Folia historica 27

I. TANULMÁNYOK - Fisli Éva: Szavak kőbe vésve. A második világháború budapesti emléktábláiról

inaugurated after 1945 and then partly removed, partly reconstructed in the 1990's. The absence of these tablets on the walls is often just as telling as their previous presence was. The city and its houses stand in the intersection of several ages. Since the early 1990's, many heterogeneous types of plaques have been placed in public spaces, and many new or revived organizations have set commemorative signs in order to legitimize themselves, while numerous old plaques have been removed. The primary aim of my paper is to call attention to the fact that former plaques, already circumscribed as a subtype of political memorials, and our photos recording and preserving them can be studied from various points of view. This time I focused on the fate of memorial plaques of World War II in Budapest, using the photos of the Historical Photo Department of the Hungarian National Museum. I did not intend to produce a monograph on all the plaques and all the related practices, only wanted to highlight some characteristic aspects of a rich source, pointing out the possible directions of a research on them. First I give a survey of the available resources on removed memorial plaques (published catalogues and collected photos), then I describe the types of plaques commemorating World War II in Budapest. Finally, I illustrate with two examples how urban space can become the stake of fierce conflicts. 1.) The story of the war memorial damaged in 1956, then re-inaugurated - and supplemented by a twin plaque condemning the previous damage - in 1957 reveals how power reseizes the right of public commemoration. 2.) The plaques at the prison in Gyorskocsi street inaugurated in diverse years preserve the traces of varied individual sufferings. Their presence on the walls of the prison is, however, indicates the disappearance of a retaliating and excruciating power. As we have already seen in connection with the plaques commemorating World War II, the painful memories of the 1940's became urgent again in the post-communist context of the 1990's. The war itself was reinterpreted as the period before the regime just falling apart in those moments, and that aspect cannot be neglected in a research trying to find the reasons for removing plaques in that era. But not only institutions have an influence on collective commemorations. New agents of remembrance entered the stage in the 1990's, who claimed for the naming and taking of public spaces. The process of setting plaques can therefore also be described according to social demands satisfied by certain inscriptions. 134