Shortly before rising from premier to president of the 1939–45 Slovak state, Father Jozef Tiso addressed a harvest festival in western Slovakia. Spending much of his speech justifying the creation of the “one God, one nation …, one party” regime and its alliance with Nazi Germany, he asked the reportedly adoring crowd just one question: “Will you obey this government?” (Slovák, August 15, 1939). The anecdote sums up fascism as top-down dictatorship. As Hana Kubátová’s welcome monograph shows, however, Tiso’s government did not just order Slovaks around but also attentively listened to them, seeking legitimacy by satisfying their desires. Informed by Christian nationalism, the conversation ended in genocide.
For Kubátová, the state’s governance was a story of compensating for shortcomings. Lacking sufficient ready-made inputs to legitimize authoritarianism, such as Tiso’s charisma, the regime stressed outputs, such as material progress. Hardening social borders between Slovaks and their ethnic “enemies” compensated for insecure territorial borders. Relying on local elites offset an inherited administration distrusted as too Czech. Such “indirect rule” (14) might create chaos, as it granted locals a wide latitude that confused policy and execution, yet the agents it enlisted strengthened the regime.
Kubátová’s geographic focus, Šariš Zemplín, was the most “backward” county in a “backward” country. Rural and multicultural, this eastern borderland included the state’s largest Jewish and Roma populations. Here, Tiso’s ruling party was weak, while Hungarian irredentist successes had severed a key rail connection and sparked a border clash that cost more land. Anxious over such facts, the regime labored to “civilize” the east to prove its commitment to the “little people” (118) by improving infrastructure, hygiene, and other factors.
Kubátová characterizes the Christian nationalism framing this project as a “lure and political strategy” (14) that valorized work, the racial supremacy of Slovak Christians (especially Catholics), and “self-love” (9). Rather than a byproduct of Hitler’s destruction of Czechoslovakia, the state was a divine reward for Slovaks’ devoted sacrifices for the nation. The regime thus sought unity and productivity at the expense of “love your neighbor.”
These Christian national and civilizing missions materialized through a dialogue between a “wobbly center” (27) and assertive “edges” (51). While the center might command, the edges could demand. Easterners policed the regime’s promises of “spiritual and material abundance” (49), shaping central agendas to peripheral ends through public discussions, media contributions, intercessions, and denunciations (the last especially eroding communal ties). The center meanwhile kept tabs on the east through surveillance. Drawing also on testimonies, memoirs, postwar trials, and artistic works, Kubátová stresses the vital mediating role of eastern “meso-level actors” (5), such as priests and teachers.
This dialogue ostensibly improved eastern conditions but also brought genocide and repression. Easterners often demanded Aryanization and ethnic cleansing alongside more benign requests. As the state began to collapse, so did local party activism, the parallel decline exemplifying how transactional these exchanges were. Postwar narratives heroizing resistance then obscured this broad culpability in despoiling Jews, deporting them to their deaths, and segregating and enslaving Roma, among other crimes. But as Kubátová rightly argues, the Slovak state’s “infrastructure development and beautification campaigns” and the genocide were “integral parts of the same national project” (207).
Researched in more than twenty archives, this book persuasively calls for greater attention to Slovakia’s borderlands. The east was indeed important for the Holocaust in Slovakia, and Kubátová is convincing that the edges and center co-crafted the eastern reality of Slovak Christian nationalism. Yet, I was unsure if she also saw the east as inspiring and changing central agendas (such as the deportations) rather than just facilitating them. If so, she needs stronger evidence. Her claim that we must “foreground” (4) the east to understand wartime Slovakia is overstated. The regime had many fixations, clienteles, and projects, while demanding social mobility through loot and purging was widespread.
It is a pity that, after getting so many big things right, Kubátová and Oxford did not work harder on smaller ones. Her prose can bog down with jargon and lose concision and clarity. Minor context, such as the significance of terms, comes up short. Undergraduates could use more straightforward background. Proofreading was poor. Nonetheless, this book valuably contributes to literatures on Slovakia, fascism, genocide, borderlands, and populism. In Slovakia, where it has already been translated, it should do much to frustrate whitewashing this dismal past.
