On statues and monuments (in Budapest)

Budapest is a city of history, a brooding city as a friend of mine who recently visited the place described it. It is also a city of statues and monuments. I was unaware of the full extent of Budapest’s and Hungary’s troubled history until I arrived. We were being carted from the airport to our residence and I tried to engage our driver in conversation. Rather rudely he spoke only Hungarian. I asked about sport and football. He dismissed this with a shrug that suggested Hungarian football is rubbish.

‘What sport do you follow?’ I asked by way of exaggerated hand signals and by speaking English really, really slowly and loudly, which as we all know passes as a foreign language to an English speaker. 

‘Basketball.’

‘Interesting,’ I replied. This didn’t look like the land of Kobe Bryant. 

I wasn’t about to engage him on the political situation in Hungary. But the buildings kind of gave it away. This was my first taste of a post-Communist country and you could see it in the architecture. It had all of the lifeless functionality and bankrupt creativity that came to epitomise so much of communist life. But I’m intrigued by old buildings and new life out of old buildings. This wasn’t off-putting in the least, more intriguing. 

 

One of the tourist attractions in Budapest is Memento Park; a giant park somewhere on the outskirts of the city; the glossy brochures hinted at the occupants of this park: inside it were all these monstrously large statues of the great socialist leaders – Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Engels and the like. As I recall the brochure actually advertised it as such. A kind of frozen political-historical vaudeville experience. One of them, as I recall, had a worker striding forward, flag in tow, like someone caught somewhere between breaking into a run and doing lunges. ‘Come see the range of jack-asses that left us with a billion dollar debt!’ More seriously, their minister of Education (1998 – 2001), Zoltan Pokorni remarked, “…I studied the plans of the Memento Park project with great interest. I find it a promising plan to keep our historical memory alive and to strengthen citizens’ sense of responsibility and commitment to sustain democracy." It was a part of their history preserved, a lesson not to be repeated. Our wonderful guide who showed us around the Buda side of the city sighed, ‘You know the Russians came and liberated us from Germany and then forgot to leave for forty years.’

And so it goes.

We never made it to Memento Park, it was just too far out and there was far too much to do in Budapest. But walking between Pest and Buda we quite by accident stumbled across the most contested memorial in the city. It was built to commemorate Nazi Germany’s occupation. It is a giant, midnight black eagle attacking an angelic figure; people were protesting in front of the statue, laying down flowers, original pictures of Jewish family presumably killed in the war, placards and speakers organised around the clock. The central, and vociferous, lament was that this memorial represented a form of denialism. The argument, as I could gather, went something like this: don’t pretend we were all victims of Nazi Germany. We were complicit. Our government, our people played their part. Don’t now turn around and blame a force somewhere beyond ourselves and our leaders.

The added lament was that the statue was an eyesore. It seemed an oddly aesthetic complaint in the midst of a politically charged debate. Not only is this an intentional historical misreading but the damn thing looks like the back end of a bus.

And you know, on re-considering that sentiment, I found it to be true, at least for myself. It was garish. This was also the first time I had considered that there might be some kind of code book for this kind of thing, creative criteria that statues and public symbols must adhere to in order to be considered art. I wondered what they were, and for that matter, who drew them up? But not knowing this I would have to agree, this statue was horrid in an obvious way; less a statue and more propaganda as I looked at it. I don’t know the criteria public should adhere to but, by process of elimination, this would be one of the first to be ruled out. In my book.

But the one that left the most indelible impression must have been the shoes on the banks of the Danube. These shoes, bronzed, came in all sizes – children’s shoes, adults, historically accurate renderings of shoes of those Jews dragged down to the bank of the Danube, Jews who were told to strip naked, who were then shot by a Hungarian fascist movement known as the Arrow Cross, and whose bodies were dumped into that great river. As our guide, who took us around the Jewish Quarter remarked in passing, ‘Strauss was wrong, the Danube doesn’t run blue it runs red.’ It was a poignant moment, sacred in a way that things that commemorate rather than celebrate often are.

These are statues and monuments in Budapest but there is a monument in the making in Durban that I do like. Elephants. Right where you would not expect them. As the highway into Durban splits into two, on that island are these elephants. A number of years ago they too were vandalised and I forget the reason now, but I think it is because these elephants were seen to symbolise the wrong political party. Sometimes as South Africans we only seem to ever need half a reason to destroy things. Considering how vulnerable our animals are, this is a statue I think we should keep. Maybe one day the stone will be replaced, and the iron mesh shaping the stone into elephants repaired. Maybe one day the monument will be complete.