Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in the Cold War
Exhibition on the history of the Munich-based American radio station.
Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) broadcast for over four decades targeting the Eastern Bloc states. On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of launching the first programs, Galeria Centralis will open an exhibition on July 14, 2011 on the history of the radio from its American beginnings to Munich based broadcasting and to its moving to Prague in 1994.
Helena Bambasová, Ambassador of the Czech Republic in Hungary will open the program; introductory speech by György Varga, one time Budapest correspondent of RFE/RL Czech service; the exhibition will be opened by Jan Kalous Deputy Director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes based in Prague.
RFE/RL played an important role in cold war conflicts. Unlike traditional press outlets, radio waves easily went through the Iron Curtain and spread the “free word.” At that time, the Radio played a similar role in fighting authoritarian regimes as the internet does today, which consequently put RFE/RL in the crosshairs of communist secret services. As a matter of fact, part of the radio building was ruined in a bombing attack in 1981. The “Voice of Freedom” was multilingual: Czechoslovakian, Polish, Bulgarian, Romanian and Hungarian exiles spoke in their native languages and their words were broadcast to target countries.
The exhibition presents the country sections as well as the influence of the broadcasts on the social and political events of the cold war era, such as the 1956 Hungarian revolution and the 1989 Czechoslovakian Velvet Revolution.
Organizers: OSA Archivum at the Central European University, repository of the documents of the RFE/RL Research Institute; the Czech Centers in Munich and Budapest, institutes of the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which have been representing the Czech Republic in the South German region and Hungary for 11 years; the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes based in Prague, the research center of the Czech recent past and manager of the Czechoslovakian state security archives; Eastern European Studies are a priority, international and interdisciplinary MA course run jointly by the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich and the Regensburg University; Collegium Carolinum, a Czech research center with a focus on contemporary Eastern European history.
The original German language version of the exhibition opened June 29, 2011 in Munich. The current English and Hungarian language exhibition will travel from Budapest to New York, and then on to Ljubljana and other cities.
Address: Budapest 1051 Nádor u. 11
The exhibition runs from July 14 to August 24, 2011.