In her recent monograph, Hana Kubátová examines the ideological background of the single-ruling Hlinka Slovak People’s Party (Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana, hereafter HSĽS) in Slovakia and analyzes its translation into political practice. She illustrates the implementation of these policies and their consequences through a case study of eastern Slovakia, particularly the Šariš Zemplín County, a region with a high concentration of Jewish and Romani communities that were subjected to persecution during the wartime period. The selected region serves as a compelling multi-ethnic laboratory for analyzing strategies of nation-building and the mechanisms of HSĽS regime control in Slovakia between 1938 and 1945.
By shifting scholarly attention from the center to the peripheries, Kubátová aligns her work with a broader trend in Holocaust studies that is gradually gaining ground in Slovak historiography. This trend has been reflected in a rising number of monographs and articles focused on regional and local Jewish history, frequently placing the wartime period and the Holocaust at their core. However, the quality and methodological approaches of these studies vary considerably and often remain confined to a positivist approach. From this perspective, Kubátová’s monograph constitutes a valuable contribution to the historiography of wartime Slovakia, offering a nuanced examination of center-periphery relations and their implications for the Holocaust in Slovakia. The publication clearly synthesizes her ongoing research interests.
The author’s principal strength lies in her narrative style, which also renders the monograph accessible and engaging for a readership beyond academia. The book is clearly structured, with concise and creative chapter titles that enhance its readability. Evidence of the work’s appeal outside scholarly circles is provided by the Slovak translation, which followed the English original and appeared on the bestseller list published in 2025 by Artforum, a longstanding intellectual bookstore in Bratislava.
Kubátová opens the book by briefly outlining her family background and personal ties to eastern Slovakia, which served as a key impetus for her subsequent scholarly interest in the region. She efficiently frames the main storyline by the visit of Minister Alexander Mach to eastern Slovakia in 1940, contextualizing this event with the planned census and the regime’s efforts to increase the proportion of the population classified as “Slovak” in the region. The analysis is most persuasive and inspiring in sections devoted to specific, lesser-known cases. In this context, it is unsurprising that chapter 4—and particularly the subchapter “Accusing and Demanding” (128–32)—proved especially engaging to me. In this section, Kubátová effectively builds on her long-standing research interest in popular responses to the Holocaust in Slovakia.
Somewhat unexpectedly, however, these lesser-known examples are outnumbered by well-established cases frequently cited in the scholarship on the Holocaust in Slovakia, such as the interviews with Jesuit provincial superior Rudolf Mikuš and theologian Štefan Zlatoš (96–99), in which both figures legitimized the regime’s anti-Jewish policy. While these examples align closely with the author’s focus on Christian nationalism, the analysis would have benefited from including additional, previously unexplored cases, particularly from eastern Slovakia. Given the scope of the heuristic approach and the wide range of archival sources employed, it is striking that the author did not pick more, fresher cherries from her research.
Considering the aim of addressing an international readership, often with limited familiarity with Slovak history and geography, the inclusion of essential information on the Holocaust in Slovakia and the repetition of well-known facts to establish a broader context are understandable. (The included maps are also very helpful.) In the Slovak-language edition, however, a different approach might reasonably be expected. Although the translated monograph has resonated with a domestic audience, Kubátová’s undisputed scholarly capacity to mediate between the expectations of a general readership and those of professional historians appears to have been only partially utilized. A similar observation applies to the otherwise welcome emphasis on eastern Slovakia. While this regional focus is a significant strength of the work, it is not consistently sustained in thematic discussions or across all chapters. (Eastern Slovak periphery is most consistently addressed in chapter 5, “The Project.”) In several instances, the central narrative prevails, or illustrative examples are drawn from other regions than Šariš Zemplín—for example, the frequently cited situational reports on conditions during the Slovak National Uprising (178) or the examples of Jewish baptisms (95).
Shaping the conclusion around the career of Matej Huťka, a lawyer and HSĽS politician who became a county party leader, is an apt choice and is very well executed. However, Huťka was also a member of the Slovak parliament and thus served as a direct link between central and regional politics, contributing to processes of nation-building in the peripheral region under study. It might therefore have been productive to examine in greater depth cases involving exclusionary regional actors who were sentenced by lower retribution courts, to address more precisely the stated aim “to illuminate how events in Slovakia, even under fascism, were not driven primarily by the center” (10).
There has been sustained scholarly debate regarding the applicability of the term “clerical fascism” to the HSĽS regime in Slovakia. In postwar historiography—mainly, though not exclusively, within a Marxist framework—it functioned as an ideologically driven concept used to characterize collaborating Catholic clergymen during World War II, particularly in Central and Southeast Europe. In the Slovak historiographical context, this debate again resonated following the publication of Miloslav Szabó’s monograph Clerofascists. Slovak Priests and the Temptation of Radical Politics (1935–1945) (Slovak: Klérofašti. Slovenskí kňazi a pokušenie radikálnej politiky [1933–1945]) in 2019. In this work, Szabó proposed a reconceptualization of this analytical category, advocating its strict use for the analysis of individual actors while cautioning against its application as a defining label for the regime as a whole. In subsequent years, Szabó has continued to engage extensively with this issue, including expressing reservations about Hana and Michal Kubát’s understanding of “clerical fascism” as a comprehensive analytical concept. This interpretation is also reflected in Hana Kubátová’s recent monograph. She notes only briefly that “[s]ome scholars caution against labeling the regime that came to power in 1939 as fascist or clerical fascist” (86). Because of the complexity of the historiographical debate, this issue calls for more detailed and precise analysis, especially given the concept’s sensitivity and its history of ideological instrumentalization. Although the monograph provides accurate referencing, the contributions of James Mace Ward and Miloslav Szabó to the analysis of Christian nationalism, the role of the clergy within the HSĽS regime, and the reconceptualization of the notion of “clerical fascism” merit greater acknowledgment.
Moreover, the analytical usefulness of categorizing one faction of the HSĽS as “clerical” in contrast to a supposedly distinct “radical” faction, as proposed by the author, remains open to question. Kubátová partially nuances this dichotomy, noting that Alexander Mach—described by historian Anton Hruboň as a “professional radical”—relied on the priest Štefan Ducko during his visit to eastern Slovakia (5). Such examples suggest that the boundaries between these categories may have been more fluid in practice than the conceptual distinction implies.
While reading the monograph, I was surprised to encounter the term “Jewish Question” written without quotation marks. I consider its use inappropriate in a scholarly publication. This term does not function as a neutral analytical concept; rather, it may imply that Jews constituted a problematic group and evoke its historical association with the Nazi regime and its collaborators and the negative way in which they applied it.
Although Kubátová’s monograph reflects extensive knowledge of the current state of research, some passages could benefit from further engagement with specialized studies on the issues discussed. In this regard, reference to Marína Zavacká’s work on the Ilava concentration camp (47), Zlatica Zudová-Lešková’s research on Jewish resistance and participation in the Slovak National Uprising (183), Jozef Tancer’s extensive research on multilingualism in Bratislava (30), as well as the chapters by Ivan Kamenec and Ján Hlavinka on corruption in the Slovak State (161), could have further enriched the analysis. The same applies to the 2016 monograph, Slovak State: The Regime Between Theory and Political Practice (Slovak: Slovenský štát. Režim medzi teóriou a politickou praxou), written by Zuzana Tokárová, in which she analyses the HSĽS regime’s categorization and the repressive apparatus in Slovakia, with a particular focus on the Šariš Zemplín County.
The publication of this monograph by such a prestigious publisher as Oxford University Press constitutes a significant scholarly achievement. Hana Kubátová’s work, devoted to Slovak history, has the potential to stimulate increased academic interest in this region within the humanities and social sciences. Of even greater importance, however, is the monograph’s impact on public discourse in Slovakia. Its publication has attracted considerable attention and fostered critical debate on the country’s wartime history and the character of the HSĽS regime. This development is especially important in Slovakia’s contemporary political context, where extreme right-wing parties are again no longer marginal.
