Peter Kalmus

* 1953

  • “Suddenly in 1968, when you didn’t perfectly know Solzhenitsyn and his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, you had an F at school. However, a year later, if they found this book at your house, you got arrested for 5 years. That’s how it changed. We had literature and at the study room, my classmates tore out pages from the students’ books describing Mňačko, Solzhenitsyn, just because they didn’t manage to print out new books. I refused it.”

  • “The basis of underground was that the majority of people, about 95% had the essential self-preservation instinct to have children, family, and once having kids one never wanted to have them sick or in orphanage. That’s why people tried to collaborate with the regime. They went to manifestations on the 1st of May, attended meetings. One of the Screwball’s messages was that if you didn’t want any career, you didn’t mind working as boilerman, worker at a farm, or dustman, because you had nothing to lose. They had nowhere else to put you. However, people were afraid to lose comfortable career – of being a head of a hospital department, or a teacher. If you gave up your career when being young and childless, they had nothing to blackmail you for. Their philosophy was: If you don’t do what we want, your children won’t get to the pioneer camp, they won’t be accepted to grammar school… Now you got scared. For God’s sake, why would I have three kids if they were doomed to end up like dummies? This was the principle of the flock, of the mass.”

  • “Of course, there were many official artists who had works of high quality. Some of them played both sides and worked also for Bolsheviks. Although, there were some unique artists, who worked just for the public sphere and had monumental pieces without idealistic intervention. First of them was Ján Mathé and the second was Mária Bartuzsová, whom I used to help for over a year. She reproached herself even for making a state seal with a star. Heineken has a star, too! This is a proof that there were prime artists in Bohemia and Slovakia, as well as in Košice, who earned well and didn’t have to do ideological works. They were able to defend themselves in not doing Lenins, Gottwalds, sickles and hammers; they didn’t do ideological art, but art the way they felt it. This is how Ján Mathé, and let’s say, in a way also Alexander Eckerdt worked.”

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    Košice, Slovensko, 27.03.2018

    (audio)
    duration: 04:59:36
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th century
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If you gave up your career when being young and childless, they had nothing to blackmail you for

Peter Kalmus
Peter Kalmus
photo: archív pamätníka

Peter Kalmus comes from a nationally mixed family. His father was an engineer of a Jewish-German descent and his mother was a Slovak, practicing evangelical religion. He spent his childhood in Piešťany. His parents got divorced and Peter doesn’t remember his father from his early childhood. In 1962 he moved to Košice. He met his father for the first time in summer of 1968, when they formed an activist-artistic installation together as a protest against the Soviet troops’ invasion of our territory. Peter Kalmus has been proceeding such civic activities until today. He studied at the Secondary Technical School of Transport in Košice and later he was an autodidact. He had various contacts with Prague underground and culture, which he closely monitored. He attended various forbidden concerts and exhibitions. Until present days he has been a very significant person of Slovak culture. He lives by turns in Košice and Piešťany and has no children.