The real 1984
Exhibition text Keynote address by Mária Schmidt, chief director of the Twentieth Century Institute and the House of Terror Museum: Ladies and Gentlemen! Barely twenty years have passed since the nightmarish year 1984 that George Orwell foresaw and depicted, and which most of us have experienced - yet it seems as if one was talking about a distant, obscure period of history.
The last of that string of years, which bleakly clung together. That year was the same as 1964 or 1974. Friendships are indissoluble, the enemy is ferocious, unity is eternal. Still, Hungary is the happiest barrack, where at Tatabánya a Strada shopping centre is being built, and in Budapest the Skála Metró. However, that was the maximum; the powers that be defined the line of demarcation precisely. And, although we Hungarians - if we proved to be loyal and ˝dependable˝ citizens - could make a short trip to Vienna with the help of the blue passport and, of course, the ˝window to the world˝, or even further afield, but at the border control we got butterflies in our stomachs at the thought of being searched, and the authorized amount of foreign currency sufficed for a couple of cups of coffee and some trifles. The powers that be, and we, the subjects had no inkling. We did not know that after Andropov, the next hoary head of the Soviet CP, Chernienko would barely live out the year, and that his successor, Gorbachov would proclaim glasnost and perestroika in 1985. Although in his 1984 speeches János Kádár spoke about two difficulties: the steadily escalating international situation (i.e. NATO had deployed longer-range intermediate nuclear force [LRINF] missiles in West German and Italy), and economic problems (i.e. we, communists, guided by good intentions, have distributed more among the people than what we have produced, but we shall overcome the difficulties by economizing) - his wrapping up left no misgivings: And yet, this year of 1984 was peculiar. It had two faces: that is when Krushchev´s secret speeches, Koestler´s Darkness at Noon and Orwell´s Animal Farm were published - naturally clandestinely - and it was in this year that Miklós Duray was arrested in Czechoslovakia, Father Popielszko was killed in Poland, and the parish priest, Géza Pálfi in Romania. The German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl visited Hungary, as did Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, and it was in that year that Hungary´s Big Brother, János Kádár was presented in the Kremlin with the highest possible Soviet accolade, the Order of Lenin. We invite you to travel through time in our temporary exhibition. Entering the hall, we can perhaps breathe in some of the air of the real year of 1984, and conjure up our erstwhile sorrows and joys. The aim of our exhibition is not some sort of phoney nostalgia, or mere brooding over transience. It is much rather an exclamation mark in the spirit of Orwell, to show that, however indestructible the possessors of totalitarian power consider their supremacy, they can soon find themselves on the scrapheap of history. Because, as Orwell wrote: I declare the exhibition open. Thank you for coming.
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Yet the real 1984 has not been made memorable or even symbolic by Nineteen Eighty-Four, the masterpiece penned by George Orwell, who was born a hundred years ago. 
