The paper explores convergences, relationships, and interactions between materialised forms of contested historical narratives and people, at the controversial Liberty square in Budapest. The square has been a site for the country's various regimes to set in stone their own narratives of Hungarian history through monuments. Amongst many others, one of the country's last Soviet monuments stands here, facing a Second World War memorial recently installed by the populist-nationalist Orban government. The memorial, titled 'Memorial for the Victims of the German Occupation' has been widely criticised for ignoring Hungary's culpability for the deportation of the Hungarian Jews and Roma, even inspiring an unoffical counter-monument at the square. This paper brings a unique insight into how memory is processed here, based on ethnographic fieldwork at the square, and following guided walks at the site.
It argues that at Liberty square, the unfinishedness and overlapping sense of memory - prevalent in the region-, is processed relationally, through convergences occurring on multiple levels, intermingling human and nonhuman agents. This means that while often contesting each other, the memorials' narratives are produced through relations to each other and through relations to other sites and even countries. Relationality is also a tool for people who interact with the monuments to understand and negotiate these narratives.
The paper looks at this relationality from two perspectives; one is temporal and political, and the other is transnational.
Having memorials coexisting from multiple political regimes presents a unique situation; here not simply hegemonic and subjugated memories compete with each other but the various systems' official normative memories. The Soviet memorial was intended to be a glorious celebration of the Soviet soldiers liberating Hungary from the Nazis. However, it is recontextualised into being a reminder of the Soviet oppression, by the addition of the German occupation memorial, which reminds of the other major totalitarian regime in 20th century Hungary. This is also present in the way tour guides use the monuments as prompts to discuss these specific moments of the country's troubled 20th century.
In the square's monuments' production of memory, Hungary's relation to other historical powers is key in positioning the country's identity in the past and the present. The German occupation memorial directly evokes this relation, posing Hungary exclusively as a victim, while erasing the problematic aspects of its history (a narrative prevalent in the current government's memory politics and efforts to shape Budapest's cityscape accordingly). On the other side of the square, the Soviet memorial is challenged by a recently installed statue of U.S. president Ronald Reagan, further distancing the country from its communist past by highlighting its relationship with the U.S.
Although based on a specific case study, the paper aims to open up discussions around relationality and convergences in negotiating memory, and around the processes of populist and hegemonistic reimagining of memory in Eastern Europe and beyond.
The paper is based on my M.A. dissertation in Material and Visual Culture at the University College London and was selected to be one of the recent years' top papers.
