Fencing in the past: Budapest's Statue Park Museum

Abstract

This article focuses on an open-air museum established in Budapest in 1993 as a repository for the city's communist monuments. Following Raymond Williams's emphasis on the importance of studying the material processes through which culture is constructed, the Statue Park Museum is analyzed as an arena for the formation of collective memories about Hungarians' 40 years of experiences with communism. The article explores the political climate within which the decision was reached to transfer the monuments from their original sites to a museum, offers a discursive reading of the museum as a space that contributes to an emerging post-communist discourse of history and society, and argues that despite some public skepticism about its value, the museum provides a symbolic space for the common recollection of diverse narratives.