Budapest and Berlin: comparing memories

In the aftermath of the communist regime in Hungary, a process of destruction and removal of symbols and monuments erected during that period began. The idea of building a park to collect statues of Lenin previously placed in public spaces in all Hungarian cities was first suggested in 1989 by historian Szörényi László.

A few years later, in 1991, the Budapest Assembly, in agreement with the residents of each district, decided to relocate some of the statues erected during the years of the communist regime. The new open-air museum opened in 1993. Thus, 42 statues were collected in a park on the edge of the city, where, stripped of the celebratory component, they should instead serve as a warning. However, maintaining the museum has become more and more difficult, as it receives no public funding.

By contrast, in East Berlin, Soviet history is omnipresent. The long Karl-Marx-Allee has not changed its name, nor have the busts of Lenin, Marx and Engels been removed from central parks. Immense memorials erected in memory of Soviet soldiers who fell to liberate the city from the Nazis stand in the heart of Treptower Park, the Tiergarten and at Schönholzer Heide (erected in ‘49 under the newly formed GDR).

However, a distinction must be made between monuments commemorating the Soviet Army and others erected under the GDR. If the commemorative monuments erected in the immediate postwar and dedicated to the liberation from Nazism persist, the same cannot be said of others built between ‘49 and ‘90. For example, the giant statue of Lenin erected in the ‘70s for the Bolshevik leader’s 100th birthday was, albeit following heated debate, removed from the list of protected monuments and dismantled two years after the fall of the Wall.

A further complication arises from the impossibility of equating the Soviet and National Socialist regimes to Germany’s, which remains "incomparable". If Nazism is absolute evil, Soviet liberation will always be good insofar as it fought the former. In Germany, the memory of the Soviet liberation-occupation is twofold.

This is not the case for Hungary however, where, as happened in Germany, it was the Red Army that defeated the Nazis of the Arrow Cross Party. In the Magyar country, the “liberating” dimension of Communism seems to be absent and instead a narrative that de-emphasizes the responsibility of the Hungarian people and places Nazis and Soviets on the same level, as invaders is preferred.

For example, the House of Terror museum in Budapest equates Nazi and Soviet occupation, without delving into the Hungarian government’s collaboration with these regimes. Moreover, in July 2014, a monument was erected in Budapest in remembrance of the Nazi occupation. The monument seems to present Hungary as a victim of Nazi Germany, eliding the former alliance between the two powers and the joint responsibility for the deportation of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews.

A different approach to monument preservation within the two European capitals with partly similar histories can be explained by their different ways of dealing with the past. Germany cannot turn away from its national-socialist past, hence the legitimization of remembering those who helped end it. For Hungary, it is less difficult to look over. Especially in the last decade, Budapest disavows the period of Nazi collaboration, like the Soviet one, with a damnatio memoriae that victimizes the Hungarian people.

If the aim of the aforementioned resolutions is to reinforce measures in Europe against the Soviet glorification currently taking place in Russia and to uphold the rightful condemnation of the crimes committed by totalitarian regimes, the peculiarities of different national histories within the EU might clash with the intent to propose a wider shared European memory.