Over the last decade, Hana Kubátová has produced a significant body of pioneering and intellectually ambitious work in social history, which readily engages with new theoretical and methodological frameworks to illuminate the behavior of ordinary Slovaks in the extraordinary circumstances of war and genocide. She has not shied away from illuminating Slovak society’s complicity in the genocide of Jews and Roma, challenging the entrenched right-wing narrative that attributes blame solely to a few rogue individuals within an otherwise innocent nation. While her previous work focused on the social history of ordinary people, Christian Nationalism shifts attention toward the complex relationship between Slovakia’s central power and its borderlands. More specifically, it explores the interplay between the central government, its ideological framework, and the implementation of genocide on the eastern peripheries of the Slovak state. Drawing on an impressive and diverse collection of sources, ranging from central and local archives to the press and oral testimonies, Kubátová argues that Jozef Tiso’s regime did not simply impose its vision and policies on the nation from above. Rather, it relied on local elites to communicate its message, which then morphed and adapted in the process. This dynamic created “the mutually dependent relationship between Slovakia’s center and outlying regions,” which tested “the strength of concepts applied from Bratislava” (9). Central to this process was Christian Nationalism, which Kubátová conceptualizes not as an ideology but as a “mode of operation,” a “category of practice,” or, in Tiso’s words, a “course of action.” The regime employed it as a tool to “mobilize and organize individuals and groups who might otherwise not have cohered around the regime’s agenda” (81). Christian Nationalism thus helped harmonize the interests of the central government and the peripheral regions, serving as a crucial framework for enabling ethnic cleansing and genocide. To test this argument, Kubátová focuses on Slovakia’s eastern borderlands, providing a detailed analysis of how these dynamics unfolded in practice.
Kubátová’s book makes an important and original intervention in the history of fascism by examining its operation from an Eastern European perspective. The anatomy of fascism has traditionally been examined from a Western European perspective, particularly through the national frameworks of Germany and Italy. Even though sustained scholarly attention has been directed in recent years toward the fascism(s) of Eastern Europe, it remains rare to encounter research that rethinks the very definition or inner workings of wartime fascism from a perspective outside the “West.” Kubátová rises to this challenge with great success, demonstrating how fascism operated in practice in wartime Slovakia, with devastating consequences for the country’s most vulnerable ethnic groups, Jews and Roma. She illustrates how the economic interests of peripheral populations aligned with the ideological directives of the central power, fostering systemic complicity in genocide. Kubátová’s willingness to engage with broad historical and theoretical questions solidifies her reputation as a bold intellectual and a critical voice in contemporary debates about Slovakia’s complex and painful past. Moreover, she brings to her work a remarkable elegance of expression. She is, truly, an outstanding writer, a somewhat infrequent feat among historians.
Kubátová’s narrative rests on two pillars: the conceptual theme of Christian Nationalism and the geographic focus on the eastern borderlands. These two elements are interconnected through the agency of local elites, who acted as intermediaries between the center and the periphery. Kubátová argues that the center and the periphery shaped and reinforced one another in a cyclical relationship, mediated by the messaging of Christian Nationalism, which was essential to “turn a political claim made at the center into a social reality, especially in the multicultural eastern edges” (81). She convincingly builds this argument throughout the book, but Chapters Four and Five fully flesh it out. Chapter Four, “The Demand,” deftly explores the connections between the center and the “eastern edges” by focusing on Slovaks’ wartime aspirations for upward mobility, articulated through the Christian Nationalist concept of self-love and enacted through Aryanization. This chapter fully illuminates the role of local educated elites in advocating for the socioeconomic advancement of “little people” in the east (114–15). Chapter Five, “The Project,” examines the fascist civilizing mission as framed through the Christian Nationalist ideal of productive work and implemented in supposedly “backward” eastern Slovakia. Together, these two chapters bring the conceptual and geographic pillars of the argument home. However, I would argue that Chapter Four itself demonstrates that many of these dynamics were not unique to eastern Slovakia, as Kubátová draws examples from the central and western regions as well. This raises the question of what precisely was distinctive about the eastern borderlands in shaping Christian Nationalism and its implementation. Similarly, much of Chapter Five’s analysis of social engineering, ethnic homogenization, and racialized modernization could also be understood within the broader framework of fascism without necessarily invoking Christian Nationalism. This is not to suggest that Christian Nationalism is superfluous to the book or that the focus on the eastern borderlands is misplaced. Far from it. Both are crucial to the work. Yet I believe there is room to articulate these elements of the argument more evenly, clearly, and forcefully in these two chapters, and throughout the book.
Perhaps the greatest challenge in Kubátová’s book lies in her ambitious and commendable attempt to address numerous broad themes simultaneously. She endeavors to explore war and genocide, complicity and collaboration, fascism, nationalism, Christian ideology, the dynamics between center and periphery, civilization and progress, and frontiers and borderlands, all while maintaining a focus on the particularity of one region. Amid this conceptual richness, however, the straightforward yet critical category of antisemitism recedes somewhat from analytical view. It is certainly present throughout the book as a lived reality, but it is most often incorporated into the broader framework of Christian Nationalism rather than explored as a force with its own analytical and explanatory weight. A more analytically explicit exploration of antisemitism could, I believe, strengthen the methodological connection between Christian Nationalism, the periphery, and the Holocaust. Similarly, while Kubátová seeks to emphasize the mutual and circular relationship between the eastern periphery and the center, her analysis seems at times to demonstrate a more dominant role for the center, with the periphery responding reactively, mobilized primarily by economic incentives and longstanding social prejudices. This does not undermine her center-periphery argument, but it does raise the question of how mutual this relationship ultimately was and where the balance of power actually rested.
These observations notwithstanding, this brilliant and rich book makes an original and outstanding contribution to the scholarship on fascism, everyday life, and the Holocaust. Its significance extends well beyond Slovakia. By placing the relationships between ideology and everyday interests, center and periphery, and central power and local agency at the heart of its analysis, Kubátová illuminates how fascism operated in practice by implicating ordinary people in its projects of exclusion, dispossession, and genocide. The book is a must-read for scholars and students of twentieth-century fascism, as well as for general readers interested in its historical legacies and worrying contemporary manifestations.
