Recovering National Victimhood at the House of Terror

This chapter explores how the center-right, Fidesz-led coalition government revived remains as a looming threat in Hungary's postsocialist culture and politics at the time of the 2002 elections. It talks about Fidesz's creation of the House of Terror, a controversial museum to commemorate Hungary's victims of fascism and communism, that became the key to the shift in the politics of memory. It looks at the purpose of the House of Terror in reviving the remains of socialism as a hidden danger that threatened Hungary. Although the Statue Park Museum's democratic preservation of socialism's monuments ultimately attracted few visitors, the House of Terror's history of victimization would make it enduringly popular with a public that increasingly blamed the persistence of socialist remains for the failure to enter transition's promised future. The chapter also reviews the efforts in funding the creation of the House of Terror.

Banishing Remains

This chapter narrates the early years of postsocialist transformation as Hungarians sought to make remake themselves as new national subjects amid the remains of multiple discredited pasts and failed historical trajectories. It explores how politicians, activists, and public officials initially conceptualized the problem of socialist remains in terms of physical remainders perceived to be emblematic of the former regime. Politicians, activists, and public officials battled to “spring clean” remains of the communist past in order to restore Hungary to the “authentic” course of national history. The chapter also focuses on the debates that resulted in the removal of Budapest's socialist-era statues to a Statue Park Museum on the outskirts of the city. Supporters justified the creation of the park as a democratic solution to the outrage that communist monuments inspired. Yet the removal of these statues was not a response to a crisis of defacements and public dissatisfaction, but an attempt to cover up the fact that little such crisis existed.

Nostalgia and the Remains of Everyday Life

This chapter argues that the various attempts to distance the past became the condition of Hungary for its return in the form of nostalgia for socialist mass and popular culture. It discusses the remains of socialism from anachronistic monuments and devalued historical narratives to the detritus of an everyday life now on the brink of vanishing, such as candy bars and soda pop. Despite appearances, this nostalgia did not represent a wistful desire to return to the previous era nor simply to the gleeful impulse to laugh at state socialist kitsch found years earlier. The chapter explains the detachment of fond communal memories of certain objects from the political system that produced them. It points out the ironic invocation of the international discourse of cultural heritage that legitimate the trash of the previous era and enabled Hungarians to redefine themselves as both savvy capitalist consumers and cultured democratic citizens.