ABSTRACT
Hungary’s role in World War II, and the Holocaust in particular, remains a highly contested issue in contemporary Hungarian memory politics. Erected hastily and without public consent on Budapest’s Freedom Square in 2014, the memorial to the Wehrmacht’s occupation of Hungary features the country as a victim and concomitantly denies its complicity in the Holocaust. Facing the memorial in defiance of its political message, a spontaneously constructed counter-memorial, the so-called Living Memorial, stands on the opposite side of the road to this day. Consisting of a variety of objects, including pebbles, photographs, notes, shoes, and suitcases, the Living Memorial lays bare what the government-sponsored memorial occludes. This chapter takes its cue from the shoes placed at the Living Memorial as a gesture to recall a memorial dedicated to Jews shot into the Danube by Hungarian Arrow Cross militiamen in the last months of the war. In particular, it examines how the object-world of the Living Memorial resonates with this earlier memorial at the Danube and how this mnemonic resonance serves as an expedience to challenge the amnesiac rhetoric of the memorial to the German occupation. While the latter veils Hungary’s role in the Holocaust, this chapter argues that, paradoxically, the commotion around its construction has resulted in a public expression of personal and collective counter-memories of the Holocaust that gain expression in the Living Memorial. Throughout this chapter, I use the metaphor of resonance to describe how the Living Memorial activates and actualizes earlier practices of commemorating the Holocaust to generate shockwaves of political resistance.
