Echoes of the Past: Memorial to the Victims of the German Occupation, Budapest, Hungary

Every now and then, when you travel, you come upon something a bit controversial. Actually, it happens quite often, but I guess that’s the nature of humanity, in that we all have different points of view; moreover, these tend to change over time even in the same place. One such contentious example that I chanced upon was the recently erected Memorial to the Victims of the German Occupation in Budapest. This official government memorial shows the Archangel Gabriel standing before some partially broken columns, holding the orb and cross that forms part of the imperial regalia of Hungary. An eagle resembling the symbol of the Third Reich swoops from above to take the orb. Given that Gabriel is featured, the memorial is evocative of the Millennium Monument in Heroes’ Square, built in 1896, so there is clearly a lot of patriotic and potentially nationalistic imagery on show here.

What particularly interested and intrigued me about the memorial (and what made it more thought-provoking than many others) is how it simultaneously commemorates history and its victims and starkly demonstrates how the past is used by different factions to influence things today. It is a site where the past is memorialised in contrasting ways: in stone, at the behest of the state, and via smaller, improvised commemorations laid before the stone structure by individuals. Since its construction in 2014, the memorial has been embellished with a combination of printed denunciations of its integrity and personal tributes to those who died in the Holocaust. These are less additions to the memorial than direct challenges to the history it is supposed to commemorate. The argument is that the monument fails to recognise that most Hungarian victims of the Nazi occupation were Jewish and that many non-Jewish Hungarians, rather than being innocent victims of the regime, were complicit in and collaborated with its actions against the Jews.

Is this a case where, ironically (although not for the first or probably the last time), a monument’s existence represents an attempt to reconstruct or even erase the past and is designed for modern-day political ends? The fact that it was installed over the course of one night after months of protest indicates the level of controversy the memorial caused in Hungary. One of the printed notices affixed to a barbed wire fence in front of it by members of the public (most of them include English translations, so evidently the intention is to reach as wide an audience as possible) makes clear that some view the memorial’s construction as a self-serving political act by the current government. Interestingly, this same notice suggests that the monument’s Gabriel figure seems to be offering the Hungarian imperial orb to the German eagle rather than having it snatched away. Another irony, perhaps. I have included a photograph I took of this particular notice. A separate placard combines commemoration of ‘the victims of the state-level anti-Semitism of the [WWII] Horthy regime’ with remembering those who died due to what the writer perceives as the ‘erroneous crisis management’ by Orban’s government during the recent pandemic, deliberately creating parallels between the WWII regime and the current Hungarian administration. You can, of course, form your own views regarding these messages.

Many of the items left before the stone monument are very personal, including photographs of Nazi victims, biographies of those lost, poems, prayers, and the remains of candles. There is something very poignant about the juxtaposition of these small items with the huge grey edifice behind them. The fact that they stand in front of the official memorial has symbolic resonance in itself. It was fascinating to see a monument effectively (and unintentionally) consisting of these two parts – one state-sponsored, the other extemporised by members of the general public – conveying alternative (indeed, polarising) messages about the past and the present and quite different political views. It reflects something timeless about human society, not least the intense dialogues that can result from the symbolism generated by material objects.

The photographs below show some more views of the memorial, including the fountains set a little way in front of it and a selection of the notices and makeshift personal tributes left by individuals.