Past Unmastered: Hot and Cold Memory in Hungary

Entanglements of art and memory activism in Hungary’s illiberal democracy

“…The conflict has never been resolved but while the museum's widely criticized victimizing narrative represented FIDESZ's unidirectional approach to history, it also triggered a wave of intense debate, that is, a sort of productive multidirectionality. It was, in fact, the museum's failure to produce a nuanced historical perspective that generated a wide range of discussions from the theorization of "comparative victimhood" (Judt 2005: 826-830, see also : Benazzo 2017;Turai 2009;Zombory 2019) to the critique of memorial museums (Creet 2013;Sodaro 2018), which greatly enriched our understanding of memory. While debates around the House of Terror Museum have been limited to professional and academic circles in this case, the open-air exhibition the museum organized on the occasion of the 1956 uprising's fiftieth anniversary in 2016 activated not only professional but also civil responses.…”

“…7). The demonstrators addressed issues including the memorial's denial of Hungary's complicity in the Holocaust through its problematic symbolism (Erőss 2016;Kovács and Mindler-Steiner 2015;Kovács 2017;Rév 2018;Ungváry 2014) -a problem that has already been raised regarding the House of Terror Museum (Blutinger 2010;Sodaro 2018;Turai 2009). Alongside the counter-monumentnot in the sense that it adopts "anti-monumental strategies, counter to traditional monument principles" but as a memorial "designed to counter a specific existing monument and the values it represents" (Stevens et.…”

Out of Eastern Europe

“…The exhibition made no effort to clarify the political context in which these crimes were committed other than to group them all under the heading of "communist terror." 33 Clearly modeled after the Hungarian "House of Terror" in Budapest, 34 the purpose of such a transitional justice project is not only to criminalize and delegitimize the entire communist past but also to present it as worse than the fascist past that preceded it. This transitional justice project, therefore, does not acknowledge that the principal ideological motivation of Yugoslav communism was anti-fascist struggle.…”

Re-cognizing the post-Soviet condition: the documentary turn in contemporary art in the Baltic States

“…In contrast to this, cold memory is frozen, the past remembered in a cold way is closed, is not kept open, not worked through […] hot memory raises emotions […] cold memory is more neutral, more forgiving. (Turai 2009: 99) Time, and therefore distance, generation and experience, have diminished the heat of memory in the Baltic States with regard to Soviet occupation. The immediate aftermath of independence may have been tempered with emotional, hot memory or 'living memory', but this has over time given way to the more neutral cold memory.…”