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

The ideology of Socialist Realism defined itself in opposition to the new (modern) architecture. It was precisely this architecture, with its principal characteristic feature of functionalism, that was branded as formalist and cosmopolitan, as the means of “imperialist penetration". Cinder the “wise guidance” of Comrade Stalin, the Generalissimo, the fundamental tenets of Socialist Realism were thus formulated: it should be socialist in content (meaning the Stalinist principle of caring for man and proclaiming the victory of the proletariat) and national in form, with the two aspects in, needless to say, a dialectic relationship. The matter of content was beyond any dispute. As for form, that was to be argued about for a long time, but its prevailing interpretation involved the employment of a neo-Classicist style.

And it is here that we should return to the issue of those ruined buildings on the Pest-side bank of the Danube. It was the theoretical implications of the meticulous scholarly examination of Classicism that were to be exploited, on a petty level, in practice at the turn of the forties and the fifties. Due to aspiring after ideals of the universally human, the supranational and the permanent, this Classicism was, as Anna Zádor explains in a piece written in 1943, a style less subjective (than that of Art Nouveau for example), and yet in its principles the “Hungarian spirit had discovered its own likeness”. Emblematic of this was the building of the National Museum (Mihály Pollack, 1936- 42), wherein the architecture and the institution form an organic unity. A building should express its status - this would become a major criterion of evaluating public buildings erected under Socialist Realism.

Drawn up in October 1944, a memorandum entitled The Tasks of Architecture in Post-War Hungary appeared in a 1945 issue of Tér és Forma. The signatories of the document (József Fischer, Pál Granasztói, Jenő Kismarty- Lechner, Máté Major and János Weltzl) proclaimed that “an architectural frame created in the appropriate manner increases human and social value". They outlined their (new, expected) tasks that were to follow from the relationship between a “more progressive social and economic order” and “modern architecture” in the interest of a “better future”. In accordance with this idea, the architectural motto was no longer restoration but reconstruction, primarily in terms of providing an institutional remedy for the housing shortage.

6