HUNGARY, as an ally of Nazi Germany, introduced anti-Jewish legislation from 1938 but managed to avoid the deportation of Jews from its post-Trianon territory until the German occupation of the whole country on 19 March 1944. The deportation of 430,000 Jews from Hungary was the quickest in the history of the Holocaust, taking less than two months with the active participation of Hungarian civil servants. Miklos Horthy, who governed the country with an iron fist from 1919, initiated discussions with the Allied forces over a separate armistice, but that did not remain unnoticed by the Germans who installed the fascist Arrow Cross party as a collaborationist government on 15 October 1944. The final days of Hungary, following the pattern of the Italian Social Republic, had started. Some parts of Hungary had been liberated by the Soviet Army by December 1944, and the provisional government held its first meeting in Debrecen and started to build up the new Hungary.

Liberty Square in the centre of Budapest was renovated in 2014, the seventieth anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary, and, as a part of the reconstruction, the architect installed a fountain which stops when somebody approaches it and has a fairly large dry space in the middle. It is the joy of young children stuck in the city during the very hot summer days. On 4 October 2014 the performance artist Victoria Mohos placed a chair in the fountain, sat in it, and screamed for fifteen minutes (according to some reports, eighteen), protesting against what is behind the playful and innovative fountain: the monument to the victims of the German occupation.

The Christian-conservative government hoped to use the seventieth anniversary of the Holocaust as a PR blitz to repair its tainted international reputation caused by its ‘unorthodox policy’ on freedom of speech and the role and funding of civil organizations. As part of ‘Hungarian Holocaust 70’, it allocated a large amount of state funding for the purpose and invited proposals from civil organizations. So what went wrong? Why did a young performance artist spend fifteen minutes screaming in front of the newly erected monument?