Opposition figures have demanded the reinstatement of Mária Schmidt as director-general of Budapest’s House of Terror Museum and accused the Tisza government of erasing the memory of 1956 in the 70th anniversary year of the revolution.
Zoltán Tarr, the minister for social relations and culture, announced Schmidt’s dismissal and the closure of the museum on his Facebook page on September 15.
Tarr said the building at 60 Andrássy Avenue would stay shut until a review of the exhibition’s content was complete and rights attached to the displays had been clarified. The review would be carried out by researchers from Eötvös Loránd University’s institute of historical studies together with independent experts, he said, and it would reopen “later this year”.
It stayed shut for a day. On September 16, Tarr announced that the House of Terror would reopen on September 22 and be free to all for a week, with the exhibition left in its present form while the review continued.
Writing on September 17, Schmidt, a well-known historian and author, said she had lost the thread of the minister’s reasoning and that he had changed course after seeing the public reaction.
No independent experts existed, she argued, because everyone holds a worldview and political preferences. Anyone claiming a value-free consensus on questions of remembrance was siding with whatever thinking happened to be dominant, in this case the liberalism that rules academic life.
If the permanent displays of every other Hungarian public collection were not reviewed as well, Schmidt said she would again suspect that the museum had been singled out because of her known sympathies for the opposition.
Either the minister found the exhibition acceptable and should leave it alone, she said, or he rejected its central claims and should commission a new one, on which there would be no full agreement either. She invited him to visit, noting there would be no queue.
Opposition party Fidesz called the decision “a shame and a disgrace” and said those involved would carry the weight of it for the rest of their lives. Fidesz had earlier thanked the former director-general for 24 years at the museum.
The retreat was read as a victory by the opposition. János Nagy, private secretary to former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, wrote that the Government had taken fright and that only Schmidt’s return was still outstanding.
Prime Minister Péter Magyar answered him within a minute, with laughing emojis. Schmidt was on their side and they were welcome to keep her, he wrote, adding: “She can organise a coup, too.”
Nagy replied by listing a set of records — public debt, the budget deficit, fuel prices — adding a “record museum closure and reopening”.
The exchange set the tone of a week in which the Government has struggled to explain what the closure was for. Benedek Gyorgyevics, managing director of the state company now operating the site, told HVG the shutdown had no political or ideological motive and was needed to clarify the legal position of the exhibition and to agree a contract with the building’s owner.
Tarr, by contrast, had ordered a review of the content of the displays. Schmidt was removed with immediate effect and told nothing beyond what she read online.
Museum staff had been instructed to blame the closure on technical reasons on the museum’s own channels, she added. Choosing the heads of public museums based on political sympathy did not fit the European political culture that Tisza, a member of the European People’s Party, invokes so often.
Bence Rétvári, parliamentary group leader of the Christian Democrats, said Tisza had built “its own political police, its own ÁVH” and was now closing the museum where the methods of the communist secret police are displayed. The closure was theoretically temporary, he said, in the way that Soviet troops were temporarily stationed in Hungary.
László Dornfeld, lead analyst at the Centre for Fundamental Rights, called the closure “a crime against Hungarian national remembrance”. Antal Ámon, president of the National Association of Hungarian Political Prisoners, called it hasty and ill-considered.
The museum opened in 2002 at the former headquarters of the Arrow Cross Party and later of the ÁVH, and has received more than eight million visitors. Two granite blocks of equal size, one red and one black, stand for the victims of communist and Arrow Cross terror.
The dismissal followed the winding up on September 1 of the foundation that had run the museum since 1999, part of a reordering of public bodies that included state television news bulletins in July.
Plans have been announced for a demonstration outside the museum September 20. Its organisers have also called a march for October 23, the anniversary of the revolution.
