ACADEMICS
AND THEIR BOOKS
András Kovács
STASI Documents and Book
The box you have photographed contains documents from the archive of the East German political police-STASI, I collected them about three, four years ago when I was on a research stay in Berlin and the purpose was to find as many documents as possible from the archives of different communist countries, namely the documents about the Jews who were living in the country and about the Jewish organizations functioning in the country collected by the authorities. So, I have done this research in Hungary and then with the help of my former CEU students in Czech Republic and Poland. Then I went to Germany myself and that was a very interesting trip because it turned out that very little was done on the specific issue and on the other hand there was a huge amount of documents collected by the STASI on Jews in Eastern Germany and in general. I was also very much surprised because it turned out that STASI created a full list of Jews living in East Germany with names and everything and second very important thing was, and this may sound a bit bizarre, that in the communist bloc the STASI was responsible for coordinating the secret police issues on Jewish affairs, so the German secret police coordinated the efforts of the other agencies on Jewish affairs. My book came into being as a result of this research not only in Germany but in the other countries as well and it contains these documents that I had found in different archives. I introduce these documents and discuss them in my book.
Travel Photographs
The three pictures on the wall are photographs I made, the first two in New York and the last one in Berlin. This is the famous Berlin TV tower which has a very cold structure so I put a boy in the middle of this structure. There are some colors on him and this creates a quite interesting disequilibrium. The second one was taken in the very cold winter day on Coney Island in New York, all the shops around the beach were closed, nobody was there, only garbage cans… and the third one I have made while I was walking down the street in New York. I looked down the shaft of the subway and I saw my shadow twice, once down on the rails and the other shadow was on the grids. I made a mistake while taking this photo, one can see my shoe on it which makes it easier to interpret what is on the picture but I like this double shadow very much: the shadow inside the shadow.
Interview by Ana Lolua
Photography by Damian Aleksiev
December 5, 2017
András Kovács is a Professor in the Department of History and the Director of Jewish Studies at the Central European University​.
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We talked about his book and collection of STASI documents, as well as his own photographs from his travels.