We have lost a symbol of freedom and humanity - 2024-02-13 02:09:19

/ world today news/ The great writer, director, anti-fascist, public figure and rebel Angel Wagenstein passed away at the age of 100

In 2016, we were together in Skopje. At one stall, Jackie saw a large red flag with a long handle and turned several times to catch another glimpse of it. I gave it to him and he ran across the central square waving this flag, a symbol of his life. All around people stopped and applauded.

It is strange that this was my first vision when the terrible news came that Angel Wagenstein had died that night. A prolific writer, director, anti-fascist, communist and an amazing friend one could only dream of. There was not a person who knocked on his door and he did not answer. A separate thick book could be written for each of these sides of his life, which took place during three critical eras. But there is something that unites them: the ability to be free, which made him strong in everything – and when, through the image of Aesop, he spoke about the rebellion against tyranny, and when his king Boris I conveyed to us the faith in the eternal Bulgarian foundations, and when he resented against today’s disintegration of Bulgaria, and when he criticized the corruption in the party and wrote to Ninova: “I beg you, resign!”

Here are a few words of Wagenstein from one of our interviews in “Duma”:

„My ideal has always been and remains communism. Communism is a melody. This is one song. One sometimes forgets the words, but the melody remains. Someone can change the words, but it’s important to keep the melody…

I have resisted and am resisting fascism. As we can see, it is being revived in Bulgaria, I don’t know if everyone understands it. I also resist capitalism. Because fascism is a very disgusting but temporary building material of capitalism…

The crisis in the BSP and the left in general, in my opinion, is primarily due to its ideological depersonalization, a cowardly desire to “subdue” and merge with the environment – i.e. refusal of a clearly expressed leftist individuality, of protection of the age-old value system of the left, bureaucratic apathy in the right-wing’s systematic strategy of demonizing it, of falsifying individual events and periods of its history. The indifference, the lazy refusal of active resistance and the reluctance to express publicly and clearly his point of view every time the replacement of the truth is done by individual persons and media, gradually deforms – especially among the young generations – the idea of BSP and of what happened in an ambiguous and relatively short historical period. The entire bloody 20th century – an arena of wars, violence, coups, political murders and revolutions – was reduced by the high corridors of power, and by the street armchairs, and by the media manipulators only to accusations of real or imagined mistakes and sins committed after September 9 1944. The murders of Stamboliyski, Aleko, Geo, Vaptsarov and hundreds of others, the night coups and atrocities of the police and gendarmerie, the emigration of Jewish families from Sofia and the confiscation of all their property, the countless victims of people who vowed to the people, persecuted with entire families and condemned to dungeons and gallows, and today denoted by the cheerful “red trash”. How can young people know about these carefully erased pages of our history, as soon as we shut up too?! “

Angel Wagenstein is part of the mind and heart of the party – he became a member in 1941 and remained always faithful to the socialist idea of a better and more humane world. „ I may be a complete fool, but I remain faithful now more than I did before November 10, 1989. I wasn’t faithful then – I was bad. Now I’m bad again because they don’t forgive me for being faithful.” These are Wagenstein’s words when he answered a poll as a deputy in the Great National Assembly. He never had an easy life – like anyone who has and stands for a position. As he told me in an interview: “I have never accepted overripe truths past their expiration date like sour lanchen marmalade. So I try to awaken those supposedly simple but warm-blooded notions of good and evil, of ordinary virtue and ordinary abomination, of friendship and treachery, of dignity and humiliation . “

He would say the same words now, sitting in his small study, where his photos as a prisoner in the hell of the Geshev police and the sword of Boris I hang next to him, and from the piles of manuscripts and books, spaces and eras are peeking out, the memory of which prevents time from turn them to dust. And the former boy from the Plovdiv neighborhood “Orta Mezar”, whom the world has long called the Great Wagenstein, watches on the computer monitor the film about himself (“Art is a weapon”) by the American director Andrea Simon from the New York studio “Arcadia”, which along with the story about his books and films, about his enormous authority from Shanghai to Moscow, Berlin, Rome, Paris and Madrid to New York, also describes in the most detail his participation in the Resistance, the death sentence from which he was miraculously saved by the coming of the Ninth of September, his enthusiastic words about Vaptsarov. Unlike the Bulgarian television stations, which today in the announcement of Jackie’s death called him a great writer and screenwriter, but did not even dare to say that he was an anti-fascist…

And another time I wrote about the ups and downs in his life: “Several of his films were banned and stopped before 1989. In the early 1950s, they even expelled him from the party, then it turns out that they mistakenly attributed an incident to him has nothing to do with it, and they restore it without interruption of party service. After 1989, he was handed 6 volumes of materials from the wiretapping of the former DS in his home. All the time, his films have been awarded with the highest awards in the world and in our country, his books have been translated into dozens of languages, he is the winner of the highest Bulgarian state awards. the famous writer and journalist Valentin Karamanchev writes that today Bulgaria has two writers who can receive the Nobel Prize – Angel Vazhenstein and Anton Donchev. They are both gone now.

In 1968, Wagenstein was filming in the Czech Republic for his film “Aesop”. They filmed the episode when King Croesus entered Ephesus, where a tyrant ruled – on a ship with red sails, the warlord shouted: “We are coming to help democracy and we will stay here as long as the people want us.” At that moment it was reported that Soviet troops had entered Czechoslovakia. (“I went into the shed and cried. Then there was a long investigation against me, no one wanted to believe that I had written the script a year earlier.”) Wagenstein doesn’t just make films, he states positions to the viewer. His film “Goya” with the magnificent actor Donatas Banionis, shot in Leningrad, in Bulgaria, in the GDR and in Dubrovnik, is not just about the life of the great artist, but about whether you are ready to compromise for the chance to be courted and cared for by the authorities. This is Jackie: everywhere and always alert and unrelenting.”

Let’s remember the finale of Jackie’s film “Supplement to the Law for the Protection of the State” – about the terror against communists and farmers in 1925. All the leftists are killed, the police can rest, no one will disturb the order anymore by protecting the simple peasants . And at this moment of pogrom beyond all hopes, the astonished eyes turn to the hill – there, unknown from where, a proud red flag flutters in the wind. Shot but alive… With this message, Angel Wagenstein always remains with us.

His amazing biography

Angel Wagenstein was born on October 17, 1922 in Plovdiv. For political reasons, his family emigrated briefly to France. After the amnesty, he returned to Bulgaria, graduated from a construction technical school. After Bulgaria entered the war on the side of Nazi Germany, he was sent to a Jewish forced labor camp, from where he escaped and joined the resistance movement against fascism. Remsist, member of the BKP since 1941, participant in the Resistance, member of a combat group that set fire to the warehouse for fur coats in Sofia intended for the Hitlerite army near Moscow during the frosty winter of 1941-1942. He was not even 19 years old then. After treason, he was captured, severely beaten in the Geshev police, sentenced to death. Only chance helps him live. Part of the Sofia prison was destroyed by an American bomb, the prisoners were transferred to the Sliven prison, where they await the execution of their sentences. But the Soviet Army entered Bulgaria and on September 8, Jackie was released.

Immediately after that, Wagenstein went to the front, as one of the leaders of the first Bulgarian front theater “Narodna Estrada”. After the war, he was among the first batch of Bulgarian students sent to Moscow to study cinematography at VGIK. He is the first foreigner to graduate from this oldest film academy in the world – his diploma is number 1. When he returns, he takes his first steps in “Bulgarian Cinematography”. And his second film after “Septemvriitsi” – “Alarm” by Orlin Vassilev, was stopped by Valko Chervenkov, because it… lacked the decisive role of the Red Army. However, “Trevoga” is the first Bulgarian film with an international award – from Karlovy Vary. Then, in 1959, Wagenstein’s film “Stars” directed by Konrad Wolff (brother of the famous German intelligence officer Markus Wolff) was banned in our country. “Connie passed away at just 56, he was like a brother to me,” says Jackie. While they ban “Stars” in our country, the film received the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, although it was presented at the festival as German(!). This is the biggest award for a Bulgarian film so far, it wins prizes everywhere it participates. A is banned in Bulgaria because it shows the deportation of Macedonian and Aegean Jews carried out by the Bulgarian fascist government and the Bulgarian army – something about which even today the authorities prefer to remain silent.

Angel Wagenstein was among the 12 intellectual reformers invited by President François Mitterrand to the historic breakfast in Sofia behind closed doors in January 1989. He was a member of the committee for the defense of Ruse. On his idea, on November 18, 1989, the big rally was organized on the square “St. Alexander Nevsky”. He was a BSP deputy in the 7th Great National Assembly.

Wagenstein has written the screenplays for 52 feature, documentary and animated films produced in nine countries. He is the author of plays for adults and children, staged in Bulgaria and abroad. Among his most famous titles are “Stars”, “Addition to the Law on the Protection of the State”, “Stars in the Hair, Tears in the Eyes”, “After the End of the World”, “Boris I”, “Goya or the Hard Way of Knowledge “, “Aesop”, “After the end of the world”. His films have been awarded the highest prizes at international film festivals in Cannes, Berlin, Adelaide, Vienna, Acapulco, Moscow, Karlovy Vary, Avellino, etc. He wrote 7 books. His novels “Isaakovo Pentateuch”, “Far from Toledo” and “Goodbye, Shanghai” have been translated and are still published today in French, German, English, Russian, Spanish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Macedonian, Italian, Chinese, Hebrew. They have been honored with prestigious world literary awards and nominations, including the Jean Monnet European Prize for Literature in 2004. He was officially invited to become a member of the Writers Guild of America. In 2011, his book “Before the end of the world. Doodles from the Neolithic”. An ironic and wise balance novel, containing treasured memories of the “neolithic” of the era, funny episodes from the kitchen of the cinema, unknown pages about the Resistance and about the paradoxes of the time in which we live. And on the basis of another famous work of his – “Dream of St. Boris I”, the script of the emblematic feature film “Boris I” by the director Borislav Sharaliev with the participation of Stefan Danailov in the role of the great Bulgarian ruler was created.

Angel Wagenstein is the recipient of numerous Bulgarian and foreign awards, incl. the orders “Stara Planina – 1st century”, “St. Cyril and Methodius” with a necklace, the French titles “Officer of the Order of Merit to the Nation” and “For Literature and Art”, two decorations from the Kingdom of Spain. He is a laureate of the Bulgarian State Prize “Paisiy Hilendarski”, the German National Art Prize 1st century, the Annual Literary Prize of the Sorbonne, the International Prize for Human Rights “A World Without Nazism”, the Russian “Pushkin” Medal for Merit in Development of our cultural ties, of awards of the Union of Bulgarian Writers and of the Union of Bulgarian Journalists, of the Award of the National Assembly of the BSP for political journalism and journalism “Georgi Kirkov – Master” (2017), of the Sofia Award for outstanding achievements and contribution in the national culture. He is an honorary citizen of Plovdiv.

The biggest warm and compassionate heart stopped beating, wrote Angel’s granddaughter – Jacqueline Wagenstein. The funeral will be in a close family circle. The service will take place in the Sofia Synagogue on the thirtieth day of death, as dictated by Jewish tradition.

As an inmate in the Geshev Police