On my mind

ON the outskirts of Budapest is the surreal ‘Memento Park’ devised by Hungarian architect Ákos Eleod.

It is the final resting place of statues and memorials from the country’s communist past, and one can also sit in a Trabant from East Germany and listen on the phone to the voices of Stalin, Mao Zedong and others.

Far from being the place I expected to see – a cheerless cemetery for dead statues – Lenin, Marx, Engels and others invite the visitor to reflect on tyranny and democracy.

It serves as a vivid reminder of the folly of the political memory game which uses statues for aggrandisement.

Most figures, like the rest of us, had feet of clay, but in their case supporting a lump of stone; yet there are far more creative ways of remembering and honouring people. Statues and sculptures should be about art and not a dodgy past.

When UK politicians today warn against lying about our history they are walking on the ashes of an end of empire orgy of incineration of any colonial records which threatened to take the ‘Great’ out of ‘Great Britain’.

But the Budapest model might be a way forward in dealing with our shameful past.

It is a politically neutral artistic project which captures the dignity of democracy, the responsibility of historical thinking and reflection on tyranny.

The architect wrote: “Only democracy is able to give the opportunity to let us think freely about dictatorship”. Until we are honest about our political and economic history we remain complicit.

One part of the park is named ‘A Sentence about Tyranny’ after the poem by Gyula Illyés.

The poem asks: “Where seek tyranny? Think again: Everyone is a link in the chain; Of tyranny’s stench you are not free: You yourself are tyranny.”

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