Abstract
The Budapest House of Terror is one of the most notorious examples of abusing spectacular new media audiovisual technology to exhibit a politically and ideologically biased historical narrative. However, as the article argues, the institution is not only an eloquent example of how the careless use of ‘public history’ is able to manipulate the ‘consumption’ of history. As the article argues, the House of Terror represents another important agenda: many new ‘public history’ museums call themselves as memory museums. Such claims often contain an epistemological distinction between ‘object-based history’ and ‘collective-mentality-based memory.’ As the case of the House of Terror demonstrates, it is however a dangerous strategy: the idea of an ‘alternative epistemology’ based on ‘collective memory’ is basically a denial of any rational way of obtaining knowledge about the past.