My very first experience outside of Budapest’s Ferihegy Airport did little to disabuse me of that conviction. The cab I took into the city center raced past block after block of drab, dour panelház—a type of prefabricated concrete apartment tower endemic to the (former) Eastern Bloc. Designed and built in response to Hungary’s post-World War II urban housing crisis (which itself was a byproduct of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party’s policy of collectivization, à la Josef Stalin), panelház are equal parts cheap, cheerless, and imposing—in other words, quintessentially Second World. But as oppressively communist as panelház may be, they did represent a major standard-of-living improvement for those Hungarians patient enough to wait for the party to assign them a unit.
Once I got into the heart of Budapest, though, I began to understand just how conceited my expectations were. A full quarter-century has gone by since communism vanished from European continent, and Hungary has made prodigious use of that time. True, the legacy of over 40 years of Soviet suzerainty (interrupted only by a few heroic days of freedom in 1956) is manifest, both in the Hungarian national psyche and the Budapest cityscape. But the Magyars have worked hard to make communism a memory. The un-Soviet beauty of their capital city is the fruit of their labors. In 1989, it may have been specious to compare Budapest (“Paris of the East”) to Paris proper, but today, well…the Parisians better not rest on their laurels.
Budapest has done itself a few favors by exiling panelház to the suburbs, banning communist symbols, and meticulously restoring the many art nouveau, baroque, and neo-Gothic buildings that populate its ancient streets. Communism can still be felt—check out the No. 3 metro line and the grim, grey façades that face off against the aforementioned art nouveau, baroque, and neo-Gothic buildings—but what relics remain have been gilded over with the trappings of modernity (i.e. ads).
In fact, as far as I can tell, there’s only one red star in all Budapest: it adorns a memorial to the Soviet soldiers who died taking the city from the Nazis during the last year of World War II. For political reasons (for fear of offending Russia and seeing the gas turned off), the Hungarian government has chosen to let this rather large monument stand in the middle of Szabadság tér (Liberty Square). So as not to cede pride of place to the Red Army memorial, though, a life-size bronze of Ronald Reagan was put up in the same tér circa 2011. The fortieth president is frozen mid-stride, his body language projecting American bravado in direction of the Soviet monument, behind which sits the U.S. embassy. It’s awkward.
But what about the rest of the city’s once-prolific communist iconography? Where did it all go?
This is where Budapest’s story gets interesting. The city’s post-communist leadership could’ve followed Berliners’ example and taken a sledgehammer to anything that smelled like socialist realism. But, wisely (I think), they opted not to engage in iconoclasm. Instead, they moved Budapest’s best Soviet art to an open-air museum called Memento Park. They impounded their communist history.
I paid a visit to Memento Park last Friday. There—framed by plain brick—Lenin, Marx, and a whole host of local party apparatchiks still stand tall. The park was designed neither to shame these communist figures nor to transform them into objects of irony. How, I’m not really sure…frankly, stripped of context as they are, the statues present more of an opportunity for selfies than historical study. In a word, Memento Park is voyeuristic. It’s a commercial take on the remnants of social catastrophe that’s transformed objects of fear into curios.
The most interesting aspect of Memento Park is location, location, location. As with the city’s panelház, the chiseled denizens of the park reside deep in the suburbs. Their existence is not advertised. It almost feels as if Memento Park is situated where it is so that the average tourist will neglect to add it to his or her itinerary. But even if the park and other tokens of Hungarian communism are forgotten, they’re not gone.
Noah Buyon graduated from Georgetown College in 2017 with a major in history. He studied at Corvinus University in Budapest, Hungary during the spring 2016 semester, where he researched the lived experience of the Cold War and blogged for the Junior Year Abroad Network.
