House of Terror is a museum located at
Andrássy út
Andrássy Avenue ( hu, Andrássy út) is a boulevard in Budapest, Hungary, dating back to 1872. It links Erzsébet Square with the Városliget. Lined with spectacular Neo-renaissance mansions and townhouses featuring fine facades and interiors, it ...
60 in
Budapest
Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...
,
Hungary
Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the ...
. It contains exhibits related to the
fascist and
communist regimes in 20th-century Hungary and is also a memorial to the victims of these regimes, including those detained, interrogated, tortured or killed in the building.
The museum opened on 24 February 2002 and the Director-General of the museum since then has been Dr
Mária Schmidt
Mária Schmidt (born 10 October 1953) is a Hungarian historian and university lecturer. In 2016 she holds the office of the Government Commissioner of the Memorial Year of the 1956 Revolution, Director-General of the 20th Century Institute, the ...
.
The House of Terror is a member organization of the
Platform of European Memory and Conscience
Platform may refer to:
Technology
* Computing platform, a framework on which applications may be run
* Platform game, a genre of video games
* Car platform, a set of components shared by several vehicle models
* Weapons platform, a system or ...
.
Visitors including
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziński ( , ; March 28, 1928 – May 26, 2017), or Zbig, was a Polish-American diplomat and political scientist. He served as a counselor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was President Jimmy Carter' ...
,
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama (; born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, international relations scholar and writer.
Fukuyama is known for his book ''The End of History and the Last Man'' (1992), which argue ...
and
Hayden White
Hayden V. White (July 12, 1928 – March 5, 2018) was an American historian in the tradition of literary criticism, perhaps most famous for his work '' Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe'' (1973/2014).
Career
...
have praised the Museum.
Building
The building was used by the
Arrow Cross Party
The Arrow Cross Party ( hu, Nyilaskeresztes Párt – Hungarista Mozgalom, , abbreviated NYKP) was a far-right Hungarian ultranationalist party led by Ferenc Szálasi, which formed a government in Hungary they named the Government of National ...
and
ÁVH.
The museum was set up under the far-right government of
Viktor Orbán
Viktor Mihály Orbán (; born 31 May 1963) is a Hungarian politician who has served as prime minister of Hungary since 2010, previously holding the office from 1998 to 2002. He has presided over Fidesz since 1993, with a brief break between ...
. In December 2000 the Public Foundation for the Research of Central and East European History and Society purchased the building with the aim of establishing a
museum
A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make thes ...
in order to commemorate these two bloody periods of
Hungarian history
Hungary in its modern (post-1946) borders roughly corresponds to the Great Hungarian Plain (the Pannonian Basin). During the Iron Age, it was located at the crossroads between the cultural spheres of the Celtic tribes (such as the Scordisci, Boii ...
.
During the year-long construction work, the building was fully renovated inside and out. The internal design, the final look of the museum's
exhibition hall, and the external facade are all the work of architect Attila F. Kovács. The reconstruction plans for the House of Terror Museum were designed by architects
János Sándor and Kálmán Újszászy. The
reconstruction
Reconstruction may refer to:
Politics, history, and sociology
*Reconstruction (law), the transfer of a company's (or several companies') business to a new company
*'' Perestroika'' (Russian for "reconstruction"), a late 20th century Soviet Unio ...
turned the exterior of the building into somewhat of a
monument
A monument is a type of structure that was explicitly created to commemorate a person or event, or which has become relevant to a social group as a part of their remembrance of historic times or cultural heritage, due to its artistic, hist ...
; the black exterior structure (consisting of the decorative entablature, the blade walls, and the granite footpath) provides a frame for the museum, making it stand out in sharp contrast to the other buildings on
Andrássy Avenue
The House of Andrássy is the name of a Hungarian noble family of very ancient lineage that was prominent in Hungarian history. The full family name is ''Andrássy de Csíkszentkirály et Krasznahorka''. ''Csíkszentkirály'' is a town in modern ...
. Inside the building, the Museum has a
T-54 tank on display.
Permanent exhibition
With regard to communism and fascism, the exhibition contains material on the nation's relationships to
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
and the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
. It also contains exhibits related to Hungarian organisations such as the fascist
Arrow Cross Party
The Arrow Cross Party ( hu, Nyilaskeresztes Párt – Hungarista Mozgalom, , abbreviated NYKP) was a far-right Hungarian ultranationalist party led by Ferenc Szálasi, which formed a government in Hungary they named the Government of National ...
and the communist
ÁVH (which was similar to the Soviet Union
KGB
The KGB (russian: links=no, lit=Committee for State Security, Комитет государственной безопасности (КГБ), a=ru-KGB.ogg, p=kəmʲɪˈtʲet ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)əj bʲɪzɐˈpasnəsʲtʲɪ, Komitet gosud ...
secret police). Part of the exhibition takes visitors to the basement, where they can see examples of the cells that the ÁVH used to break the will of their prisoners.
Much of the information and the exhibits are in Hungarian, although each room has an extensive information sheet in both English and Hungarian. Audio guides in English, German, Spanish, Russian and Italian are also available.
The background music to the exhibition was composed by former
Bonanza Banzai frontman and producer
Ákos Kovács. The scoring includes the work of a string orchestra, special stereophonic mixes, and sound effects.
Visitors may not take photographs or use video cameras inside of the building. There is no reduced fee for
ICOM members.
Controversy
Some historians, journalists, and political scientists such as Magdalena Marsovszky or Ilse Huber have argued that the museum portrays Hungary too much as the victim of foreign occupiers and does not recognise enough the contribution that Hungarians themselves made to the regimes in question as well.
Criticism has also been raised that far more space is given to the terror of the communist regime than the fascist one. One answer to these criticisms was that while the German occupation and fascist regime of
Ferenc Szálasi
Ferenc Szálasi (; 6 January 1897 – 12 March 1946), the leader of the Arrow Cross Party – Hungarist Movement, became the "Leader of the Nation" (''Nemzetvezető'') as head of state and simultaneously prime minister of the Kingdom of Hungary' ...
lasted less than a year, the Hungarian Communist regime lasted for 40 years. The museologists of the museum also reminded critics that the
Hungarian Holocaust has its
own museum, within three kilometres distance, so there is no need to repeat its content.
References
External links
*
House of Terror Budapest English language website
{{DEFAULTSORT:House Of Terror
2002 establishments in Hungary
Museums of communism
Fascism in Hungary
History museums in Hungary
Holocaust commemoration
Hungarian People's Republic
Museums established in 2002
Museums in Budapest
Headquarters of political parties