly endanger media as the representatives of the public, in the execution of their basic function of informing the public and acting as a watchdog of public authorities,” said Pavol Múdry , chairman of the Slovak Committee of the International Press Institute (IPI).

“Both of these cases of attacks against the media raise justified concerns that judges, prosecutors and the judiciary in general act as a caste of the untouchable, above criticism and ultimately uncontrolled by the public,” said Múdry. In the Bonanno case, the media are under attack for reporting on the behavior of judges and prosecutors that is in direct conflict with their ethical code, he said.

“In the Judge Truban hunting case, the court has not only disregarded the fact that the SME daily had published truthful information, for which the daily must apologize, but with the ruling on publishing text on the front page, the court had directly infringed the accountability of the publisher and the editor-in-chief for the content of their medium,” Múdry said.

International Press Institute Slovakia appealed to the Parliament, the government, the Ministry of Justice, judges and prosecutors to respect freedom of speech and the media. “IPI Slovakia will inform its international partners, such as the International Press Institute, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Council of Europe and others, about this case,” the press association announced.

The lawsuits also drew a reaction from Dunja Mijatovi, Representative for Freedom of the Media for OSCE. She asked Slovak Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajčák to provide her with an explanation of the Bonanno prosecutions, as well as the triple apology to the judge in SME.

The OCSE is alarmed by the amount of damages sought in the the lawsuits, Mijatovi said. “Public officials must be able to cope with a higher level of criticism from the media,” wrote Mijatovi  in a letter to Lajčák. Minister Lajčák responded to Mijatovi after almost four weeks, he sent only a complimentary reply.

“One must realize that public officials experience a narrower privacy protection and they have to bear increased interest from the public and the media outside of their working time. If it not proven that the media published untruthful information, the claimed compensation amounts can be considered significantly excessive,” said attorney Peter Wilfling, who works for the daily newspaper Plus jeden deň and an organization called Via Iuris that fights for citizen rights. Slovakia’s justice system gives preferential treatment to lawsuits filed by politicians and judges, he said. ”Public officials sue for damages to their reputations with compensation claims considerably higher than a common person does for wrongful injury or death of a near relative,” he added.

Former Minister of Justice Daniel Lipšic has also criticized the lawsuits. “Almost all court decisions against the media have been eventually invalidated by the Constitutional Court or in Strasbourg, which means that our courts do not respect their judicial practice,” said Lipšic.

Damage claims with an ulterior motive

The inflated compensation claims are clearly intended to bankrupt the targeted media outlets and have little to do with any real damage incurred to the plaintiffs. For example, compare Acting Chief Prosecutor Tichý’s demand for 200,000 euros or Truban’s demand for 150,000 euros to the state’s maximum death benefit for families of those killed in violent crimes: 16,000 euros.

These unbalances can exist in Slovakia because no ceiling has been specified for damage payments that a court can award in personality protection cases – theoretically, it can be as much as a billion euro. The amount is up to the judge.

The cases mentioned in this article are not the only examples of such lawsuits threatening the Slovak media. SME, for example, is facing at least 20 similar other cases. The results of these lawsuits is to foster a culture of self-censorship. Some media are now afraid to report on the activities of public officials and judges, as they worry being targeted by similar lawsuits.

“Politicians and judges use … lawsuits to intimidate the media,” said Zuzana Petková, an editor with Nový čas. “The courts, especially in the lower ranks, unfortunately tend to go out of their way to approve the lawsuits. They decide on compensation in amounts unparalleled in the EU.

“I am afraid that even the involvement of the OSCE High Representative will not change anything about this decision-making practice of our judicial bodies. The only result will be another stain of shame on Slovakia’s reputation abroad.”

Miloš Luknár, the editor-in-chief of the weekly Plus sedem dní, echoed the sentiments.

“These high damage payments are not only an easy way to obtain cash in amounts that common citizens do not even dream about, that is on top non-taxable,” he writes. “But above all, they are a very effective method to harass the media. You don’t write nice, so you’ll pay. What (former Prime Minister Vladimír) Mečiar was unable to achieve – silencing of the media – the courts are gradually accomplishing.”

Our favorite computer game lost its relevance a year later, when Moscow was attacked by other forces. Our school-leaving ceremony coincided with the reburial of the martyred prime minister Imre Nagy, an occasion when a young man named Viktor Orbán (currently the Prime Minister of Hungary) was the first to publicly demand the withdrawal of Soviet troops. Shortly thereafter, the political campaign of the first free elections started, during which one of the newly formed opposition forces deployed its anti-Soviet secret weapon. Their poster showed the back of the neck of a fat Soviet general and bore the victorious inscription: “Tovarisi Konyec”. They won the elections with it, and it was clear to us that there would be no future for our Soviets in the Great Plain. They came to our town in long bicycle convoys to the Sunday market to sell everything that was moveable in the barracks. We then watched on the evening news as the “Soviet troops stationed temporarily in our country” rolled out of Hungary. In response to the election-poster, there was a poster on each tank with the image of a boy soldier smiling and with the caption: “All the best, Hungarians!” Silence became a less unusual experience in our town.

Altogether, approximately 400,000 Soviet soldiers and their relatives left the territory of the Visegrad countries in the beginning of the 1990s. They left behind more than a thousand empty barracks and an untold number of military goods, based on data calculated by the local knowledge of self-appointed experts who deal with the histories of former Soviet military bases. As they explained, there were some monumental ideas regarding how the considerable amount of “war booty” might be put to local use. However, in reality only a few of these projects were realized. Some former barracks have been converted into housing projects, such as the Kluczewo and Chojna barracks in Poland and the Hungarian sites in Debrecen and Tököl. A few former Soviet air bases have been put to civilian use, including Kołobrzeg-Bagicz in Poland and Kiskunlacháza in Hungary. Moreover, there are examples of air-bases which have been kept for military purposes, as in the cases of Nadarzyce in Poland and Sliač in Slovakia. Alterations with the intention of creating cultural or sporting facilities have been rare.

The majority of the former Soviet military barracks were never put to any use. Due to financial difficulties and the reductions in national defense, budgets the states in question had little ability to invest in the sites. In addition, negative public attitudes toward the former Soviet barracks made it harder to reach a political compromise about their future. The abandoned real-estate went to ruin in twenty years. In the meantime, locals and business entrepreneurs with a well established network unscrewed and carried away every usable or sell-able item they could find. At present, the ruins are used of by paintball players or casts shooting video clips and feature films, while the airstrips remain popular amongst car and motor racers.

Mysteries of the Ruins

Ghost towns, this is what those areas which were abandoned are now called. One can find many such places around the world. Ghost towns are the former industrial centers, research stations, military barracks, punishment camps, psychiatric facilities, or areas hit by industrial catastrophes. These are the dead-end streets of modernity which slowly become their own sites of memory, or their own memory parks, where we can face the failures of the recent past. In Eastern Europe, mostly the empty and dying former Soviet military barracks have become widely known as ghost towns in the sense that they are places which we do not consider part of our pasts or history. While they were functional they represented the military extension of Soviet power and they operated as military zones strictly removed from the public eye, with locals only able to enter with special permission. This special treatment fueled local imaginations in terms of what could be hidden behind the concrete walls and wired fences, in contrast to the ideal picture suggested by official propaganda. Circulating rumors condensed all local fears and beliefs. There were legends about a secret atom bunker, drilling bombs that missed targets, air catastrophes, alcohol consumption inside the barracks, unmerciful discipline, and Soviet soldiers and civilians lost without a trace.

These legends are still alive and are bound to be sensationalized by various TV shows dealing with the mysteries of the past. Among the adventurous tourists who enjoy such sites, the following destinations are considered most the interesting: Klomino and Pstraze in Poland, Milovice and Boží Dar in the Czech Republic, as well as Kunmadaras and Szentkirályszabadja in Hungary. This is according to the names listed by Szabolcs Kizmus, who leads barrack-expeditions in his free time for amateur researchers. According to him, the Internet is primarily responsible for making these places famous by discussing and showing them in popular thematic blogs, photo albums, and community sites which are visited or followed by thousands. The gloomy photos, videos with melancholic music, and personal accounts of such experiences are uploaded to these forums and then appear as authentic documents of “wicked” adventures.

On the Trail of Former Soldiers

Those who once had a personal relationship with the Soviet officers and their relatives do not believe the scuttlebutt and have a good laugh when their old friends come up in discussion. And this is also true the other way round – as economist Károly Vándor ardently explains. He received a great deal of help and good will, while he was asking locals and Soviet soldiers about their lives before the pullout of troops. He has conducted more than 2,500 interviews in the past two decades and organized a popular exhibition in Berkefürdő, close to Kunmadaras, which featured a selection of precious objects he managed to collect during his research. In addition, he published two books that were praised by both professionals and laymen. Former Soviet officers regard him as the historian of the Southern Army. However, Vándor is not a historian by training. He was twelve years old when the troops left the country, and he never really accepted it. He searched for everything and everyone that was once related to the Soviet barracks. According to Vándor, the most significant breakthrough in his research was the arrival of the Internet, which allowed a massive number of former Soviet soldiers, pilots and engineers to get back in touch online and contribute to various forums. It also allowed him to get direct answers to the questions that had so long occupied his thoughts.

Vándor has alter egos in nearly every Eastern European country, who, like him, obsessively research the lives of the former Soviet barracks. In the Czech Republic, Ales Hottmar has already published a book in English in which he explores Czechoslovak relations with Soviet troops, while Radoslaw Kacperski, a Polish engineer whose unfulfilled love was flying, is working on a similar volume. To my questions raised in English, he prefers to answer in Russian and talks about his belief that there are less and less of his countrymen who would like to collectively condemn the former Soviets. We have to understand that the foundation of international relations is not only national interest but also friendships among citizens, says Kacperski, in reference to his Russian friends who once served in his country. He confirms that the former Soviet soldiers were fond of their host countries no matter where they were stationed across the region. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union established different political and military relations with each member state of the Warsaw Pact. It is enough to recall the interventions in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 or in the Prague Spring of 1968, or the distinction made in Moscow after the Second World War between Warsaw and Prague as “liberated” and Vienna and Budapest as “occupied.” Amongst themselves, Soviet soldiers summed up their experiences in the following way: “One is on duty on foot in the GDR, seated in Poland, and laid back in Hungary.”

Researchers following the trail of former soldiers aim to study military techniques, along with the organizational and military strategies of Soviet military units and their plans for warfare. As a matter of fact, Vándor managed to decipher the code of a military maneuver conducted in Hungary in 1965. He succeeded where professional historians had not. He emphasized, and asked me to write that self-appointed researchers like him never receive any help from professional colleagues who do their job in archives, without ever contacting former Soviet soldiers.

Finding Each Other, Somewhere Else

The abrupt switch in voice here is very confusing. First it’s “us” and “our,” after the colon “they” and “them.” Who is speaking, and who is being spoken about? If these are Vándor’s words, that should be indicated For their own part, they miss “the most beautiful years” of their youth which they spent in those barracks – so tells me the self-appointed historian. The personal memories collected by these men populate the empty buildings and breathe life into events preserved in photos taken secretly behind the walls of the barracks. They clarify the function of each building, they show us who lived and worked there as well as how they lived and whether they liked their stays there. I heard an unusual story about a girl who fell in love with a Russian soldier. After they received permission and got married she moved from a neighbouring village into one of the Soviet barracks. Then I got to know the story of that memorable night when the Soviet soldiers asked for permission to leave the barracks in order to watch an erotic Western movie entitled Emmanuelle, which was screened in one of the villages. The narratives, writings and collections of self-appointed researchers and the few exhibitions organized around these themes could enhance the transparency of these once parallel worlds. In light of the above, our Soviet ghost towns should not seem alienating, at least not to us, since their former inhabitants – who are now more frequently coming to visit the worlds they left behind – are rather shocked by what they find. On the occasions of their ceremonial returns, they find the flats where they once lived with their families in ruins. The floors are covered with debris; the paint has come off the walls. There are no windows or doors.

In the virtual spaces of Internet forums, idyllic and eternal barracks, which will never be left, take shape. In these barracks, military technique is used for non-military purposes and no one is attacked. There are no wired fences, stands, or gates. Without any military rank, such contributors can communicate as equal partners about the past, present, and what has changed.

Finally, Vándor told me that “as a child, when I was busy playing Raid Over Moscow at home, I was already a NATO target, together with the Soviet soldiers in our neighborhood who were occasionally training with a simulated nuclear bomb. By that time, everybody already knew that the atom bomb would never be deployed,” he says reassuringly; “This whole thing turned out to be a giant and incredibly expensive game for everyone which no one could quit, however in the meanwhile one could still fly a lot.”

Translated by Anna Lujza Szász

The article was originally published in “Visegrad Insight” vol. 3.

Investment in education on EU’s tail

Let’s look at some statistics. As shown in Key Data on Education in Europe 2012, published by the European Union´s education agency (Eurydice), total public expenditure on education in Slovakia as a percentage of GDP was in 2011 lowest among all EU-27 countries, at a mere 3.6%, while the EU average was 5.1%. In terms of annual expenditure per one full time equivalent pupil/student in 2008, Slovakia was also lagging considerably behind the EU average of 5,430 EUR. Slovakia occupied also the lowest position in terms of share of staff expenditures within total annual expenditure in public education. Only about 58% of total expenditures went to education employees’ salaries, in contrast to the rest of the EU, where this share was well above 60 or 70%. In the school year 2011/12, the average  annual gross salary of teachers, in Euro purchasing power standard (EURO PPS), reached a mere 13,925 euros in Slovakia, which was the fourth-lowest sum in the EU.

The education authorities say that, despite these figures, the overall efficiency of the Slovak school system is relatively high. Some authors, however, question the credibility of the data acquired by testing. Vladimír Burjan, editor-in-chief of Dobrá škola, claims that there must be widespread cheating in the testing itself or in the assessment of the tests. He points at the huge shift between the distribution of pupils´ measured efficiency in 2013 maths test for 9th-grade pupils and the Gaussian curve of efficiency.

The main problem with low salaries in the education sector lies in the fact that the sector becomes very unattractive for young, creative, empathic young people. The prestige and social status of the teaching profession has decreased significantly over the last 10-15 years. Nowadays, a Teacher Training College (Pedagogical Faculty) usually figures among the choices of a young person leaving secondary school only after all other options have been exhausted.  The trend of deterioration of the quality of the teaching staff will have a negative impact on the quality of the school-leavers, and, consequently, also on the performance of the economy.

The most neglected element – the child

The main criticism of the educational policies of the state focuses on the fact that the authorities neglect the most important element of the whole educational system, namely the child itself. Within the so-called public debate on education there is little talk about the fundamental goals of education, about the needs and rights of the child, and about the legitimate interests, will and expectations of the parents or legal guardians. One would even presume that Slovak politicians or ministerial civil servants have never read international documents and recommendations on the right to education.

These documents put emphasis not only on the cognitive aspects of education, but also on building social competences, creativity, intercultural understanding, and education on human rights and democratic citizenship. They say that education should not be reduced to the preparation of a labour force for the market, or to improving the state´s macroeconomic data. Evidence proves that neglecting the humane aspect, the value dimension and the inclusivity of  education weakens the social cohesion of society and, in the long run, has a negative impact on the economy, too.

Inclusion of diversity of any kind is one of the biggest challenges facing the Slovak educational system. This not only concerns the Roma, Hungarian-speaking children, children with disabilities, migrants and aliens, LGBTI persons, but also talented or (temporarily) underperforming children. Slovak authorities have over the years constantly ignored or misinterpreted recommendations of international monitoring bodies emphasising the need to strengthen the inclusivity of the Slovakian school-system and of putting bigger emphasis on intercultural education.

Diversity? Forget it.

Before entering school, Roma children are tested in Slovak language skills and, after failing the test, are sent to “special” schools, which are a blind alley, from the point of view of a full educational career. The national curriculum does not include content on the culture or identity of other national, ethnic or social and disadvantaged groups living in Slovakia.

Many young people have no idea how the Hungarian or Roma minority find themselves in Slovakia. They know little about the contributions these groups, let alone Germans, Jews, Ruthenians, Czechs and Poles, make to the diversity, and economic and cultural development of the country. According to a survey accomplished within a project run by the Slovak Youth Institute IUVENTA in autumn 2012, on a sample of 761 respondents, 77% of the population of Slovakia identified with national (=ethnic Slovak) elitism (defining itself mainly in opposition to Hungarians) and some 2/3 were identified with anti-Roma attitudes. These dismaying trends are unfortunately not addressed in the above mentioned report of the Ministry.

The Ministry argues that schools can involve intercultural content in their own curriculum, where the design of up to 30% of the content (in schools with Hungarian as the language of instruction, 20%) is left in principle to the discretion of the school. In reality, the situation looks somewhat different. The prescribed national curriculum (in theory 70% or 80% of the content) is so tough and packed that teachers usually use the additional 20 or 30% of free space for tutorage of missed topics in maths, national language or another compulsory subject.

It must be said at the same time that most teachers are not prepared to create content by themselves; they mainly rely on the Ministry and its supporting institutions. However, little help comes from that direction. There are some dozen of these supporting institutions; however, their main activity is producing paperwork for each other or for the Ministry and laying additional administrative burdens on the schoolmasters and teachers. Plurality and variability of methods and content remains thus an illusion, topped by the fact that there is no real textbook market in Slovakia.

Yes, the system needs change

There is much that is dysfunctional in the system of co-operation between various subjects engaged in the education sector: the Ministry of Education and its supporting institutions, the founders (local and regional self-governments in case of public schools, churches and private persons in case of non-public schools), school boards, civil society, and parents. Schools in many places do not function as real communities, many elected local and regional governments are corrupt and incompetent, and many schoolmasters are lacking the specific managerial skills needed in this sector.

However, even against this background, efforts to accomplish “structural changes” envisaged by some members of Fico’s cabinet hold out little hope from the point of view of an enlightened liberal democrat. The direction of these changes is clear: re-centralisation of public administration, including administration of the system of education, and concentration of power.

The government plans to abolish specialised lower-level state administrations, and to re-establish a model of District State Administration Offices with joint competences, overseen by the Ministry of the Interior, resembling very much the era of Communism. There are even plans to abolish elected regional self-governments, and to take away the school-founder’s competences from the self-governments and vest them to the state. (This has already been done by in Hungary.) It looks like the Slovak government, as with many authoritarian regimes in the past, regards education as an instrument to form people in its own image.

History is not a neutral medium. As I understand it, history is a way of problematizing various (social, political, literary, etc.) ways of constructing and reconstructing individual or social identity patterns. If that is the case, it is an active tool that often problematizes its own rhetoric and semantics, along with the very grammar of historical narratives. In these terms, history encompasses the main fields of an individual’s personal interest by means of defining links to national and European narratives of multinational and multicultural solidarity, for example. I would say that history is sometimes a field of purely emotional policy, but it can also be outlined and described as a space for rational work within the field of social and political myths. Since this is the basis for various paradigms and individual or collective decisions and choices (we simply cannot exist outside history), it is one of the primary realities in which we live. In summary, I would say that in a way history has to be a good business insofar as it concerns everyone.

How would you describe the work of your company Maksa? Is it “museum outsourcing”? What was your inspiration?

The main goal of the company is to provide various museums with up-to-date ways of creating highly inventive and modern exhibitions. I author what are called arrangement concepts, exhibit content-related scenarios, and multimedia scripts. Likewise, I participate in a team consisting of architects, sound and lighting directors, graphic artists, multimedia designers, and experts that provide us with their knowledge related to the particular subject or theme of an exhibition or museum. As you have called it, it is a kind of “museum outsourcing.” Maksa specializes in creating exhibitions and expositions at all levels, creating not only full arrangement concepts and content-related scenarios but also building museums and exhibitions. That means that the scope of products we sell is rather wide. The company also participates in projects that belong to the educational and touristic markets, such as creating cultural parks or sightseeing paths.

I would say that the main inspiration comes from within the field of modern scenography. It was the founder of the company, Krzysztof Lang, who came up with the idea and still is the source of new solutions, pushing us to search for new inspirations. We are concerned with elements of visibility, spatiality, sound and light properties in order to design an exhibition as a sort of performance and to provide visitors with a cognitive, intellectual, and emotional experience. Our practice is therefore holistic and is concerned with the reception and engagement of visitors. What we do is try to create exhibitions and museums outside of conventional perspectives. We do not want visitors to watch an exhibition. They ought to involve themselves with the museum space.

The very basis of the concepts we create is always a particular narrative. In point of fact, visiting a museum is participating in a sort of plot. The narrative around which the exhibition revolves enables us to unify thematic units (corresponding with spatial divisions of an exhibition or museum interiors) along with directions for moving about. Everything is coherent with soundscape, lighting, materials, and fabrics. The exhibition is designed with a number of associations and several meanings in mind, all of which visitors have the opportunity to discover.

The narrative is usually derived from the theme of an exhibition and is based on research that I do. This means that every exhibition concept is rooted in a subject; its motivation is always essential.

How large is the company?

We have several permanent staff members, but it is the specific character of each project that determines the number of people at work. The same goes for successive subcontractors, such as various companies operating in the new technologies market, for instance. Creating a single exhibition does not necessarily involve a multi-person team. But we are also engaged in designing museum buildings along with permanent and temporal exhibitions. The number of people employed in such projects obviously increases.

How successful is the work, in terms of revenue or other measurable features?

The success of the company should be measured with reference to current and previously realized projects. Maksa created the concept for The Katyn Museum, now being built in Warsaw. A few years ago, the company was also awarded the Sybilla Award for its “Central Industrial Region for the Future” exhibition. This is by far the most prestigious award in the museum market in Poland. The competition is organized by The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in Poland. It is also worth mentioning that it was Maksa that created and built The European Tale Centre (Pacanow, Poland), where a vast range of multimedia technologies have been combined with traditional elements in order to create a highly interactive exposition. At present, Poland is the only country in which Maksa operates.

Is there anything comparable within Poland or elsewhere in Europe?

There are few companies in Poland that share the same field of interest. The same applies to Poland’s neighbors, such as Germany. I would say that these shared interests are defined by the conviction that a museum is not simply about exhibits on display, and that modern technology needs to be placed in the service of the museum – not the other way around.

How is your work affected by the traditional Polish passion for historical policy, which is not so strong, for example, in the Czech Republic?

First of all, the museums that employ us are not only historical, although we often work for municipal history museums across the country. But the presence of historical thinking in everyday politics enables me to abstract a number of various narrative patterns, along with symbolical complexes, that are widely shared by society or within particular communities. Such patterns, usually of the literary type, can be used as the basis for an exhibition experience of that which is different, in both historical and political terms. So it is not the passion for historical policy or its absence that creates the basis for my work. It is the need for narrative, plot patterns, historical, social, political, and literary tales that hold and structure our identities, our ways of perceiving various issues. These narrative patterns are what I usually look for, and what I try to distill and position within particular scenarios.

Why do you take that approach?

The reasons are numerous. First of all, it is a genuinely interesting and demanding job. Every project I participate in requires different knowledge. So I always have to read a new set of books and gain new knowledge. Apart from the creative gradient of my work, I think this could be listed as the most important reason for working in this market.

Does occasionally employing your company mean that museums (and the state) do not have enough money to pay employees?

Creating a museum or an exposition is not simply putting the exhibits on display in cases. Or at least, it is not anymore. Modern exhibitions require soundscapes, lighting systems and a coherent concept of the whole. Museum councils and executive branches are representative, but creating everything from the concept to the moment of displayed exhibits is usually beyond their professional reach. So actually, it is not finances that drive museums to employ companies such as Maksa. Museum employees usually use cases, and they sometimes arrange a space for the exposition. We come up with a coherent story, with an exhibition that is also a narrative employing various technologies, which enables us to provide a better product. And that is what it all is about: the marketability of an exhibition, and the number of visitors that will be willing to come, is it not? We provide museums with the newest ideas and solutions. And the people who work on such projects have expert knowledge of various components of the exposition. Of course, there is also the issue of European subsidies, usually the very core of funding. But usually everything ultimately comes from the demands of creativity and the need for professionally designed museum products.

Did we already pay all our historical debts in post-communist countries, in the sense that we have now discussed and described all the forgotten or hidden events from our past?

I would not agree with the description of society as a community that is able to reach a sort of static level of overcoming all historical debts, dark memories, etc. Working on our own mistakes, processing our own identity, our own prejudices, of the past and present, is at the very core of modern society, is it not? I would say that the modes of working on what we call “the past” can either define us as a free society or quite the opposite. It is not the position we have gained but the ways in which we employ various modes of interpreting ourselves and our neighbors. To be free, a modern society has to be able to think about itself and its our neighbors using different styles, rhetoric, literary genres, and with the imperative of their equivalence, with the strong conviction that none of our identity narratives is exceptional.

If you were given 100,000 euros and asked to prepare a historical exhibition that would be important to all four Visegrad countries, what would you chose to do?

Milan Kundera once said that the small nations of Central Europe constitute the arch-Europe: “the greatest variety within the smallest space.” He also held that while multilingualism structures the truth of Central Europe, our particular languages are the fated cages from which we cannot escape (unlike Kundera himself, who in fact did). I would like to focus on this issue in relation to various historical perspectives. The Visegrad Group is an alliance for integration and cooperation, but it is also a highly multilingual area. Most of us can understand each other (maybe with the exception of Hungarian – speaking people), at least aside from a historical, political basis. But at the very core of the Central-European area, this multilinguality sustains the danger of incomprehension and failures in understanding. What we share actually divides us. At the same time, we are deeply marked by the possibility and impossibility of understanding. What is more: history is a painful baseline for our identities. I would like to combine experiences of various ways of naming and telling our own history, creating identities with historical events and literary traditions of each of the four countries. I would like to draw upon the distinctions between the factual, linguistic and literary. Do we all use the same rhetorical patterns? Are the figures of comedy or tragedy the only ones that we impose on our historical narratives? Which linguistic inventions are we are trying to escape in our particular modes of expression, and how do we communicate with others outside the V4? Given 100,000 euro, I would research the subjects of literary, linguistic, and factual conjunction that have determined the invention of the Visegrad Group.

The article was originally published in “Visegrad Insight” vol. 3.