ABSTRACT
On October 23, 2006, 50 years to the day since Hungarian civilians battled their own security services and Russian troops on the streets of Budapest, the United States Embassy in the city watched with bated breath as Hungarian extremists, crowds in opposition to the Hungarian government, and even the veterans of the original 1956 events themselves, battled Hungarian riot police with everything they could get their hands on – including an original and still functioning 1956 tank. Deploying approaches from Memory Studies and Performance Studies, this chapter is an analytical history of how the memory of 1956 unraveled in Hungarian-U.S. relations in the fall of 2006. In government documents, personal interviews and their attendant media coverage, I trace the year’s bilateral commemorative programming, and the anatomy of failure by both national governments to anticipate the explosion of commemorative protests by right-of-center and far-right political forces within Hungary, which arguably undid both countries’ commemorative diplomacy during the anniversary. This case study of the 2006 commemorations of the 1956 Hungarian uprising demonstrates that even the most carefully crafted official remembrance of the past is vulnerable to challenges to its memory régime by non-state actors – and national governments and their diplomats must plan for such contingencies.
