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Abstract
The Budapest House of Terror is one of the most notorious examples of abusing spectacular new media audiovisual technology to exhibit a politically and ideologically biased historical narrative. However, as the article argues, the institution is not only an eloquent example of how the careless use of ‘public history’ is able to manipulate the ‘consumption’ of history. As the article argues, the House of Terror represents another important agenda: many new ‘public history’ museums call themselves as memory museums. Such claims often contain an epistemological distinction between ‘object-based history’ and ‘collective-mentality-based memory.’ As the case of the House of Terror demonstrates, it is however a dangerous strategy: the idea of an ‘alternative epistemology’ based on ‘collective memory’ is basically a denial of any rational way of obtaining knowledge about the past.
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Péter Apor
Péter Apor is a research fellow at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 2003 and 2011, Apor was a research fellow at the Central European University, Budapest, and an associate researcher at the University of Exeter (2008–2009). In 2012, he was a Fellow at the Imre Kertesz Kolleg in Jena. His main research interest includes the politics of memory and history in post-1945 East-Central Europe, the social and cultural history of the socialist dictatorships, and the history of historiography.