Prakfalvi Endre: Architecture of Dictatorship. The Architecture of Budapest between 1945 and 1959 - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)

“Reconstruction will be the crucible of the young democracy in Hungary,” announced Mátyás Rákosi at the 1945, “Whitsun,” conference of the Hungarian Communist Party. With a characteristic but perhaps understandable gesture, one of the first architectural assignments after the war was not aimed at solving some practical, reasonable, task, but instead envisaged the creation of a National Pantheon. And while the designers were busy participating in a competition of reconstruction-related ideas, to be used in drawing up guidelines for the municipal development of “Greater Budapest”, or the project of making Budapest a city of baths, the world of politics was characterised, according to Rákosi’s 1948 assessment, by a “healthy shift to the left”. It was this process that was to eliminate or marginalise alternative styles and artistic polyphony, and which led to the discrediting of modern architecture.

... when [Georg] Lukács decrees a mandatory connection between realist art and progressive art, thus coupling aesthetic tyranny and political tyranny then the

suspicion that one will be obliged to sing hymns on an empty stomach is by no means unfounded.

(István Vas, 1946)

The margins within which Hungary was allowed to manoeuvre had basically been demarcated as early as 1944-45. The presence of the Red Army determined where the limits were drawn even in terms of style; the liberation monuments presented and projected in essential form an ideal that was to become the enforced norm. Heroes' Memorials, designed by Károly Antal, were unveiled in Szabadság tér and Gellért tér as early as 1945. “The symbol of a nation’s eternal gratitude carved in stone and cast of bronze,” the Liberation Monument by Zsig- mond Kisfaludi Strobl was inaugurated, after the eighteen months its erection took, on 4 April 1947 (the architectural component being built with Soviet help).

In the period of reconstruction, architect and designer worked as “a jobbing tailor patching up the rags of the country”. The tasks were given: “the solution of the ruin problem,” the restarting of public transportation and utility services, and the rebuilding of the destroyed bridges.

The difficulties were aptly described by József Fischer (the last chairman of the Board of Public Works and gov7