Budapest enters the discussion through the Budapest Liberation Monument, a colossal statue on Gellért Hill in Buda. Its history turns on a striking reversal: commissioned by a Fascist ruler to commemorate a soldier who died fighting the Red Army, it was later adopted as a memorial to the city’s liberation by that same army. The monument makes Budapest a vivid example of how political authority can redirect the meaning of an existing work of art.

Setting and monument

At the top of Gellért Hill, the statue depicts a woman holding a flag aloft. Its scale and appearance led it to be regarded as an example of socialist-realist baroque kitsch, but that familiar reading conceals its earlier purpose. In 1943, Admiral Horthy had ordered the statue to honor his son, who had fallen on the Russian front while fighting the Red Army.

A reversal of political meaning

In 1945, after the Red Army liberated Budapest, the Soviet commander Marshal Kliment Voroshilov was shown the statue and judged that it could serve as the city’s liberation monument. The sculpture itself had not changed; its commemorative role had. An image made under Fascist rule to honor a combatant against the Soviet forces was enlisted to mark their victory.

Art, history, and interpretation

The monument’s reassignment exemplifies the plasticity of artistic meaning: the same public image can be made to support sharply opposed political narratives. The book places this Budapest example alongside changing readings of Dmitri Shostakovich’s symphonies. Music once celebrated as an exemplary expression of Stalinist Socialist Realism could later be heard as a covert mockery of Communist ideology; in the Seventh Symphony, a marching rhythm formerly associated with the German Army’s advance into Russia was reinterpreted as the mechanically cruel advance of Communism. Together, these examples show that an artwork’s meaning is not secured by its original commission or by a single established interpretation.