Imagining Postcommunism: Visual Narratives of Hungary's 1956 Revolution

Chapter Three: Memorial To The Martyrs Of The Counter-Revolution

chapter three MEMORIAL TO THE MARTYRS OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN KEEPING WITH the Kádár regime’s efforts to suppress memories of the 1956 uprising, relatively few monuments to the “counterrevolution ” were erected during the communist years. The main exception is Viktor Kalló’s Memorial to the Martyrs of the Counter-Revolution (also known as the Martyrs Monument).1 Reflecting the dimensions and rhetorical overstatement of socialist realism, it is a colossal bronze statue of a mortally wounded worker reaching for the sky in a final gesture of victory as he falls to the ground. Banished to the Statue Park Museum after the collapse of communism, the monument stood for more than thirty years in Republic Square (Köztársaság tér) in Budapest’s Eighth District , a major area of resistance in 1956. Today Republic Square is a quiet park known mainly as the site of the Erkel Theater. But more-disturbing associations dating back to the revolution cast their shadows. On October 30, 1956, armed insurgents besieged the headquarters of the Communist Party’s municipal branch, located across the street from the theater. The building had been defended by state-security police—the hated ÁVO—and rumor had it that prisoners had been languishing for years in secret underground prison cells. During the course of the fighting, a number of the building’s occupants were shot in cold blood or beaten to death as they attempted to surrender or escape. Several police and military personnel were hanged on the spot, and their bodies were mutilated. Following the siege, excavators were brought in and the square was dug up, but no trace of an underground prison was uncovered. Republic Square was the scene of the revolutionaries ’ most reprehensible actions in the thirteen days of the uprising. But by the mid-1970s, the episode had faded from public discourse. The foreword to a book published in 1974 on the siege of the party building and the violence that ensued notes that the events had been largely 62 chapter three Viktor Kalló’s Memorial to the Martyrs of the Counter-Revolution (1960). Photograph by Zsolt Bátori. Courtesy http://www.szoborpark.hu forgotten, their memory preserved only through the iconographic work of Kalló’s monument: “If we were to stand today in Republic Square and go into the party building, we wouldn’t encounter a single trace of what happened here on October 30, 1956. Looking out the window of the Party headquarters, we’re met with the familiar image of the wooded square’s peaceful atmosphere. The only reminder of what happened on that late October day is the statue that stands in front of the party building, the figure of a fatally wounded worker, collapsing but raising his powerful fist in a final show of strength” (Katona 1974, 7–8). As virtually the only public memento of October 30, 1956, Memorial to the Martyrs of the Counter-Revolution shouldered a heavy rhetorical responsibility. But what was the nature of this responsibility if the party’s aim was the obliteration of the memory of 1956? The Martyrs Monument embodied a narrative that was generated in various public discursive spaces long before the bronze was cast. This discourse was replete with images and metaphors of the body, which were then amalgamated into the work. There they exercised a disciplinary function in the Foucauldian memorial to the martyrs of the counter-revolution 63 A postcard sold at the Statue Park Museum takes a playful spin on Kalló’s martyr . Courtesy http://www.szoborpark.hu sense. With the suspension of the terror that had been enacted in the form of imprisonments, show trials, and executions, the state could now exercise social control through the microphysics of power. And Kalló’s monument would blend into the landscape as one more barely noticed apparatus of control. Now enjoying retirement in the Statue Park, the Martyrs Monument amuses foreign visitors who have no idea what prompted its histrionic pose. But remnants of its earlier life can still be seen in Republic Square in the form of a rectangular platform about sixty feet long and twenty feet wide. Spray-painted with graffiti, it appears to be the foundation of a razed building. On closer inspection, however, one finds that the sides of this curious structure are faced with marble, now chipped off in places. A small inscription framed with stars...