'56 after '89: Re-commemorating Hungarian history after the fall of communism

Governments and civic groups erect public memorials in national capitals to record and legitimize selected events and people, so as to define collective history. Budapest provides a rich case study of how changing political regimes and their opponents also alter, re-interpret and remove memorials in their attempts to control national narratives and express and consolidate political authority. This paper uses archival research, interviews with memorial decisionmakers, and analysis of individual memorials to explore how various key themes of Hungarian history have been articulated through Budapest's commemorative works, and how the expression of particular commemorative subjects has been contested, modulated or repressed. Analysis explores which approaches to commemoration have remained constant throughout Hungary's several regime changes, and what broad shifts have occurred in memorial themes, forms and locations. An examination of major memorials erected, removed and replaced in Budapest up until the 1989 collapse of Communism provides a context for understanding the subsequent proliferation of memorials to the 1956 Anti-Communist Uprising and the newly-completed reconfiguration of the key national space, Kossuth Square. The paper identifies four specific dynamics in the reframing of Budapest's memorial landscape since 1989 for current consumption: decontextualization, iconoclasm, liberalization, and avoidance.