4
RECOVERING NATIONAL VICTIMHOOD AT THE HOUSE OF TERROR
For decades, we have been passing by a seemingly peaceful, bourgeois apartment building, located on one of the most beautiful avenues of our capital, among palatial residences and enormous trees that never lose their cheerful character. And it never crosses our mind what this building’s past might conceal. We do not even think about the fact that this house is a memento. Living pain. But there comes a day when we know. When we glance at it, when we truly see it. It stands naked in front of us, it lets us see what it has covered up, and it forces all of us to understand.
—Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s speech at the opening of the House of Terror, 2002 [Gondola.hu 2002]
On February 24, 2002, a new museum opened on Andrássy Street, a tree-lined boulevard that is Budapest’s equivalent of Paris’s Champs Elysées. Here, in a stately building much like its neighbors, the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross Party tortured and killed Jewish and political prisoners after it seized power in a successful putsch in October 1944. Later, the communist state security police, the ÁVO (later known as the ÁVH),1 used the same house as its headquarters and the same cells to imprison and torture political prisoners. Although the building stopped being used for these purposes after the early 1950s, according to urban legend (or, at least, the legend “revived” for the purposes of the museum), it continued to be known in the local vernacular as the House of Terror (Terror Háza). This name, in turn, was given to the museum that the Fidesz-led coalition government created within the building’s walls: a historical exhibition dedicated to the victims of fascism and communism.
The House of Terror was an immediate success. The first round of the general elections was six weeks away, and the museum’s opening was timed to fall on the eve of a new holiday dedicated to the victims of communism. Each morning, visitors of all ages could be seen reading conservative newspapers and discussing the upcoming election as they waited outside in line for hours beneath the museum’s pengefal (knife wall), a stark metal scaffolding that slices the building out of its surrounding urban landscape. Andrássy Street is a protected UNESCO World Heritage Site, and its architecture and symbolism conjure up one of Hungary’s historical highpoints: the frenzy of construction and monumentalization in Budapest at the end of the nineteenth century, and the economic development, political power, and national-cultural vigor that made such growth possible. In contrast, the House of Terror’s knife wall casts much of the building into shadow, severing the museum from its nostalgic turn-of-the-century setting and thrusting it into the violence of twentieth-century modernity. Only cutouts in the metal allow sunlight to hit the building’s facade in the shape of the word “TERROR” as well as a five-pointed star and an arrow cross. Terror thus literally haunts the building, as a once-hidden remain of socialism that the knife wall transforms into spectral possibility: a threat for the present and future.
FIGURE 4.1 Line of visitors waiting to enter the House of Terror during the first weeks of its opening. Personal photograph, 2002.
As a memorial space that addresses Hungary’s experience of state socialism, the House of Terror appears similar to the Statue Park Museum that opened nearly ten years earlier. Yet while both museums recontextualize the remains of the previous era, they do so for distinctly different ends. The purpose of the Statue Park Museum was to lay the past to rest and thus to demonstrate the triumph of democracy by containing socialism’s visible remains. In contrast, the House of Terror sought to bring a hidden history of persecution out of invisibility so that Fidesz could argue that remains in the form of communist crimes and their perpetrators continued to threaten Hungary’s political transformation. That is, if the Statue Park Museum reduced the problem of the past to easily isolated physical remainders, the House of Terror would use the materiality of its location at 60 Andrássy Street as mere evidence of a more widespread contagion in political and public life. No longer were remains merely a question of the past as past. Rather, they took the form of a past that continued to jeopardize the present—and in so doing, called into question the very success of Hungary’s political transformation.
The House of Terror would thus play an important role in the Fidesz coalition’s 2002 reelection campaign discussed at the end of chapter 2. Warning of a return to communism should the MSZP (Hungarian Socialist Party) win, Fidesz presented the elections as a moral battle between those who looked ahead to the future and those who threatened to bring back the terrors of the previous era. With the Magyar Millennium, Country Image Center, and similar initiatives to reshape Hungary’s national subjectivity, Fidesz attempted to replace the remains of socialist-era history with a proudly optimistic vision of national history that would serve as a model for the way forward. Alongside this tutelage in thousand-year national pride, the House of Terror functioned to remind the nation of the suffering it had recently overcome and to link the perpetrators of the past to the Fidesz coalition’s left-wing political rivals in the present. The museum thus enabled Fidesz to present Hungary’s accomplishments as endangered by the persistence of socialist remains that threatened to return in the form of the MSZP-SZDSZ coalition—and thus again push Hungary off the proper and authentic course of its national history.
What made this threat of communist persecution so striking is that everything the House of Terror now presented as a danger to Hungary’s democratic future had already happened in past election cycles. During previous elections, the government had swung from right to left and back again—which did not necessarily reflect Hungarian voters’ confidence in any particular party as much as it did the desire for change, and the public’s economic dissatisfaction and political disillusionment under postsocialism more generally.2 As we have seen, the MSZP had not only already spent a term in office between 1994 and 1998 without any threats to Hungary’s democratic stability, but it had won these elections precisely by appealing to positive memories of the past regime’s social welfare measures and the administrative efficiency its former bureaucrats were expected to deliver. And in 2000, two years after defeating the MSZP’s bid for reelection in coalition with SZDSZ, Fidesz prime minister Victor Orbán himself declared that Hungary’s transition—and thus the four decades of state socialism that preceded it—was over (Orbán 2000).
Why did the socialist past now become such a danger, and why did it seem so much nearer than a few years before? In part, the ever-increasing warnings of communist danger reflected broader ongoing shifts in the ideological landscape. With both the MSZP and SZDSZ increasingly reluctant to engage with questions of national identity or Hungary’s post-1945 history, the problem of socialism’s remains could become the province of the right wing and a key element of the political rhetoric of the Fidesz coalition’s election campaign. But beyond the demands of party politics, the House of Terror also sought to intervene more broadly into two circulating regimes of memory that each threatened to invalidate claims to both past and present suffering under communism. First, the museum’s emphasis on the crimes of communism challenged the priority given to Holocaust memory not only by Hungary’s left wing, but also by Western European memory culture, which many of my interviewees perceived as minimizing claims to equivalent victimization. Second, the House of Terror sought to tame local nostalgic desires for everyday life under state socialism, which similarly risked rendering claims to communist oppression unintelligible. Instead, by conceptualizing the problem of socialism’s remains as one of continuing persecution, the museum attempted to enact an affective pedagogy that would teach its visitors to react to the material culture of the past socialist era with “terror” rather than nostalgia.
While the Fidesz coalition would narrowly lose the 2002 elections, the creation of the House of Terror would nonetheless signal a transformation in the way remains of socialism figured in public and political debate as Hungary entered the second decade of postsocialism. No longer would remains simply enable rituals of jubilant mastery of a problematic past, as we saw in the examples in chapters 1–3 of this book. Instead, the persistence of remains of socialism would become proof of Hungary’s ongoing victimization, as Fidesz and other right-wing parties and political actors attempted to revive a once-buried past in order to break with it anew.
A Theater of Terror
During the first months after its opening in 2002, I made several visits to the House of Terror: on my own, as a guide for a visiting North American scholar, and with various Hungarian friends and colleagues. Each time, the wait in line to enter the museum stretched to an hour or more because the highly structured permanent exhibition required a limit on the number of visitors allowed to enter at one time. Yet the crowd, which was composed of visitors ranging from formally dressed pensioners to parents with young children to teenagers and young adults, only vocally complained once, when a group of what appeared to be visiting dignitaries was permitted immediate entrance, thus prolonging the delay even further. Otherwise, the long wait in the early spring sunshine only seemed to heighten each visit’s sense of eventfulness, as did the dramatic contrast between the sunny bustle of the city outside and the shadowy, dramatically lit architecture of the museum’s interior when we were finally allowed to enter. A friend who joined me on one of the visits suggested that the long wait outside was intentional: a way to augment the “political theater” of the museum. “It’s like going to church,” he commented quietly, as we noted the hush that had descended on the crowd when we first stepped inside.
The modernity of the House of Terror’s interior renovations magnified the theatricality of this contrast. The museum’s designers preserved the building’s turn-of-the-century monumental exterior, but they gutted the inside of the building to transform it into a glossy contemporary exhibition space, with ominous music, video screens, and interactive elements such as a reconstructed prison cell and a 1950s voting booth. This immersive curatorial strategy, which emphasizes experience and participation over the passive reception of information, is reminiscent of other recent museums dedicated to commemorating historical trauma, such as Berlin’s Jewish Museum and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, with their similar mandates to appeal to the emotions and sensory capacities of their visitors (Radnóti 2003). For example, the entrance to the permanent exhibit at the House of Terror appears to take direct inspiration from the USHMM’s “Tower of Faces,” a three-story tower of unidentified portraits from a Jewish community massacred in 1941. The House of Terror’s own imposing “Wall of Victims” presents a Soviet tank standing in a small pool of motor oil in front of a grid of nameless photographs that similarly extends two stories upward in the museum’s inner courtyard.
Where the House of Terror diverges from its predecessors, however, is in the central role given to its pedagogy of affect. The museum does not encourage the representational critique found in the deconstructive architectural strategies of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, which questions the very possibility of representing an event as immense and catastrophic as the Holocaust. Nor does it attempt the historical comprehensiveness and documentation of the USHMM. Instead, as the House of Terror’s director, the conservative historian Mária Schmidt, explained in several interviews at the time of the museum’s opening, the museum uses historical artifacts and contemporary technology to conjure up the “atmosphere” (levegő) of the past eras (Sümegi 2002) so as “to give the visitor the sensation of what terror meant” (La Bruyère 2002, quoted in Pittaway 2002).
This attempt to produce historical awareness via enactment rather than the passive reception of information is familiar from Fidesz’s other interventions in memory politics at that time, such as the Magyar Millennium and the activities of the Country Image Center. In the case of the House of Terror, this appeal to affective involvement and response serves two additional functions. First, it links the reaction of the museum’s Hungarian visitors to the experiences of suffering it commemorates, by inviting them to identify with a community of national victimhood. Second, by linking these experiences of suffering under two distinct regimes of terror, the museum also evokes theories of totalitarianism that similarly emphasize commonalities in the ambitions and techniques of communist and fascist rule. As both an affective stance and interpretive frame, “terror” thus unites otherwise divergent ideologies and experiences of victimization into a seamless narrative of persecution that extends into the present day.
To convey this experience of continuous terror at the hands first of the Arrow Cross and then of the communists, the museum’s permanent exhibition channels its visitors through three floors and five decades of Hungarian history. Its story of “double occupation” (kettős megszállás) begins in the final days of World War II, after the Arrow Cross took power. A room and a hallway present information on the party and its persecution of the Jewish population. The remainder of the exhibition then details the oppression of life under communism. On two upper floors, the museum presents topics both chronological and thematic (“The Gulag,” “The Fifties,” “Peasants,” “Justice”) with interactive exhibits and reconstructions of historical interiors such as the office of the head of the secret police. This section of the exhibit concludes with a two-minute elevator ride to the cellar, during which a video screen in the elevator presents a stark interview with a former janitor who describes the process of executing prisoners.3
The exhibition in the cellar presents a warren of reconstructed torture cells, culminating in two rooms that explain the events of the 1956 revolution and commemorate its victims. The final room (“Farewell”) celebrates the end of communism by presenting multiple video screens playing loops of television footage that include the public events that marked the end of communism in 1989 and 1990 and a speech given by Fidesz leader and then-prime minister Viktor Orbán at the House of Terror’s opening in 2002. Finally, the exhibition returns to theme of the “Wall of Victims” by presenting its counterpart in the form of a “Gallery of Persecutors” (Tettesek galériája) besides the stairwell that leads the visitor out of the exhibition. This long narrow hallway is lined with names and photographs of functionaries from the two regimes.
During my visits to the House of Terror shortly after its opening, lengthy Hungarian and English-language handouts were available in each room to supplement the museum’s history of five decades of terror by foreign powers and traitorous fellow citizens. I appeared to be the only one to consult these printed materials, but a version of these texts was later reproduced on the virtual tour offered on the museum’s website (www
Incompatible Histories
This argument of continuous victimization throughout Hungary’s twentieth century found an eager and receptive audience among many of the House of Terror’s visitors, who in my conversations with them primarily identified as supporters of one of the right-wing parties and shared the museum’s critique of both the injustice of state socialism and the danger of the MSZP’s possible return to power. For them, the museum was a greatly overdue opportunity to give voice to long-silenced stories of suffering. (As an elderly man insisted to me, “No one wanted to hear this before.”) The museum’s narrative of persecution thus encouraged visitors to identify with a community of victimhood: understood not merely as a specific experience of oppression, but as a national and political category that united its subjects across space and time (Jensen and Ronsbo 2014, 1).
Moreover, in keeping with the museum’s pedagogy of affect, its exhibition strategy emphasized not only historical narration, but participation in a collective event that emphasized experience over information. Despite the lines outside the building to prevent overcrowding during the first months after the museum opened, each room of the exhibition was so packed with visitors that many of its details were initially difficult to see or decipher, particularly since the photographs and objects on display often lacked captions that would explain their significance or origin.4 As the crowd slowly shuffled from room to room, the sounds of praise and criticism, questions and muttered historical explanations informally filled in the gaps in apprehension or highlighted perceived omissions in the exhibition itself: whether a young man who complained that the museum honored those who fought against the communists but did not mention the antifascist resistance, or an elderly couple who patiently explained to their young grandchildren that the “iron curtain” separating East and West was a metaphor, and not—as the children assumed—an actual metal curtain.
But although for some, the House of Terror provided the public legitimation of long-established family and political narratives of loss and persecution, many of those who identified as left wing refused to visit the museum at all, dismissing it as right-wing propaganda and a political tool in the upcoming elections. Such conflict was symptomatic of what Domonkos Sik calls a more general lack of “minimal consensus” (2012, 26) in Hungary about the recent past.5 Whereas the memory of the Holocaust has been institutionalized internationally and is readily accessible through an abundance of films and literature, the experience of state socialism “does not have such rich popular cultural embeddedness” (96). The result has been little agreement in both private life and public discourse concerning the memory of the past era, particularly with regard to the experience of Kádárism (91–96).
Indeed, throughout the years of my fieldwork, many people complained to me that the polarization of both contemporary political life and memory of the past era had produced irreconcilable social rifts or fraught silences among friends, family members, and colleagues. This polarization was also the subject of much public commentary. For example, a documentary film made in the late 2000s, titled The Fidesz Jew, the Mother with No National Feeling, and Mediation (A fideszes zsidó, a nemzeti érzés nélküli anya és a mediáció [2008]) addressed this ongoing perception of a deep social divide produced by conflicting ideological positions. Contrasting the “love and hope” of 1989 with the “hate and disappointment” of 2007 (the year of its filming), the filmmakers brought in professional mediators to attempt to heal relationships divided by political affiliation. In one example, two friends who were both Jewish became estranged after one of them, a local politician, joined Fidesz. The film shows their attempt to resolve their conflict through mediation, as well as a screening of that conversation for a local Jewish community organization, where many in the audience heatedly asked the politician how he could support a party that they considered to be antisemitic. In another case, a woman became estranged from her right-wing husband and teenaged daughter after her husband had a spiritual and political “awakening” during the demonstrations in support of Fidesz during the 2002 elections. Despite the apparent good intentions of all involved, mediation did not appear to succeed in reconciling any of these strained relationships because both sides believed they had the moral high ground. In the words of a street interview the filmmakers conducted with a middle-aged man at a demonstration against the Gyurcsány MSZP government in 2006: “You can’t mix spring water with shit.”
Controversy
Public debates about the House of Terror were similarly torn between left-wing critics who challenged the museum’s political utility and historical accuracy, and those on the right who insisted on the legitimacy of the museum’s claim to continuous national trauma and the importance of this narrative to rebuilding Hungarian national identity. Because so much of the local and international press and scholarly coverage has focused on these debates in detail, I will not explore them in depth here, but will isolate some of their key points, particularly concerning the museum’s funding and the historical omissions and distortions the museum was perceived to endorse.6
Even before the House of Terror officially opened, it provoked public and political criticism.7 Unlike other museums in Hungary, which have to seek funding from multiple and even international sources, the House of Terror was funded entirely by the Fidesz government’s Ministry of National Cultural Heritage (Nemzeti Kulturális Örökség Minisztériuma). The transformation of 60 Andrássy Street to the House of Terror—from its purchase in December 2000 by the Public Foundation for the Research of Central and East European History and Society to its opening in February 2002—thus appeared to have been accomplished with unprecedented speed. (Similar projects, such as the creation of a local Holocaust museum, had been in planning stages for much longer and yet in 2002 still remained unbuilt due to lack of funds.)8 Moreover, the politics of these funding decisions went beyond questions of memorialization to the production of history itself. The director of the House of Terror, Mária Schmidt, was also the head of the Twentieth Century Institute, a conservative institute created by Fidesz to counter two existing historical research institutions (the 1956 Institute and the Institute of Political History) perceived to be dominated by left-wing historians. Some critics claimed that the funds for the Twentieth Century Institute came from the money cut from the other research institutes’ budgets (Pittaway 2002).
Scholars and commentators critical of both the project and the Fidesz government also charged the House of Terror with misrepresenting both the history of Jewish persecution during World War II and the later experience of state socialism. In the words of István Rév, the museum deploys a “noticeably arbitrary selection and sequence (and omission) of a few disconnected brute facts” to put forward a highly partisan right-wing version of history as if it were commonly accepted and neutral (2005, 290). Specifically, the museum’s emphasis on a narrative of “double occupation” by the Nazis and the Soviets effaces the key fact that until March 1944, Hungary chose to ally with Nazi Germany in the hope that it might regain the territory lost in the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. The House of Terror thus fails to address Hungarian responsibility for its history of antisemitism (which includes twentieth-century Europe’s first anti-Jewish law in 1920),9 and for the role of the Hungarian gendarmerie and other authorities in assisting the deportation of more than 400,000 members of Hungary’s rural Jewish population to Auschwitz after Germany invaded Hungary in 1944. Moreover, by limiting its historical scope to the persecution inflicted by the fascist Arrow Cross after it seized power in the final months of World War II, the House of Terror’s narrative entirely omits these rural deportations from its coverage—and thus excludes Hungary’s victims of Auschwitz from the victims of fascism memorialized in the museum (Apor 2014; Réti 2017; K. Ungváry 2002).
Schmidt and the museum’s supporters justified this omission by arguing that the creation of a Holocaust museum was already under way, and that the story told by the House of Terror should thus begin at the point when the Arrow Cross took power in fall 1944 (Seres 2002). They defended the limited treatment of Jewish persecution vis-à-vis communist oppression as historically faithful and representationally proportionate; as Ádám, the university student, argued to me, “This is a difference of a few years [of oppression] versus decades.” In turn, the museum’s critics challenged this claim to historical fidelity by pointing out that the building only housed communist torture and imprisonment until the ÁVH moved away in 1956,10 yet the museum nonetheless extends its historical scope—and its narrative of communist oppression—up to the end of the regime in 1990 (K. Ungváry 2002).
At stake in the different ways the House of Terror represents the experiences of fascism and communism was not merely a question of periodization. Rather, the museum uses the crimes of the early years of communism to characterize all four decades of communist rule—and thus to imply that communism did more harm than its predecessor (Judt 2005b, 828). To accomplish this, the museum abandons the chronological approach in its treatment of communism. Instead, most of the eighteen remaining rooms are thematically organized into what Aniko Szucs terms a “Communist theme park about everyday life in Communist Hungary in the 1950s” (2014, 235). This strategy does not make any qualitative distinction between the oppression suffered before Hungary’s failed 1956 revolution against the Soviets (when 60 Andrássy Street was actively in use) and the accommodation between the regime and its citizens in the decades that followed the post-revolutionary retribution (Rényi 2003). This distinction is not only relevant to scholars, but as we have seen, it is also the main dividing line that structures the way Hungarians narrate their own experiences of the past. Instead, the museum’s permanent exhibition removes the 1956 revolution from the exhibition’s narrative entirely, only addressing it in two rooms toward the very end of the visitors’ journey through the museum, directly before a room devoted to the system change in 1989 and 1990. By blurring the chronology of these events, the museum thus represents early socialist phenomena such as forced collectivization and religious persecution as equivalent to the relatively lenient years of late socialism—and thus morally equivalent as years of “terror.”
This logic of equivalence also extends to the way the House of Terror portrays its victims and perpetrators. The two-story “Wall of Victims” at the museum’s entrance does not identify the subjects of its photographs or clarify who was responsible for their victimization. Instead, this lack of specificity enables the photographs to offer a mute claim to continuous national suffering. And in a complementary logic, the museum’s narrative of equivalent oppression similarly makes an equally guilty perpetrator of every individual who accommodated or collaborated with either regime in any capacity.11 The museum argues this explicitly in the room titled “Changing Clothes”: an exhibit of uniforms and old lockers that offers the (historically unsupported) assertion that those who persecuted Jewish Hungarians under the Arrow Cross later became the communist regime’s most avid torturers.12 But the contemporary political stakes of this logic are most evident in the “Gallery of Persecutors” that, along with the “Wall of Victims,” brackets the visitor’s experience of the museum. If the lack of identifying information on the “Wall of Victims” expands the community of Hungarian victimhood as the visitor enters the permanent exhibit, the “Gallery of Persecutors” at the end of the visitor’s journey identifies the subject of each photograph to assign the blame for these atrocities to Hungary’s past and present left wing. Many of the photographs represent communist functionaries, some of whom (or their children) were still active in political or cultural life at the time of the museum’s opening. The House of Terror thus explicitly links the past horrors of communism to the contemporary political left to argue that the terror of the past continues to endanger the present.
The Battle for Victimhood
Many on the left who criticized the museum’s historical distortions did so to dismiss the museum as a political tool of the right wing: a way to avoid discussion of Hungary’s current problems and to prevent a true coming to terms with the past. One MSZP politician, László Kovács, even made the controversial suggestion that in the event of an MSZP victory, the museum should be renamed the House of Reconciliation (Megbékélés Háza) (Stefka 2002). In response, the right accused the left of refusing to take responsibility for the crimes of the previous era, arguing that the left muddied moral distinctions between right and wrong and let past injustice ebb into the grayness of recent history. Schmidt argued that the complaints about the museum’s role in Fidesz’s campaign were proof of the very need for a museum that would tell the truth about the past. “The unending and devious series of attacks preceding and following the opening of the House of Terror perfectly fit into the Hungarian Socialist Party’s violent and aggressive campaign; they conjured up the memories of leftist power-demonstrations well known from the old party’s times. To many elderly, this awoke old fears, and the old reflexes returned: ‘it is still not advisable to discuss these things’ and ‘it’s better to remain silent’ ” (Schmidt 2003, 197–198, translated and quoted in Szucs 2014, 241).
From this perspective, the House of Terror stood in opposition to those who sought to wipe out history and moral accountability. What made this injustice particularly acute was the emphasis that had been placed on punishing Nazi criminals and commemorating their victims. As one reader wrote to the far-right weekly Democrat (Demokrata), if the public did not forgive the Nazis after the Nuremberg trials, it should not forgive the actions of communist murderers either (Paksa 2002). The minister of justice, Ibolya Dávid, similarly complained at a conference held by the International Alliance of Those Persecuted by Communists (Kommunizmus Üldözöttei Nemzetközi Szövetség), “When it comes to the crimes of Nazism, the sentence was passed in good time, but in the case of communist crimes, only time has passed [A nácizmus bűnei fölött időben pálcát törtek, a kommunizmus bűnei esetében még csak az idő telt el]” (Gábor 2000).
This perception of the differential treatment of fascist and communist persecutors and victims drove much support for the House of Terror. In the eyes of many of my interlocutors, Nazi criminals had been punished and their victims commemorated both abroad and locally (whether in films and literature or memorials and official acts of remembrance). Indeed, in the first decade after the end of communism, private individuals and international institutions from Israel, Western Europe, and North America helped to fund a new Holocaust memorial beside Budapest’s centrally located Dohány Street synagogue.13 They also participated in attempts to revitalize the Jewish community in Hungary by supporting the establishment of new organizations and infrastructure, including Jewish schools, community centers, and summer camps aimed at “reviving” religious-ethnic and communal identity among a primarily urban and assimilated population who often did not know of their Jewish heritage until adolescence or adulthood (or who had learned from their parents to keep this information private) (Kovács and Forrás Biró 2011, 14).14
But although the memory of the Holocaust was well-established and internationally recognized, some complained, the victims of communism were in danger of being forgotten before their stories were even told. “We didn’t just suffer during 1956,” Miklós (the early member of Fidesz whom we met in chapter 2), pointed out, when I observed that there were a number of memorials to the victims of the 1956 revolution. “There were millions who died in the gulag.” Supporters of the House of Terror thus defended its creation as a simple corrective to an imbalance of historical memory—a museum that as Hungary’s only memorial to victims of communism, “should have been built 10 years ago,” as Miklós insisted.
This emphasis on the importance of remembering the victims of communism in addition to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust went beyond the simple demand for commemorative parity, however. Rather, it reflected the perception that the memory of the Holocaust was threatening to silence the Hungarian experience of suffering under communism. This challenge of what the historian Tony Judt calls “comparative victimhood” (2005a) reflects Hungary’s experience of the historical politics of state socialism. As elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, after World War II one of the original sources of legitimacy for Hungary’s communists was their unimpeachable history of resistance to fascism: to be communist was to be anti-fascist. Once in power, the communist regime emphasized the crimes of fascism to reinforce the moral authority of communist rule and to make clear that only it had the power to grant Hungary, as a former Axis ally, the forgiveness of historical amnesia (Rév 1994, 4–5). This logic, which recognized victims of fascist genocide and condemned those who died fighting communism, produced two sets of victims that would thus come to constitute two mutually exclusive historical reference points: to mention one was to deny or trivialize the other.
With the end of state socialism, this competition between anticommunism and antifascism continued to mark a key ideological divide. But now, the legacy of the communist regime’s polarized historical politics had the ironic effect of potentially endowing fascist and interwar-era symbols, historical figures, and narratives with new anticommunist legitimacy among Hungary’s right wing. (That is, if anticommunists were once stigmatized as fascist, now fascists could be potentially redeemed as anticommunist.) For example, in 1994, under the right-wing MDF (Hungarian Democratic Forum)-led coalition government, the Constitutional Court nullified a number of provisions of the 1945 People’s Tribunals Act, which had the effect of overturning the conviction of many individuals involved in the deportation and execution of Hungary’s Jewish community during World War II (Braham 2014, 11, see also Rév 2005).
The majority of those who supported such acts of historical rehabilitation (which included the reburial of Miklós Horthy discussed in chapter 2) justified them as the recuperation of national values, rather than the endorsement of fascist ideology. Nonetheless, such symbolic actions—and the outrage they inspired—would function as key points of ideological reference as politicians and public figures battled to establish their positions in the emerging political landscape of postsocialism. For parties on the left (which included not merely the successors to the communist party but also the former dissidents and urban intellectuals who formed SZDSZ [Alliance of Free Democrats]), the right wing’s rhetoric of national sovereignty and its perceived recuperation of the discourses of fascism and antisemitism both distorted historical fact and endangered Hungarian democracy. (As we have seen, such fears were one factor that drove the SZDSZ to become a coalition partner with its once sworn enemy, the MSZP, beginning in 1994.) For those on the right, the left wing was hopelessly tarnished by its association with communism, and its tendency to avoid national questions and emphasize the crimes before 1945 over those that occurred afterwards (K. Ungváry 2017, 391) was evidence that it prioritized Jewish and/or international interests ahead of Hungarian ones. Moreover, the moral and political utility of the memory of fascist genocide to both the state socialist regime and the current left-wing led many on the right to view any claim to Holocaust suffering—much less a call for Hungarian accountability—as inevitably exaggerated and instrumentalized (Sik 2012, 15). Frequent warnings about antisemitism only had the effect of discrediting such concerns in the eyes of some of my interlocutors, who would argue that “no one is being sent to the camps” when I asked their opinion about what in the United States would be interpreted as antisemitic statements in right-wing political discourse. One friend observed that such sentiments might sound troubling to me, but “you [Americans] are twenty years ahead of us”—a joking denial of coevalness that he blamed not on contemporary politics but on the legacy of communism, which had “distorted everyone’s thinking.”15 Others, particularly on the left, also dismissed such statements as mere political posturing: a way for those on the right to distinguish themselves from their opponents.
Indeed, regardless of political affiliation, many people across the political spectrum tended to view Hungarian Jewish claims to exceptional suffering with skepticism. For example, Mária, the former office administrator who now worked as a housecleaner, was an MSZP supporter. She emphatically told me that she had no interest in visiting the House of Terror because of its ties to Fidesz and because she would rather save her money to attend opera and classical music concerts. Nonetheless, she too expressed doubt about the extent of Jewish victimization during World War II during a conversation in which she told me how much she had enjoyed the Oscar-winning filmmaker István Szabó’s English-language film, Sunshine (A napfény íze, 1999), which narrated three generations of twentieth-century Hungarian persecution of a Jewish family in Budapest. “I really liked it,” Mária said. “It was interesting how it showed the history of a family, and I was especially interested in the Jewish culture—traditions, weddings, etc.—that I didn’t know before. Of course, you can’t really know if the war was really as awful for the Jews [as it was in the film]. But in the film, it was terrible.” The film sparked similar debate in internet forums and right-wing newspapers about the historical accuracy of its claims, as well as whether its portrayal of Jewish victimization under three different political regimes in Hungary was “anti-Hungarian.”16
Mária’s uncertainty about the accuracy of representations of Jewish victimhood reflects the legacy of a communist regime that defined the victims of Nazi Germany in political rather than religious-ethnic terms. But as we have seen, it is also a symptom of the polarized historical politics between Hungary’s right and left wings, which has resulted in a public culture with very little general consensus about much of the twentieth century. (This inability to find common ground in discussions of Hungary’s past also helped fuel socialist nostalgia’s appeal, as a way to address the experience of state socialism without being forced to engage with its political and historical context.) For some people, the unsettled nature of recent history only drove them to cling more fiercely to specific narratives of the national past, whether fueled by personal experience or political loyalty. But for many others, like Mária, such uncertainty bred an overarching distrust of historical truth claims in general: the suspicion that any attempt to invoke historical examples or precedents was biased and politically motivated.
In contrast, many of my friends and interviewees who identified as Jewish or as being of Jewish ancestry were often angered and alarmed by instances of antisemitism, such as the publication (and popularity) of new Hungarian editions of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion at the turn of the millennium (Szőnyei 2002). Klára, for example, was a graduate student in her late twenties when I interviewed her in 1998. Like many others in the transitional generation who now identified as having Jewish parents or grandparents, she had grown up in a secularized family with parents who were members of Budapest’s cultural intelligentsia. Klára told me that she was taught by her parents to view being Jewish as a “special, privileged thing” that nonetheless, like many of those in her cohort, she felt pressured to keep quiet as a child and teenager under late state socialism. (Not until the mid-1990s did she discover that some of her friends had Jewish ancestry as well.) “But I consider myself Hungarian,” she told me firmly, drawing a contrast between herself and her boyfriend, who came from a rural Orthodox Jewish background and self-identified as Jewish. His parents had moved to Budapest when he was a child, and a sense of social and cultural dislocation from his schoolmates led him to become active in the revival of Jewish youth community life in Budapest in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “But when antisemitism appears,” Klára added, “we both feel targeted—there is a feeling of solidarity.”
Cosmopolitan Memory
The reasons for Hungarian resistance to specifically Jewish claims to victimization went beyond the polarization of national historical politics, however. They also reflect the centrality of Holocaust memory in the West, where recognition of the genocide of Europe’s Jews has become the condition for European belonging as well as “the very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity” (Judt 2005b, 804). Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider have hailed the emergence of such transnational “cosmopolitan memory” (2002) as decoupling the moral imperative of remembrance from national and ethnic boundaries and thus providing, in Aleida Assmann’s words, a “foundation for a global politics of human rights, based on commonly remembered barbarism” (A. Assmann 2007, 14). Yet, as Andreas Huyssen argues, this global circulation of Holocaust memory has not replaced territorialized national memory, but rather stands in tension with it (A. Assmann 2007, 14; Huyssen 2003, 148). National claims to victimization are thus forced not only to compete with the transnational memory of Jewish genocide for acknowledgment but also to navigate its established template for representing collective trauma (A. Assmann 2007, 14). As Jeffrey Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy observe, the image of the Holocaust victim has become the measure by which other forms of victimhood are evaluated (2011, 30).
Many people I spoke with perceived this institutionalization of the Holocaust in European memory discourse as the trivialization of the suffering the country endured under communism. Right-wing scholars have similarly argued that the dominant narratives of twentieth-century history reflect only the perspective of Western leftist intellectuals, for whom the Holocaust represents a singular foundational trauma—and communism merely failed to live up to its ideals (Sik 2012, 13–14). At stake in such criticisms of Western myopia is not only the erasure of Hungary’s past victimization but also the stigmatization of what many on the right consider a healthy desire to celebrate postsocialist national pride and rebirth. In the frustrated words of the representative of the Country Image Center we met in chapter 2, “Here if you’re proud to be Hungarian and have national consciousness (nemzeti öntudat), people assume you are a fascist!”
Such complaints about Western misrecognition of Hungarian suffering go back to the post–World War I Treaty of Trianon (in which Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory), as well as Hungary’s earlier loss of sovereignty under the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. But these laments have taken on new fervency in postsocialism under the pressures of cosmopolitan memory, for which claims to both political rights and moral legitimacy are often based on the recognition of victimhood (Judt 2005a). As a result, in public life and everyday conversation in the years leading up to the creation of the House of Terror, appeals to the memory of the Holocaust often inspired right-wing bids for similar national acknowledgment. For example, one of the first initiatives of Fidesz’s conservative Twentieth Century Institute was to host a conference in 2001 to commemorate the publication of the Hungarian translation of The Black Book of Communism (originally published in 1997), a historical compendium of communism’s crimes and death tolls whose chief editor (Stéphane Courtois) controversially argued against the uniqueness of Nazi genocide (2000). At the opening ceremony, the host Mária Schmidt praised the book for overturning the “double morality” that governed the way the crimes of fascism and communism were treated and argued that the establishment of gulags should be condemned just as much as Hitler’s concentration camps (Regényi 2000). As the historian György Gyarmati argued at a roundtable on the book a month later, “terror” under communism was not an extremist exception, but rather a structural part of the whole system (Dombrádi 2000).
It is important to note that the attempts of these scholars and political actors to give equivalent commemorative and moral weight to the crimes of communism did not deny the Holocaust, and nor did they explicitly target Hungary’s Jewish citizens as the object of contemporary national animus. Fidesz may have instituted a day of remembrance of the victims of communism, but it had also legislated a similar memorial day for the victims of the Holocaust. Later Fidesz would help to provide funding for a Holocaust museum and even attempt to collaborate with Hungary’s Jewish institutions to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary (with ultimately controversial results).17 Such efforts enabled Fidesz to distance itself politically from the extreme right wing (which at the time of the House of Terror’s opening was primarily represented by the Hungarian Justice and Life Party [Magyar Igazság és Élet Párt (MIÉP)] headed by István Csurka), while at the same time often refusing to condemn politicians or media outlets that deployed antisemitic rhetoric.18
Nonetheless, many on the left viewed attempts to argue that the crimes of communism were equal to—or greater than—those perpetrated by fascists to be merely covert antisemitism: a way for Fidesz to lure voters from the extreme right while still maintaining plausible deniability. The challenge for the creators of the House of Terror was thus to find a way to foreground Hungary’s victimhood under communism without outright rejecting the moral primacy of the Holocaust victim in Western European memory.
A New Moral Algebra
The exhibition strategy of the House of Terror offers what was then a novel solution to this conflict. Rather than continue to oppose these two painful sets of memory of historical victimhood, it assimilates them into a continuous narrative of national persecution. By arguing that the terrors of communism emerged seamlessly out of the terrors of fascism, the museum thus provides a way for its Hungarian visitors to claim moral legitimacy within a cosmopolitan memory culture previously experienced as invalidating. Indeed, although the House of Terror borrows representational strategies from Holocaust museums in North American and Western Europe, its creators also sought to provide a narrative and architectural model of national terror at the hands of communist persecutors that would be ready for export to other European commemorative contexts.
The museum’s narrative of continuous persecution no longer divided by the historical and ideological specificity of the fascist and communist regimes draws its legitimacy from the indexical authority of the site itself: the fact that 60 Andrássy Street housed both the Arrow Cross and communist police torturers. The building serves as physical evidence that, as the conservative journalist Zsolt Bayer declared at an event to commemorate the first anniversary of the museum’s opening, “There was only one Hungary and one kind of suffering” (Budapest Sun 2003). The museum thus rejects particularistic claims to Jewish victimization by encompassing them within a broader story of Hungarian victimhood in which the persecution of Hungary’s Jewish community was merely part of a larger history of terror suffered by all Hungarians. This strategy no longer symbolically expels Jewish Hungarians from the national community; rather, it reflects that many self-identified as Hungarian first and Jewish second.
Yet by narrating history in terms of victimhood, the museum’s argument of continuous terror also enables it to conflate very different historical experiences of suffering—and different responsibilities for persecution. It draws a line of moral equivalence between the genocide of Jews during World War II and the relatively eventless experience of growing up in late socialist Hungary. By blurring together these two sets of victims (and making the historically questionable argument that the same evil band of perpetrators was responsible for persecuting both), the House of Terror externalizes the blame for Hungary’s misfortunes to foreign occupiers and national traitors. Moreover, by enabling those who identify as the victims of either regime to disavow responsibility for the injustices of the past, the museum allows the victim of one historical injustice to extract moral authority from both.
The House of Terror thus rejects a “politics of regret” (Olick 2007) that would take responsibility for the segments of Hungarian society who supported Jewish oppression during World War II. And its narrative of historical victimization refuses the task of “negative remembrance” found in most European Holocaust museums, which commemorate crimes committed rather than suffered (Knigge 2002, quoted in Uhl 2009, 64).
This attempt to simultaneously minimize the memory of Jewish persecution and claim it as part of a broader experience of Hungarian suffering stands in contrast to the logic of nostalgia discussed in chapter 3. Nostalgic practices redeemed the remains of an inauthentic and disavowed past so as to assert present-day mastery—epitomized in the catchphrase, “But it’s ours.” The House of Terror, on the other hand, asserts ownership of a previously incompatible domain of historical memory in order to extend and support a claim to Hungary’s national victimization. And by claiming a continuous history of victimhood as “ours,” the museum and its supporters were also able to reject responsibility for both fascism and communism.
These two modes of formulating and dealing with the problem of socialism’s remains—nostalgia and terror—were not necessarily incompatible, and they could not be easily classified along party lines. Just as some of the most enthusiastic consumers of nostalgia were otherwise highly critical of the communist regime and its legacies, some Hungarians who identified as left wing were nonetheless suspicious of claims to the exceptionalism of Holocaust memory. As much as Fidesz’s election campaign may have tried to argue otherwise, the explicit politicization of history found in the House of Terror and the emphatic denial of politics found in nostalgia thus did not represent a battle between two competing communities of memory: those who condemn the past versus those who seek its return. Rather, the two forms of memory could easily coexist within the same individuals precisely thanks to their dichotomized approaches to the uneasy legacies of recent history and the incommensurability of the varied emotions evoked by the remains of state socialism. Moreover, both memory practices were in part impelled by the perception of international misrecognition, whether as naive and backward consumers or as persecutors with no legitimate claim to victimhood. “But it’s ours,” in both contexts, thus became a way to reassert the power of self-definition against globalized regimes of memory and cultural value.
This coexistence of cozy memories of socialist-era domestic life and highly politicized narratives of oppression thus posed a challenge for the creators of the House of Terror, whose rhetoric of victimization depended on appropriating the memory of fascist persecution and also extending such persecution through the relatively comfortable years of late socialism. To address this, the House of Terror declared war on the nostalgic recuperation of memories of the socialist era, insisting that the popularity of socialist nostalgia was evidence of an alarming continuity with—rather than triumph over—the recent past. Asserting “what is ours” would demand equal attention to rejecting what is “not ours”: that is, rejecting as mere remains of socialist terror those objects, narratives, and practices already redeemed by contemporary practices of nostalgia.
Soviet Tanks and String Bags
In June 2002 I met with my friend Vera, who had come to Budapest from her village in northeastern Hungary to visit her son Ádám, then a university student of nineteen. Over the past months, Ádám, who identified as a Fidesz voter and was more politically active than his parents, had forwarded me news stories and sent email messages about the heated national elections of that spring and his participation in rallies to reelect Fidesz. Upon Fidesz’s ultimate defeat at the hands of the MSZP, it was Ádám who sent me the email insisting that “the past has begun,” and he now worried about both the economic and political impact of the MSZP victory.
The three of us sat at an outdoor café near the National Museum, discussing the House of Terror and furtively eating scones (pogácsa) that Vera had brought from home. Ádám argued for the importance of a museum that would “tell the truth about our history” by explaining the oppressive daily realities of life under state socialism. For example, he said, every Friday workers would monitor each other carefully at the canteens (menza), to see who declined meat and thus could be inferred to be a practicing Catholic. Among other examples of the fear and suspicion that governed the practices of everyday life, Ádám argued, were the small collapsible string bags (hálószatyor) that women used for shopping: they existed so that informers could see what others had purchased.
Vera burst into indignant laughter, immediately denying that either of these claims was true, at least in her experience. The three of us soon got into a discussion about where Ádám had learned such stories and why he so determinedly clung to this version of history even as Vera denied it. From earlier conversations, I knew that Vera had mostly positive memories of the Kádár era. Her family had lived within a small settlement of villages in northeast Hungary for at least five generations, and they had risen from the peasantry to the middle class under the decades of state socialism. (Her husband, father, and brother were all career military officers under the state socialist regime, and each retired after the system change.) This experience of social mobility had also nourished Vera’s professional ambitions. At the time of her visit to Budapest, she was working as a librarian in her village while pursuing a master’s degree in a nearby city, and she told me of her civic-minded determination to make the village library into a local hub of cultural, educational, and charitable activities. (In the following years, she was able to realize these goals by successfully obtaining funding from local, state, and ultimately European Union resources for these initiatives.)
The memories of the socialist past Vera shared with me over the years were not colored by the longing and abundance of affect that characterized the nostalgic practices described in chapter 3. (Vera was already married with two children at the time of the system change, and she thus did not belong to the transitional generation whose members viewed nostalgia through the gauzy lens of childhood memory.) Nonetheless, when I had asked Vera a year earlier what object she might choose to characterize the socialist era, she chose the neckerchief of the Young Pioneers (úttörő nyakkendő): not as a symbol of the past regime’s political socialization of its citizens, but as an emblem of what she considered to be the past system’s forward-looking optimism, work ethic, and family orientation.
In Vera’s eyes, as she now explained, the ubiquity of string bags reflected the realities of shopping under state socialism, rather than state-enforced social leveling. Although life in late socialist Hungary was not characterized by the long lines and shortages experienced elsewhere, plastic bags were not common during Soviet times and the collapsibility of the string bag made it useful as a “just-in-case” bag. (A plastic bag with a Western logo, on the other hand, was an envied status symbol to be used with care for as long as possible.) Now, many people—including Vera—did their local shopping with straw baskets and paid extra for plastic bags at the supermarket, but string bags were still in common use.
On the other hand, although Friday meals at the menza may or may not have been subject to the community surveillance Ádám claimed, blatant displays of religious observance did carry the possibility of reprisal. For this reason, many of my friends and interviewees (including Vera and her husband) had been married in civil ceremonies and chosen to forgo an additional church wedding. A year earlier, Vera’s husband, a former military officer, had shown me a photo album of his daughter’s christening during the last years of state socialism, and explained that participating in such a ceremony had been a risky move for him professionally.
What is most important here is not the contested truth value of these representations, but the mythologies that developed around them. How is it that a string bag came to function for Ádám as a sign of the oppression of the socialist era? What made this everyday item into a remain of socialism unable to be redeemed by the nostalgic practices then so pervasive in Hungarian cultural life? And what about this story was so compelling that it inspired Ádám to dismiss his mother’s interpretation in favor of the version that—as Ádám ultimately revealed—he had learned from a young teacher at his former gymnasium, who in turn had learned these stories from his own politically conservative parents?
The narrative of the string bag appealed to Ádám because it focused on the lack of privacy to choose and consume as emblematic of the way the regime penetrated even the most mundane aspects of everyday life. In other words, the everydayness of the string bag did not trivialize Ádám’s argument—it was instead what made it so alarming. Unlike the more straightforwardly terrifying experiences of violence, persecution, and political oppression represented at the House of Terror, activities such as eating and shopping under the kinds of restrictions Ádám described were simultaneously familiar and alien: easily imaginable and yet not imaginable enough.
As we have seen, the exhibition strategy of the House of Terror was designed to appeal directly to its visitors’ affective apprehension. It attempts to target the emotions and senses of its viewers—particularly the younger generations—with video installations, a soundtrack by the pop musician Ákos Kovács, and exhibits that emphasize experience and participation over the passive reception of information. Such techniques seek to collapse the sensory distance between then and now and to make the terror on display palpable: whether it is the sense of dread visitors feel in their stomachs as the elevator drops down into the cellar where the reconstructed prison cells are housed, or the ability to interact with the various reconstructed sets and historical tableaux that fill the exhibition spaces.
FIGURE 4.2 “Everyday Life” room at the House of Terror. The poster advertising Bambi soda is on the upper left. Source: House of Terror Museum, Budapest, Hungary.
Ádám’s tale of the string bag suggests that the purpose of these strategies is not just to bring the past near and thus make it comprehensible. Rather (or simultaneously), the museum seeks to pathologize the everyday life of the past system to argue that the quotidian details of socialist life were not independent of the ideology that produced them, but rather deeply implicated in the story of communist terror. For example, after an entire room devoted to propaganda posters, the museum’s exhibition presents a similar room plastered with reproductions of advertisements for socialist-era products that at the time of the museum’s opening had already been redeemed as nostalgia—including the recently remarketed Bambi soda discussed in chapter 3. The museum thus intervenes into the contemporary politics of socialism’s remains by pathologizing these products as both relics of the past and objects of nostalgic consumption in the present. That is, on the one hand, the museum attempts to estrange memories and stories of the cozy domesticity of everyday life under late state socialism, as well as the fantasy of a private sphere free from political intervention that such domesticity represented. On the other hand, the museum also seeks to criminalize the contemporary nostalgic marketing of this era’s relics as ironic kitsch or fashionable retro, particularly for young consumers who never encountered these objects in their original contexts.
FIGURE 4.3 A neon sign advertising Bambi soda inside Terv Eszpresszó. Personal photograph, 2015.
It is crucial in this double logic that in neither case does the museum simply attack nostalgia directly. As we saw in the case of the Workers’ Party, attempts to explicitly politicize nostalgia (whether negatively or positively) were unsuccessful because of the way most Hungarians viewed nostalgia as being free of ideological considerations. Instead, the exhibit’s strategy of affective pedagogy sought to control the very desires that drive nostalgia, by imbuing its objects with painful associations that would overpower the fond pleasure they previously inspired. In other words, the task of the House of Terror is not merely to convince its visitors that both the prison cell and the concentration camp produced ideologically indistinguishable experiences of terror. Ádám’s story of the string bag suggests that the targets of the museum’s designated horror are also the banal details of a socialist everyday life already redeemed by nostalgia. Tanks and prison cells are thus not the only instruments of terror—so too are the Bambi soda whose poster was on prominent display and the string bag whose presumed function appalled Ádám.19
Ambivalent Remains
At the same time, the House of Terror’s aesthetics and marketing also produce the amusement and ironic enjoyment familiar from nostalgia and other attempts to tame socialism’s remains. The museum’s gift shop, much like that of the Statue Park Museum, offers an array of communist kitsch that includes candles in the shapes of busts of Stalin and Lenin, blank arrest warrants, and retro-themed mousepads. The stylish midcentury aesthetic of the museum’s interiors—its bookstore, coffee shop, and lounges—similarly reveal a more ambivalent fascination with the visual and material culture of an era that the museum otherwise denounces.
Of course, the responses these kitsch objects and aesthetics inspire are distinct from those of nostalgia, and the inconsistency between the exhibit and these other spaces may simply reveal the desire to condemn the past era and also profit from it. As with its representation of the Holocaust, the House of Terror thus simultaneously minimizes and appropriates competing memories of the recent past. But just as nostalgia promises its consumers that they can hold onto fond memories of the past while still being successful under postsocialism, here the House of Terror may offer the perhaps even more appealing possibility that its subjects can laugh at the past and yet still lay claim to being victimized by it. By arguing that socialism’s remains continue to endanger postsocialist life, the museum enables its visitors to connect contemporary party politics to a longer history of national suffering—and thus to extend the moral legitimacy of having been victims of “terror” into the present.
Europe and the Memory of Totalitarianism
Despite what would ultimately be Fidesz’s highly contested loss in the 2002 elections, the House of Terror’s warning of the threatened return of communism’s remains would continue to influence political life and public discussion over the following years. Unlike the Statue Park Museum, whose visitor numbers declined soon after its opening, the House of Terror has proved enduringly popular with locals and international tourists who visit what has now become a genre of museums devoted to remembering communist oppression across the former Soviet bloc.20 The House of Terror would also serve as both a symbolic and physical rallying point for the reenergized right wing led by Fidesz, which in the years after its 2002 defeat used the museum’s exterior as a site for demonstrations and political speeches. And since returning to power in 2010, Fidesz has enshrined the museum’s narrative of “double occupation” by both fascists and communists in Hungary’s new constitution.
Moreover, the museum’s implicit deployment of the theory of totalitarianism has proved to be the first of many postsocialist attempts on both the state and international levels to institutionalize a narrative of totalitarianism that explicitly draws equivalence between the victims of fascism and communism. Estonia’s Museum of Occupations and Freedom opened in 2003, and in 2008, an international conference in Prague on “European Conscience and Communism” produced a declaration that called for an institute devoted to researching Europe’s totalitarian past, as well as a day of remembrance for its victims. With backing from right-wing politicians and scholars and from former dissidents such as Václav Havel, the European Parliament voted in favor of both proposals in 2009. The institute—now an EU educational project titled “Platform of European Memory and Conscience”—has called on the European Parliament to hold a tribunal for the crimes of communism. Its president also signed an agreement to produce a European museum of totalitarianism, as part of a ceremony held at the House of Terror to commemorate the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarianism in 2012. These efforts to institutionalize the narrative of totalitarianism have thus succeeded in producing a cosmopolitan countermemory to rival the prevailing transnational discourse that insists on the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the centrality of “negative remembrance” for European identity.
Meanwhile, the House of Terror has become one of the most popular museums in Budapest. Since the museum opened, I have been making periodic visits to it along with other sites of memory, and I have never failed to find the House of Terror packed with visitors, even on days when other museums devoted to Hungary’s twentieth-century history (such as the Statue Park Museum or the Holocaust Memorial Center opened in 2004) were nearly empty. A 2012 analysis of high school visits to the House of Terror by Domonkos Sik argues that the crowds of visitors and density of experiential cues in the museum are so overwhelming that little of the museum’s intended historical narrative or ideological message is legible to its visitors (2012, 29–50).21 But as Aniko Szucs observes, such semiotic instability may be the key to the museum’s appeal: its ability to draw multiple audiences as “a historical exhibition of Nazism and communism, a collection of artefacts featuring post-communist nostalgia, a theme park of communism, and a shrine that commemorates the victims of terror” (2014, 240).
Regardless of the success or failure of its exhibition strategies, the creation of the House of Terror nonetheless helped Fidesz to inaugurate a successful shift in conceptualizing the problem of socialist remains from a discourse of mastery to one of ongoing victimization. As we shall see, the events that followed the opening of the House of Terror and the 2002 election campaign would confirm Hungary’s entrance into a postnostalgia moment, in which simple acts of distancing, disavowal, or recuperation no longer offered sufficient response to the challenges of memory posed by socialism’s troubling remains. The substance of remains thus also shifted: from intrusive materialities and canonized histories to hidden perpetrators of terror, secrets, and lies who required exposure lest their crimes go misrecognized, overlooked, or forgotten. And although Fidesz attempted to deploy the threat of such remains to attack their political enemies, this new conceptualization of the socialist past as posing a hidden danger that demanded exposure would soon exceed the boundaries of party politics. Instead, the search for remains would reveal troubling secrets on both sides of the political spectrum—and at the heart of the national family.