Discourse, Culture and Organization by Tomas Marttila

Author:Tomas Marttila
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319941233
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The German Occupation Memorial/Freedom Square: Szabadság tér

The neighboring Szabadság tér (Freedom Square) caused intense debate in the media and at the location. It was so fiercely contested that the opponents organized a counter-memorial. The floating signifier—or paradiastolic move to follow rhetoric—dealt with WWII. The erected on the Holocaust memorial year, the German Occupation Memorial gained protests that eventually spawned the grassroots movement Eleven Emlékmű (Living Memorial). The official memorial implied that the Hungarians had not played an active part in the Final Solution during the Holocaust—something difficult to absorb (Hirschberger et al. 2016). The counter movement criticized this rhetorical move: ‘the government ordered the erection of a statue of German occupation of 1944 in the heart of Budapest, suggesting that all Hungarians had been victims of German Nazis’ (Bozóki 2015: 24). In fact, the first anti-Semitic laws in Hungary were actually passed in the 1920s, and the genocide intensified during the Arrow Cross era at the end of WWII.6

The Eleven Emlékmű started as a flash mob on March 23, 2014 under the heading of ‘living memorial’ (‘my story’) that asked people from all ethnic backgrounds in Hungary to come and place some small commemorative items at the site to challenge the politicized historical narrative embodied by the memorial. The movement grew into a standing memorial, a regular event and a Facebook group and later Facebook page, where people, many of whom had no background in political activism, protested government policies. From the perspective of the government, which was building its identity through enemy rhetoric, it was perhaps convenient to have this active Budapest-based group of intellectuals. The living counter-memorial remains on the site. It also offers a point of contestation for at least those Hungarians familiar with the issue and works as a rallying point for the anti-government protests.

This chapter sought to reveal how practices of transforming the urban symbolic landscape are relevant as an object of study for discourse analysis. It also established the rhetorical-performative discourse analysis as an approach related to the Essex School discourse theory. Performative-constitutive meaning-making is central to populism as a logic of articulation. In Hungary, the dichotomy of us and them was sedimented through transformation and contestation of urban symbols. The myths of the previous eras were contested, removed and replaced. Budapest as the platform for the re-articulation of nationhood was redesigned under Orbán governments enforcing populist confrontation and offering new points of identification. The interwar period was chosen by the government to be celebrated next to the parliament and paradiastolically rearticulated through selective amnesia of the German Occupation Memorial that also became a point of contestation, only strengthening the populist logic of equivalence: confrontation that itself became the empty signifier of Fidesz populism.

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