Budapest’s Living Memorial and the Reperformance of Countermemory

Abstract

Condemned as a “forgery of history,” Budapest’s “Memorial to the Victims of the German Invasion of 1944” depicts Hungary as a victim of Nazi aggression, ignoring the state’s active participation in the deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and others. Since 2014, activists have maintained the nearby living memorial, inviting visitors to leave mementoes and converse about Hungary’s past, current events, and the national future. Reperforming the official monument, the living memorial disrupts the government’s problematic revisionism. We theorize reperformance as a tool for engaging the politics of contested memory and modeling democratic culture.

Keywords:

• Holocaust
• Memory
• Monument
• Performance
• Protest

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Róbert Svoboda and Jenő Urbán for their help with Hungarian translation, Natalie Bennie, Emily Brennan-Moran, and Aaron Dicker for their feedback on an early draft of this paper at RSA’s 2019 Institute. We deeply appreciate Amy Janan Johnson’s guidance through revisions of this essay, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Following Thomas Dunn, we use countermonument to highlight the monument’s participation in acts of counterpublicity and countermemory (“Remembering” 440), rather than in reference to Young’s theorization of how memorializing impulses might be turned back on audiences.

2. Young explains that memorials take many forms—statues, books, remembrance days, festivals, etc., whereas monuments are the tangible objects of a memorial site, whether they be left items, art installations, or imposing structures. (Texture 4). In this sense, both the government installation and Living Memorial are both monuments and memorials. Throughout this essay, we use monument (excepting for proper names that include the word memorial) to capture the installations’ tangible aspects.

3. Balthrop et. al., (2010). gesture toward a notion of reperformance’s discursive embeddedness, mentioning how rhetoric supplemental to commemoration “reinterprets or reperforms the place” (p. 72), Beyond this, however, the term remains otherwise undeveloped.

4. Most photos included both English and Hungarian captions. For those that did not, we consulted with Hungarian colleagues to validate our own translations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was not supported by a grant or other funding.