The outside is all black: steel entablature, blade walls, granite footpath. Inside, the temperature drops, and piercing string music is interspersed with grainy black-and-white war footage projected on mounted displays. An enormous T-54 tank sits in the center of the rotunda, dwarfed by thousands of passport-sized photos blown up to fill a six-story wall.
Earlier in the day, we took a bus to the foot of Buda Castle, a massive Baroque palace that houses—in several wings—the Hungarian National Gallery, the most distinguished home for Hungarian art in the country. In addition to a Surrealist exhibit featuring a collection of Dalí’s “dream photographs” (pink rockfish spawned from a pomegranate and eating a tiger, for starters), the Gallery showcased hundreds of before and after photographs of Budapest dating back to WWII. One photo depicted the Elizabeth Bridge in 2019, exactly as it looked when we walked across it the previous morning, alongside one from 1945, where only two stone pillars on the West bank were visible, the asphalt roadway and cable undergirding plunged into the Danube.
It suddenly hit me why so few buildings in Budapest date back before the mid-20th century. Practically the entire city needed to be rebuilt, all the effort at renewal a necessary salve for the disintegration of the past. But WWII was only the half of it. The dual forces of communism and fascism left a tremendous blight on Hungary, a fact made evident in the House of Terror, a museum and memorial to the victims who were detained, tortured, and killed in the very same building that had once been the headquarters of Hungary’s Nazi Party and Communist Terrorist Organizations. There were no photographs allowed inside, but the scenes were chilling enough to stick. At the end of the exhibit, we took a slow elevator to the basement, where we walked through a maze of stone prison cells, the vestiges of the gallows and instruments of torture still present.
When we left, the guard at the door told us that the country was celebrating the 30th anniversary of the fall of communism. I didn’t have a good sense of how long autocratic rule lasted in Hungary and was shocked that it had only been 30 years since the end of such a repressive and dark period. Shorter even than I’ve been alive.
I couldn’t help seeing Andrássy út in a new light after that. The boulevard lined with shady beech trees, coffee shops, and designer boutiques—where we’d sipped on cappuccinos just before going into the House of Terror—seemed indelibly altered in my mind. But from the surface, the history was indiscernible. We could have easily passed by without thinking twice about it. The guard asked us our age when we left and lamented: “Your generation has no connection to this history. Now who will caution against the mistakes of the past?” How fragile is our collective consciousness that history can be wiped out with buildings and bridges as much as it can with age.
On the boulevard, we passed a group of women sitting outside of an Illy coffee shop. They were dressed up, wearing nice jeans cuffed at the ankles, black sunglasses, shawls. Knotted to one of their seats was a chrome-colored balloon in the shape of the number 30. A birthday celebration. They talked, and notes of laughter pealed from the table, buoyed along by the wind. When they left, the balloon unhitched itself from the chair and floated up too, pushing ever higher, a beacon made visible all that could no longer be seen.