Abstract

This paper explores how art contributes to the articulation of memories that counter the official historical narrative of Hungary’s self-proclaimed political and ideological system, illiberal democracy. Amid deepening polarization between Europe’s post-colonialist and post-socialist countries, the Hungarian government promotes a Christian conservative national identity against the “liberal” values of Western Europe. Systematic appropriation of historical traumas is at the core of such efforts, which largely manifests in removing, erecting and reinstating memorials, as well as in the re-signification of trauma sites. Insufficient civic involvement in rewriting histories generates new ways of resistance, which I demonstrate through the case study of a protest-performance organized by the Living Memorial activist group as a response to the government’s decision to displace the memorial of Imre Nagy in 2018. I seek to understand the dynamics between top-down memory politics, civil resistance and art within the conceptual apparatus of the “memory activism nexus” (Rigney 2018, 2020) and “multidirectional memories” (Rothberg 2009). I argue that artistic memory activism has limited potential to transform the dynamics of memory in a context where a national conservative political force has gradually taken control over historical narratives, triggering inevitably polarizing responses in the society. Although profoundly embedded in local histories, the case-study may offer new ways of negotiating traumatic heritages through the entanglement of art and memory activism.

Highlights

  • In the aftermath of oppressive regimes and armed conflicts, societies face an enormous task to seek justice, evaluate their histories and work toward a future where such painful episodes can be avoided

  • The nonviolent political demonstrations I analyzed concern different stages of memory in different historical and political contexts, including the democratic transformation and illiberal democracy, yet they both play a critical role in the articulation and visualization of memories with artistic tools

  • The action brought silenced memories back into the public sphere, and for a short while it re-signified the area around the Parliament – the trauma site of the 1956 Revolution – which has since been completed as the par excellence representative space of the official historical narrative

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Summary

Introduction

In the aftermath of oppressive regimes and armed conflicts, societies face an enormous task to seek justice, evaluate their histories and work toward a future where such painful episodes can be avoided. Budapest’s well-known “trauma site museum” (Violi 2012), the House of Terror Museum and the yet-tobe-opened House of Fates Holocaust museum represent the same problematic approach to history as the one that currently characterizes the government’s memory politics In this situation, the articulation of alternative memories by creative and artistic means takes place largely outside the state-sponsored institutions, and political art tends to serve as an aid of demonstrations to formulate and visualize counter-histories in opposition to the official narrative. In the aftermath of the short-lived revolution, the new Soviet-backed government of János

Hannah Arendt added the chapter “Epilogue
Conclusion

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