Pavol Kosnáč is a social scientist and the director of the DEKK Institute: Social Cohesion Research Centre based in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Last month, I was going about my normal work day which usually means conducting surveys, interpreting data, standing as an expert witness at the court on religious extremism cases or reading books and by a complete chance I came across an Instagram post by Elizabeth Resnick that mentioned the University of Brighton Design Archives’ blog post on Dorrit Dekk, a Czechoslovak-born artist who inspired the founding story of our institute.
The DEKK Institute consists of social scientists, students and humanitarians. Its founding members met in 2015 while doing humanitarian work in Iraq and Syria, working in refugee camps, providing primary medical care and supporting former Yazidi sex-slaves who were rescued from ISIS, a terrorist group that tried to establish a protostate in the area and was ravaging the region at the time. That experience has taught us that peace and good relationships in society are not a given but come through effort, knowledge and accumulating shared good will.
Image 1: Slovak medical team establishing a health point in a refugee camp near Erbil in Iraq, 2015. Courtesy of Anton Frič.
After a few years when we returned home to Bratislava, we suddenly had a bad feeling. We noticed patterns of social disintegration such as erosion of communities, low interpersonal trust, growing tribalisation and ideological entrenchment, that we have seen in the Middle East, and believed it was somehow specific to the region. It was not – it can happen to any human society. In Central-Eastern Europe, we should have known better.
Slovakia, together with Poland and Hungary, has its own ‘identity crisis club’ – we are the most polarised countries in Europe. Britain is not that Great when it comes to being United, but it has long way to go to reach our levels of polarisation.
Image 2: Polarisation of Society, V-DEM Project, 2024.
As you can see, we are in a completely different field than Dorrit Dekk was, but we believe we share a strong connection in attitude, which is why we took her name in 2020 when our institute was founded. Dorritt Dekk comes from Brno, an hour’s drive from the DEKK headquarters, and where I spent 5 years studying social cohesion and talking to paramilitaries (before it was cool). She was an ordinary person capable of extraordinary courage in a terrible situation, that (even if by proxy) contributed to breaking the Enigma cypher machine used to protect Nazi military communication. It was a massive challenge of her time and breaking it has saved countless lives, and shortened the Second World War by two years, according to some historians.
In Slovakia, but also in Europe in general, our contemporary ‘Enigma’ is the erosion of social cohesion. If we don’t ‘decipher’ how to stop the erosion of cohesion, countless lives will be lost. We were thus looking if we could find a Czechoslovak who contributed to breaking of the Enigma codes – and we found Dorrit Dekk in the list of women who worked for Bletchley Park.
Apparently, she was multilingual and fluent in German, so when she escaped from Nazi-occupied Bohemia together with her mother and reached London, she volunteered to fight the Third Reich. Assigned to the Women’s Royal Naval Service’s (WRNS) radio intelligence division, Dekk joined the Y-service, a network of intercept stations tasked with monitoring Axis military communications. Her role as a ‘listener’ required meticulous attention to detail: she transcribed encrypted German naval messages, often transmitted via Morse code in short bursts, which were then relayed to Bletchley Park for decryption. Her transcripts contributed to the decryption efforts that revealed U-boat patrol lines, enabling supply convoys that were desperately needed in Britain to reroute and evade attacks. This work placed her at the forefront of Allied efforts to counter the U-boat threat in the Atlantic.
Dekk’s contributions exemplify the often unsung role of women in the war effort. Of the 8,000 WRNS members assigned to cryptographic duties, many, like Dekk, were multilingual refugees whose skills proved indispensable. Her work remained classified until the 1970s, a common fate for Bletchley Park personnel bound by the Official Secrets Act.
Born as Dorothea Karoline Fuhrmann in 1917, Dorrit Dekk stood up to the challenges of her time and was able to keep her normal life and work, becoming a graphic designer. Some of her legendary posters aged remarkably well and were even dusted off during the COVID-19 pandemic. I am sure Brits are familiar with the “Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases” slogan that Dekk utilised on a series of posters commissioned by the Ministry of Health recommending people to “Trap the germs in your handkerchief”. The slogan even found its way into medical scientific papers.
We resonate with her story and personal resilience, and are happy to learn of ongoing research from her archive at the University of Brighton Design Archives. She was an extraordinary woman who made ripples not only across artistic and military worlds, but if we can humbly count ourselves into people she inspired, also scientific and humanitarian.
We would be very interested in learning more about her life and her work, and we are looking forward to any endeavours of this community that will include her legacy. We even contributed to some applied arts and designs ourselves – our work was part of the inspiration for the 2024 Deutsche and Slovak Telekom Christmas commercial titled “Bubbles” that made a heartwarming observation on polarisation and what it does to us.
In today’s chaotic world, be more like Dekk. Do your duty when necessary and follow your passion whenever possible. She was a rare combination of courage and discipline on one side and creativity, inquisitiveness and originality on the other. Adversity shaped her into a unique, new person which is why, I think, she eventually picked a new name. It wasn’t just a whim or a marketing decision, it was a rite of passage, and she earned it. May her story inspire even more people to be better versions of themselves, and leave the world a bit better, safer and a more colourful place than they found it.
