Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: this detail from the jolly tiled mural that decorated the building of the former GDR Finance Ministry, in Berlin. (Itself formerly Goering's Air Ministry).

Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: the House of Terror, Budapest.

House of Terror is a museum located at Andrássy út 60 in Budapest, Hungary. It contains exhibits related to the Fascist and Communist regimes in 20th-century Hungary and is also a memorial to the victims of these regimes, including those detained, interrogated, tortured or killed in the building

Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: the House of Terror, in Budapest.

The building currently houses a museum. With grotesque symmetry, the address was used, in turn, by both the Arrow Cross (Hungarian Fascist party) and by the AVH (Communist Secret Police). It's a sombre place and merits a reflective visit. It's rare to have the opportunity to enter the heart of darkness - such buildings seldom survive.

The Prinz-Albrecht Palais in Berlin (HQ of the Gestapo and SS) was bombed into oblivion in 1945, leaving only its foundations. A very public argument about what to do with that site, and even when it was finally resolved not to use it for 'development', how to present the dark story associated with it, was carried on for a decade, in the newly re-united Berlin.

Preserving the opportunity for people to step into a extant basement, such as the one at 60 Andrassy Avenue, is vitally necessary. Without it, we risk walking towards a future where people are not given the option of visiting - they are simply taken to the basement.

Villa Giulia

Pier Paolo Pasolini (translated by e-flux)

Its sad. A critique of the PCI (Italian Communist Party) should have been done in the first half of the past decade. You are late, children. And it doesn’t matter that at the time you were not born. Now the journalists of the entire world (the t.v. ones included) kiss your (as they still say, I think, in university) ass. I don’t, friends. You have the face of daddy’s boys. Your clean appearance doesn’t lie. You have that mean look. You are afraid, uncertain, despairing (very good) but you also know how to be spoilt, scheming, and arrogant: petit-bourgeois values, my friends. When you were at the Villa Giulia yesterday you brawled with the police, I sympathised with the policemen! Because policemen are sons of the poor. They come from the outskirts, urban and rural. As for me, I know well, I know how they were as little kids and young men, the precious penny, the father who never grew up, because poverty does not bestow authority. The mother calloused like a porter, or tender, because of some disease, like a little bird; the many children, the hut among the orchards overgrown with red weeds (on someone else’s land); the slums over the sewers;or the apartments in the vast council estates, etc, etc. And, look how they dress them up: like clowns, with that rough cloth that stinks of uniform and poverty. Worse of all, naturally, is the psychological state to which they are reduced (for a handful of dollars a month): with no more smile, without any friends in the world, apart, excluded (in an exclusion without equals); humiliated at the loss of their human values in exchange for police ones (being hated breeds hatred). They are twenty, your age, my dear boys and girls. We are all obviously against the institution of the police. But try going against the courts, and then you’ll see! The boy policemen that you, out of the sacred violence (of the venerable risorgimento tradition) of the daddy’s boy, have beaten, They belong to the other class. At Villa Giulia, yesterday, occurred an instance of class war: and you, my friends (although on the right side) you were the rich, while the policemen (who were on the wrong side) they were the poor. A nice victory, then, yours! In these cases, to the police you should give flowers, my friends