Americký svědek konce československé federace
An American Witness to the End of the Czechoslovak Federation

Summary/Abstract: Hacker, Paul. Slovensko 1990–1993: Spomienky amerického diplomata. Trans. from the English by Eva Salnerová. Bratislava: Artforum, 2014, 286 pp., ISBN 978-80-8150-042-8.The book under review is a Slovak translation of Paul Hacker’s Slovakia on the Road to Independence: An American Diplomat’s Eyewitness Account (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). With this book, Hacker has made an important contribution to the small number of memoirs by diplomats which discuss Czechoslovkia after the collapse of the Communist regime. Hacker, from autumn 1990 to late 1992, was in charge of the newly established US consulate in Bratislava, and, after the creation of the Slovak Republic, became the US ambassador to that country. His memoirs discuss Slovakia particularly in the last years of the Czechoslovak federation, its road to independence, and its first steps as a sovereign state. He looks at events from the Slovak perspective, almost completely ignoring the Czech and Czechoslovak. The reviewer notes, for example, Hacker’s depiction of the division of the federation, his sketch of the Slovak premier, Vladimír Mečiar (b. 1942), and the affair over the discovery of the wiretapping of the US consulate general in Bratislava.

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