Farewell to Spring – Opening Event
Opening Event of the Exhibition “Farewell to Spring: Revolutionary Youth Magazines 1968. Nr. 2.”
The year 1968 started with great hopes in some Central and Eastern European countries: for a brief moment it seemed that strict ideology was being replaced by political pragmatism. Elements of consumer culture, and even a private sector appeared; cultural censorship was loosened – or lifted. The whirlwind of the Western protest movements reached the region, while counter culture also left its mark on Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Hungary. Similarly to Western youth, young people from behind the Iron Curtain also wanted to correct the mistakes of the previous generation, and they found their own voice and their own ways to express themselves. Creating a fictional international youth magazine, the exhibition “Farewell to Spring” presents this thriving and hopeful period of student protests, happenings and other events of youth and counter culture, which ended with the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Opening remarks by József Mélyi.
The video recording of this event is available on Blinken OSA’s YouTube Channel.