A Monumental Debate in Budapest: The Hentzi Statue and the Limits of Austro-Hungarian Reconciliation, 1852–1918 MICHAEL LAURENCE MILLER WO OF THE MOST ICONIC PHOTOS of the 1956 Hungarian revolution involve a colossal statue of Stalin, erected in 1951 and toppled on the first day of the anti-Soviet uprising. TOne of these pictures shows Stalin’s decapitated head, abandoned in the street as curious pedestrians amble by. The other shows a tall stone pedestal with nothing on it but a lonely pair of bronze boots. Situated near Heroes’ Square, Hungary’s national pantheon, the Stalin statue had served as a symbol of Hungary’s subjugation to the Soviet Union; and its ceremonious and deliberate destruction provided a poignant symbol for the fall of Stalinism. Thirty-eight years before, at the beginning of an earlier Hungarian revolution, another despised statue was toppled in Budapest, also marking a break from foreign subjugation, albeit to a different power. Unlike the Stalin statue, which stood for only five years, this statue—the so-called Hentzi Monument—had been “a splinter in the eye of the [Hungarian] nation” for sixty-six years. Perceived by many Hungarians as a symbol of “national humiliation” at the hands of the Habsburgs, the Hentzi Monument remained mired in controversy from its unveiling in 1852 until its destruction in 1918. The object of street demonstrations and parliamentary disorder in 1886, 1892, 1898, and 1899, and the object of a failed “assassination” attempt in 1895, the Hentzi Monument was even implicated in the fall of a Hungarian prime minister. It is perhaps fitting that the destruction of this controversial monument—which had come to embody the irreconcilable differences between the Habsburg dynasty and the Hungarian nation—coincided perfectly with the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The destruction of the Hentzi Monument was one of the many “iconoclastic episodes” that accompanied the end of Habsburg rule in Central Europe.1 Indeed, “[r]evolutions are a time for destruction, for smashing,” a maxim that applies equally well to the French Revolution in 1789, the Russian Revolution in 1918, and, of course, the Hungarian Revolutions in 1918–1919 and 1956.2 In all of these upheavals, the very statues and monuments that had been erected in order 1Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (New Haven and London, 1997), 10. 2Richard Stites, “Iconoclastic Currents in the Russian Revolution: Destroying and Preserving the Past,” in Abbot Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites, eds., Bolshevik Culture (Bloomington, IN, 1985), 2. Austrian History Yearbook 40 (2009): 215–237 © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota doi:10.1017/S0067237809000174 215 216 MICHAEL LAURENCE MILLER to bolster the ruling powers became objects of iconoclastic ire and symbols of old, discredited regimes. The Hentzi Monument had many parallels in the Habsburg Empire, such as the Marian column in Prague and statues of Emperor Joseph II across the realm. Emblems of dynastic legitimacy (and later, targets of nationalist rage), their destruction marked the denouement in an ever-sharpening debate over the relationship between dynasty and nation. In the past two decades, a growing body of scholarly literature has examined the overlapping and intertwined “politics of commemoration” and “politics of national identity,” with particular focus on the Habsburg lands.3 This focus is quite natural, because here, in particular, the tensions between a supranational dynasty and the increasingly assertive national movements helped transform public spaces into symbolic battlegrounds, pitting competing historical narratives against one another. These tensions rose in the second half of the nineteenth century, with a noticeable upswing in the 1880s and 1890s, as the emergence of mass politics—and the concomitant sharpening of political rhetoric—accelerated the nationalization of urban space in the Habsburg Empire as a whole. In Hungary, where the Revolution of 1848–1849 (and the failed war of independence against Habsburg rule) remained defining moments in the national narrative, this process was all the more acute. The controversy over the Hentzi Monument was rooted in the complicated relationship between Hungary and the Habsburg Empire. Ever since Ferdinand I assumed the crown of Hungary in 1526, the Habsburg emperor also reigned as the King of Hungary—with a few notable exceptions. Although the emperor and the king were unified in one person, the standard-bearers of the Hungarian nation considered Hungary a separate kingdom with a distinct and inviolable constitutional tradition. This was matched by aspirations for a separate and independent Hungarian army, an aspiration that was briefly realized during the Revolution of 1848–1849, when the Hungarian National Guard (Honvédség) became the basis for a separate Hungarian Honvéd army, which fought—and lost—its war of independence from the Habsburg Empire. Under the command of General Arthur Görgey, a Hungarian, the Honvéd army fought against the Habsburg emperor in the name of the Hungarian king, who had been one and the same person before the Hungarians dethroned Francis Joseph in 1849. Once the Hungarian war of independence was crushed in August 1849, Hungary was reintegrated into the Habsburg Empire, but Francis Joseph was not crowned King of Hungary until the Austro-Hungarian compromise restored some of Hungary’s historic rights in 1867. General Hentzi and the Siege of Buda, May 1849 The Revolution of 1848 pitted nation against dynasty, and General Heinrich Hentzi played a crucial role in the eventual victory of dynasty over nation. Born in Debrecen, Hungary, to a 3See, for example, the wide range of articles in the following edited volumes: John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, 1994); Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield, eds., Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present (West Lafayette, IN, 2001); Rudolf Jaworski and Peter Stachel, eds., Die Besetzung des öffentlichen Raumes: Politische Plätze, Denkmäler und Strassennamen im europäischen Vergleich (Berlin, 2007). For recent monographs on these topics, see Markian Prokopovych, Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772–1914 (West Lafayette, IN, 2008); Nancy M. Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands became Czech (Cambridge, MA, 2007); Daniel Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848–1916 (West Lafayette, IN, 2005); Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, 2002); Alice Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848–1914 (Baltimore, 2000). A MONUMENTAL DEBATE IN BUDAPEST 217 noble family of Swiss origin, Hentzi rose through the military ranks, becoming a general in the Austrian army during the Revolution of 1848. His moment of glory (or infamy, depending on one’s perspective) came during the siege of Buda’s Castle Hill in May 1849, when he and several thousand Austrian troops held out for three weeks against the thirty thousand Hungarian Honvéd troops under the command of Arthur Görgey. The Honvéd army had already driven the Austrian army out of most of Hungary, and Görgey expected the siege of Castle Hill to be over quickly, especially since General Hentzi had allegedly given his word to Lajos Kossuth that he would never turn his weapons against his fellow Hungarians.4 In the end, Hentzi had no hesitation in turning his weapons against the Hungarian Honvéd army, and he even ordered his troops to bombard Pest into submission. As General Görgey related to Kossuth in the midst of the bombardment: Yesterday evening, General Hentzi’s threats were carried out most horribly. With a number of well- aimed shots, he managed all at once to set on fire most of the magnificent buildings along the Danube. Before long, strong winds stoked the fire, and turned Pest’s nicest parts to ash. It was a horrific sight! The entire city was engulfed in a sea of flames, with balls of smoke and burning grenades showering down upon the unfortunate city with an awful thunder, like a celestial downpour. No pen can describe the enormity of the sight with complete accuracy.5 As a result of the bombardment, many of the city’s finest buildings—including the Redout, the Lipót Church, and the Queen of England Hotel—were burned to the ground. Hentzi even instructed Colonel Alois Alnoch to place explosives on the Chain Bridge, the first suspension bridge connecting Buda and Pest and, as such, a symbol of Hungary’s path to modernization. The bridge, which had recently been completed, had not yet been opened to traffic; and Austrian soldiers were ironically among the first to cross it. In the end, the explosives never went off, and the Chain Bridge suffered only minor damage. (As the poet Endre Ady wrote sixty years later, “I am an ancient bridge, who has seen a lot and whom Hentzi could not even destroy.”)6 For many Hungarians, the wanton destruction of Pest was all the more reprehensible, because Hentzi appeared to have bombarded the city “with no reason and no aim.”7 Some blamed Hentzi’s “inhumanity, savagery, unbridled fury, and vengefulness”; General Görgey viewed it as evidence of Hentzi’s “cannibal personal gratification.”8 As Görgey related in his memoirs, after the bombardment of Pest, he wanted to make an example out of Hentzi “as a