Situated at 60 Andrassy Boulevard, the main thoroughfare of Budapest in a beautiful, elegant building Terror House is impossible to miss. The building hs a large grey metal strip attatched to the top and letters reading TERROR HOUSE stamped out of it in imposing block script. If the aim is to make the house which served as the headquarters of the Red Arrow Party (Hungarian Fascists) and then the Hungarian Communist Party stand out then it is certainly successful. However, I couldn't help but feel that it was also a little tasteless and a sign that the museum concentrates more on the shocking and the macabre than on the broader story of this indeed brutal period of the country's history.
The aim of the terror museum is to commemorate the victims of both the Red Arrow and Communist regimes as well as trying to 'present a picture of what life was like for Hungarians in those times' (terrorHaza.hu/museum). The house has been
gutted and redesigned inside so that the visiter works from the groundfloor, through connecting rooms that work gradually forward in time. When you reach the top a lift takes you down to the dungeon which is the only part kept as it was and has the cells and living spaces of many people kept and tortured by the secret police, including Imre Nagy.
The museum does cover the two regimes in question fairly thoroughly without going into so much detail that it becomes too much to handle and there are quite a few very interesting and unusual items. One room has footage of Imre Nagy at his trial after 1956 which I had been interested in seeing and had not been able to up till them and there was a fascinating room discussing the rise of the Communists, how peoples political sympathies were manipulated post WWII and the control by the Soviets.
However, on the negative side my impression of gaudiness from the outside unfortunately did spill over into the interior. The exhibit became plain tacky at times-for example when Nazism is fading but Communism is rising they have a car decked out entirely in red on the inside with the hammer and sickle and music plays not dissimilar to the Jaws tune, getting faster and faster as the spectre of Communism approaches. It failed to be dramatic or aweing completely and instead became to me a little comical albeit in a dark way. This sort of thing occurred a few times during the tour and completely takes away from the very real suffering and fear that was felt by the regimes.
The fact that the inside of the building has been reconstructed took away from the reality of housing the museum in the actual building which controlled much of the terror-I felt that having the exhibits in the true rooms, even if run down would have been far more atmospheric than on plastic boarding and cream painted walls.
Another downside is the lack of full English information. There are leaflets, often fairly substantial in each room in English, but these give more of a general background to the history which that room displays rather than the individual exhibits. Minus my Hungarian friends I was a little lost as to what many of them were meant to show. There are a number of newspaper cuttings and similar and I would have liked to be able to read what they were saying about the events as they were happening-even censorship is interesting. For foreigners putting up some extra English explanations relating more directly to the items on display would have improved the experience a lot for me.
Apart from the design of the museum I also found it's obvious political bias troubling. Often the explanations and exhibits themselves seemed to have been chosen to give a particular, right winged political slant to the overall effect of the place. There is also a rather worrying video that features Hungary having it's territory reduced by the invading Nazis and Russians over the years-but it starts out with the map of Hungary including much of Slovenia and Croatia, a map which is a common motif of the far-right in Hungary who belief that they have had their rightful territory unfairly diminished and they should be fighting to get it back. In places the museum would appear to agree with this.
I still believe that this museum is worth visiting and it is laudable that effort has been made to commemorate and explain for future generations how such events came about. I just think that it is wise to view some of the exhibition carefully and not to accept absolutely everything at face value.
Practicalities:
Location-60 Andrassy, Budapest Admission-1500HUF, 750HUF for students and concessions (approximately £4.50/£2.25 at the current exchange rate) Opening Hours-10am to 6pm, closed monday
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Jun 23rd, 2009
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