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Christian Hartmann, Thomas Vordermeyer, Othmar Plöckinger, and Roman Töppel (eds.). Hitler, Mein Kampf: Eine kritische Edition. Munich and Berlin: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 2016, vols 1–2, 947 + 1019 pp., ISBN 978-3-9814052-3-1. With Edith Raim, Pascal Trees, Angelika Reizle, and Martina Seewald-Mooser. Includes illustrations, maps, a list of all known translations of Mein Kampf before 1945, a list of abbreviations, a detailed bibliography in three parts (before 1932, 1933–45, after 1945), and four indexes (a biographical index and indexes of persons, places, and subjects). In the form of an essay, the author comments here on the 2016 critical edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925–26), edited by a team of historians from the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, with additional assistance from others. He contemplates the nature and importance of this book and discusses its author and his meaning in the history of twentieth-century central Europe. He then discusses some of the ideas of Mein Kampf, and clarifies the historical context of the work, returning to the circumstances that led to its being written and published. He also discusses some of Hitler’s fellow travellers in the Nazi movement, who were of importance for this key work. The author brings up episodes in Hitler’s life, and pays particular attention to his still unclear transformation from an apolitical soldier into a zealous antisemite and political agitator of exceptional rhetorical skill, who was able to bewitch the German people and become their Führer. The author also discusses the difficulties that the editors of this critical edition had to struggle with, and he praises their work as utterly solid and astonishingly thorough, particularly the commentaries in the huge critical apparatus. The author concludes by discussing reactions both to the first edition of Mein Kampf and to this critical edition, and he discusses various attempts to publish a Czech edition.
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Since the Czech policy became a mere component of the westernpart of the Empire after the Compromise 1867, the Czech political elite,with an orientation to the conception of historical rights, strove for an equalnational position. As a result, they lost interest in the Slovak policy as an allyand the Slovak question as a part of a wider conceptual solution. The Slovakpoliticians with a natural right conception rejecting historic rights as “oldrubbish” were placed in a complicated situation. On the base of historicalrights there were many attempts to realize the cooperation between the partof the Czech politicians and Hungarian opposition against the Vienna court.Such cooperation, however, did not have a chance of success and only arouseddiscontent among the Slovak political elites. Slovak policy after decades on thecrossroad between Vienna, Budapest and Prague came with the beginning ofthe WW1 into the new geopolitical situation. In May 1917 the Czech politicalprogramme, for the first time, abandoned the principle of historic rights, crossedthe river Morava and included Slovakia and the Slovaks in its sphere of interest.After the Czechoslovak Republic was declared, the struggle – propagandist,mental, military and diplomatic – for Slovakia was only beginning.
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List of reviewed books: PIETER M. JUDSON, The Habsburg Empire. A New History (Rudolf Kučera) INES LUFT, Eduard Winter zwischen Gott, Kirche und Karriere. Vom böhmischen katholischen Jugendbundführer zum DDR-Historiker (Petr Husák) JOSEF SERINEK, JAN TESAŘ, Česká cikánská rapsodie (Pavel Baloun) PAVEL KOLÁŘ, Der Poststalinismus. Ideologie und Utopie einer Epoche (Jiří Růžička) PETR ROUBAL, Československé spartakiády (Karel Šima) PETR ORSÁG, Mezi realitou, propagandou a mýty. Československá exilová média v západní Evropě v letech 1969–1989 (Pavel Horák)
More...Případ plánování Prahy od šedesátých do osmdesátých let 20. století
Using the planning in Prague between the 1960s and 1980s as an example, the article deals with the transformation of the concept of a socialist city among urbanists and architects. The author describes how the generation of the inter-war modernist avant-garde inspired by works of Karel Teige (1900–1951) started reasserting itself again after Khrushchev’s speech on architecture in 1954. Its influential member, Jiří Voženílek (1909–1986), became the Chief Architect of Prague. It was under his leadership that the General Plan of the Capital City of Prague was drafted at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. The author analyzes the plan as an example of the socialist modernism and urbanistic optimism of its creators who believed that, subject to a correct application of principles of inter-war avant-garde architecture, an urbanistic transformation might become the base of a social transformation of socialism. The plan envisaged sacrificing not only all residential quarters of Greater Prague built at the turn of the century, but also the very principle of a traditional city with a network of living streets which socialist urbanists saw as an incarnation of all evils that the development of towns and cities had thitherto been governed by: mixing of functions, too high density of population, lack of light and air. Newhousing projects comprising high-rise prefab residential buildings set in greenery were to become the opposite of traditional streets. The article explains how criticism of the housing schemes, the chief representative of which was urbanist Jiří Hrůza (1925–2012), had been growing stronger since as early as the mid-1960s. Influenced by works of US journalist and urbanistic activist Jane Jacobs (1916–2006), he presented a comprehensive critique of socialist modernism and questioned they very principle of urban planning as a tool of social transformation. The intellectual skepticism was soon thereafter refl ected in urban planning practices in Prague; they abandoned the modernistic principle of zoning and acknowledged the value (first urbanistic, later architectural) of traditional quarters. In the end of the article, the author analyzes how the urbanistic turning point was confronted with building industry practices and political preferences demanding rapid construction of flats and apartments.
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Randák, Jan. V záři rudého kalicha: Politika dějin a husitská tradice v Československu 1948–1956 (České dějiny, vol. 9.) Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny and Faculty of Arts of the Charles University, 2015, 404 pp., ISBN 978-80-7422-373-0 and 978-80-7308-597-1. In the reviewer’s opinion, the monograph In the glare of the red chalice: The politics of history and the Hussite tradition in Czechoslovakia 1948–1956 provides a consistent in sight into how the tradition associated with preacher and church reformist Jan Hus (1370–1415) and the subsequent Hussite movement was made use of in Czechoslovakia under the Communist rule between 1948 and 1956, i.e. during the period which the author defines as the era of Czechoslovak Stalinism. The author sets the topic in the context of the politics of history which had been intensively applied in the Czech Lands since the 19th century. Since seizing power in 1948, the Communists were using the instrumentalized Hussite tradition for their own historical legitimization, presenting the Hussites as predecessors of the victorious struggle for social justice and national freedom, which was successfully concluded only in February 1948. In the reviewer’s opinion, the book has succeeded in showing how the Hussite cult was reflected in the official ideology, school education, or cultural policy, the tools that were used to spread it, and the forms of its ritualization.
More...Projekt „Half a Century of Communist Cadre Training“
The article is devoted to a US conference and oral history project organized by the University of South Carolina in Columbia in 1969 under the title “Half a Century of Communist Cadre Training”. Its aim was to obtain testimonies of former graduates of different types of education centers of Communist parties and to use the information for a better understanding of the transnational phenomenon of Communist “cadre” training and its importance for the dissemination of the Communist ideology. The authoress introduces individuals involved in or associated with the project – academic experts and ex-Communists/contemporary witnesses – their public actions and literary works. She uses several selected example to attempt to show how the formation of the Communist activists and their subsequent missions were affecting the evolution and development of Communist movements in their respective countries. She thematizes the project’s position in the context of the development of the US Soviet studies and its role from the viewpoint of period socio-political reflections of the Cold War, including predictions of its future development. The article is primarily based on collections of the Hoover Institution Archives in Stanford, California, the core of which consists of unpublished academicand contemporary witnesses’ essays produced under the aegis of the project.
More...K pojetí času a nostalgickým aspektům poststalinského komunismu
In his interpretatively conceived essay, the author attempts to elaborate on existing studies of the Communist notion of time, using Czechoslovak, East German, and Polish source to examine how the Communist concept of time changed during the period of de-Stalinization. In doing so, he assumes that the critical year of 1956 cannot be viewed only as the beginning of the downfall of the Communist system, but also as the birth of a new epoch with its own specific concept of time. The settling of accounts with Stalinism started by Nikita Chrushchev shook the concept of “iron laws of historical evolution” and strengthened the notion of randomness and irregularity of history. This in turn reinforced the authenticity of various historical players who no longer had to act in accordance with the “great history”. In his analysis, the author distinguishes between two levels of Communist language: binding ideological texts and statements of leaders, as well as texts of party propaganda and historiography, and their modifications in the everyday ideological language practiced, in particular, at meetings of regional, district, and company-level part organizations. Using this material, the author presents several hypotheses concerning the notion of “post-Stalinism”, to be used as a potential starting point of new thinking about the continuity and turning points in the history of Communism. The first of them is a disintegration of the notion of linear time and a strengthening of cyclic elements, which the author calls a “hybridization of time”. The second one is a restitution of the “authentic party” by a revitalization of local memory concentrated on everyday life, as represented by systematically captured memories of pre-war party members. The second hypothesis is related to the third one, namely that of the production and dissemination of nostalgic images of pre-Stalin Communist parties as an alleged original homeland of genuine comradeship. The last hypothesis of the author concerns a deceleration of history and a blurring of the notion of revolution during the post-Stalinism period.
More...Možnosti konceptuálního uchopení intelektuálních „reformních“ diskurzů v období 1956–1968
The author deals with potential approaches to the conceptualization of post-Stalinism as a specific mental formation gradually born at the turn of the 1950s and 1960sas a result of the crisis of Stalinism. In doing so, he is in opposition to approaches perceiving the period after Stalin’s death as a mere de-Stalinization, or as a transition period between Stalinism and the so-called normalization in Czechoslovakia. He chose the modernity, or modernization, theory concept of German sociologist Peter Wagner and a reinterpretation of the work of Marx (or Marxism as such) by American philosopher Moishe Postone as his methodological starting points, and he introduces both of them in detail in his study. It is through this optics and dissociating himself from the theory of totalitarianism that he interprets Stalinism as a project of accelerated modernization the efficiency of which was ensured bya centralist bureaucratic system, including its authoritarian features, better than a market economy would have done. He also attempts to infer that Stalinism was a specific evolution of thoughts of Marx and Lenin in given historical circumstances. After the 2nd World War, it was paradigmatically applied in other countries with outtaking into account their regional specifics, or the previous history and existinglevel of modernization; during the 1950s, its potential was ultimately spent. In the end, the author tries to view intellectual reform discourses in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s as a distinctive attempt to restart a specific version of socialist modernity. In doing so, he focuses on issues related to the notions of revolution, history, and market, and formulates some hypotheses and topics for discussion.
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Weber, Thomas: Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi. New York: Basic Books, 2017, 423 pp., 2 maps, 32 photographs, ISBN 9780465032686; Plöckinger, Othmar: Unter Soldaten und Agitatoren: Hitlers prägende Jahre im deutschen Militär 1918–1920. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2013, 377 pp., 26 illustrations, ISBN 978-3-506-77570-2. In the reviewer’s opinion, the question how Adolf Hitler had become a Nazi, i.e.a full-fledged follower and ideologist of the nationalistic and racial doctrine, which declared Jews and Bolsheviks enemies of the German nation, remained open for a long time. Hitler’s own version to the effect that the transformation had occurred as early as during his apprenticeship years in Vienna, is utterly implausible. It must have happened after the Great War, in the chaos shortly after the defeat of the Bavarian Council Republic in May 1919. The reviewer describes the events taking place at that time, Hitler’s situation and circumstances of his conversion to Nazism, and compares both publications dealing with that period. He admires Weber’s style, vivid in comparison with Plöckinger’s heavy-handed language; on the other hand, Plöckinger precisely documents all his arguments, while Weber does not hesitate to use dubious and obscure sources to confirm his conclusions.
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In the opening part of his summarizing study, the author provides a biographic sketch of Jaroslav Krejčí (1916–2014), presenting him as an interdisciplinary researcher educated in law, economics, history, religious studies, and sociology, who was imprisoned for political reasons in Czechoslovakia during the 1950s, emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1968, and then became a Professor at the University of Lancaster, since the early 1990s also lecturing in his home country. Using fragmentary components, the author attempts to rebuild and critically present Jaroslav Krejčí’s comparative approach toward studies of long-term revolutionary transformations, which he had been building all his life, and set it in a broader sociological-historical context, with an access on the civilization dimension of these transformations. Although Krejčí also developed a unique typology of revolutionary processes or a theoretical model of revolution cycle phases, the study focuses on multiple civilization connections of revolutionary transformations. Krejčí notices, first and foremost, the civilization conditionality of the birth of revolutions, finding out that some civilizations do not wish revolutions, while a strong revolutionary tradition is typical for others. He also studies differences in the courses and outcomes of the so-called western and eastern revolutions, looking again for civilization conditionality of these differences. He argues that while the former tend toward plurality regimes, the latter head toward regimes characterized by a high concentration of power. In the end, Krejčí focuses on the topic of civilization transformations resulting from revolutionary processes that bring new, revolutionary combinations of new and old, and in particular domestic and foreign, resources. In the second part of the study, the author critically points at Jaroslav Krejčí’s unfinished civilizationist turn in his research of these revolutionary transformations. He also provides a description of how the topic of the civilization aspect of revolutionary processes is evolving in today’s academic mainstream, particularly in works of historical sociologists such as Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Johann P. Arnason, and Samuel P. Huntington. The final discussion summarizes principal propositions of Krejčí and also examines their heuristic potential in their application to events of the so-called Arab Spring.
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Suk, Jiří: Veřejné záchodky ze zlata: Konflikt mezi komunistickým utopismem a ekonomickou racionalitou v předsrpnovém Československu. Prague: Prostor, 2016, 325 pp., ISBN 978-80-7260-341-1. In the reviewer’s opinion, the book titled "Gold Public Conveniences: A Conflict between Communist Utopianism and Economic Rationality in Czechoslovakia before the Soviet Occupation" is an important contribution to studies of the evolution of economic thinking in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and of the reform process culminating in the Prague Spring in 1968, hitherto unparalleled in Czech historiography. However, the author does not focus only on the economic theory prevailing at that time, but also examines it, mainly from philosophical and sociological perspectives, in a broader historical context, including paradigmatic Marxist works and Soviet disputes concerning the economic policy after the Bolshevik revolution. He is interested in the form and viability of the new economic model, or the Czechoslovak concept of the “socialism with a human face”, including its internal conflicts and limits of thinking and acts of various players. The greatest deal of attention is paid to Ota Šik (1919–2004), then Director of the Institute of Economics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and the principal author of the “third way” economic concept; the author also describes the restorative reaction of the political regime against the concept after the defeat of the Prague Spring. The reviewer presents the content of each chapter of the book and formulates some partial reservations.
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Łukasiewicz, Sławomir: Third Europe: Polish Federalist Thought in the United States 1940–1971. Saint Helena (Cal.): Helena History Press, 2016, 478 pp., ISBN 978-1-943596058. According to the reviewer, the publication, initially published in Polish under the title "Trzecia Europa: Polska myśl federalistyczna w Stanach Zjednoczonych, 1940–1971" (Warszawa – Lublin, Instytut Pamięci Narodowej 2010), is one of the first works providing a thorough analysis of how the Polish exile community in the West reacted to unfavourable international developments during WW2 and after the divisionof Europe by the Iron Curtain and how its members imagined Europe’s new ideal arrangement. However, the author does not only deal with theoretical concepts of selected personalities, but also provides an insight into the complex situation of the Polish exile community, clearly explains causes of conflicts and disputes between its various groups and fractions, and, in particular, presents a broad range of its activities. The book is a fascinating chronicle of the life and thoughts of people engaged in an exhaustive struggle for their distant motherland which they, due to circumstances, had been forced to abandon and which many of them did not see again, and for their own nation which the Communist propaganda had made believe they were traitors and enemies.
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In this article I sketch out the general outlines of the so-called ‘Great Polish Emigration’ after the November Uprising (i.e. after 1831) from the (broadly understood) intellectual history perspective. Subsequently I present the wider intellectual background, attempting to place the output of the émigrés in the longer-term intellectual perspective of Polish history. I focus on the main dimensions and reasons underlying the ideological and conceptual evolution of the Polish community that emerged in exile. By evoking the most striking examples of their conceptual and organizational innovations and examining the scale of their publishing activity, I conclude that they brought about substantial changes in many spheres of action and reasoning. In the last part of the article I compare the Great Polish Emigration with similar phenomena in Europe, as well as with precedents and succeeding emigrations in Polish history. In conclusion I try to answer the question posed in the title, i.e. whether the emigration after the November uprising was really ‘great’.
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The study focuses on the statistical evaluation of data on crime in1882–1911 published in contemporary records. Firstly, a descriptive analysis is used to compare selected characteristics of persons condemned to death. Secondly, a multinomial logistic regression model is used to identify and statistically test factors determining whether a felon deserved pardon or was eventually executed. The final evaluation of the results of both analytical methods points out the differences in various parameters of criminal behaviour and its treatment on the side of the state across the lands of the Cisleithanian part of the Habsburg Monarchy.
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The review introduces a collection edited by Jiří Hanuš and titled "The modern world critic: Rio Preisner 1925–2007" (Brno: Centrum pro studium demokracie a kultury, 2018) and dedicated to Rio Preisner (1925–2007), a Czech expert in German studies, political philosopher, essayist, translator and poet. He was born in Carpathian Ruthenia; in 1968, he emigrated to the United States and lectured at the Pennsylvania State University as Professor of German studies. Preisner profiled himself in particular as a Christian conservative political thinker and a representative of philosophically based, irreconcilable criticism of totalitarianism, especially Communism and Marxism as its philosophy. He was also commenting on the American civilization and the value crisis of the modern Western democracy, which was, in his opinion, fatally struck by its departure from Christian foundations. Due to his ideological radicalism and conservatism, he found himself at the edge of Czech political thinking, although his work is extensive and, insofar as Czech authors are concerned, he was the one who was examining the phenomenon of totalitarian ideologies in the most consistent manner. The reviewer introduces contributions to the collection, whose authors attempt to characterize Preisner’s thinking and work from different angles in the context of his time, one by one, and ascribes a timeless validity to them.
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The book titled "(Self)control of intellect: Social criticism in late socialist Slovenia" (Ljubljana: Modrijan, 2019) written by Jure Ramšak, a younger generation Slovenian historian, introduces social critical thinking in Slovenia in the 1970s. The reviewer describes the situation in Yugoslavia, and particularly in Slovenia, at that time, and draws attention to some features shared with the so-called normalization in Czechoslovakia, which was being implemented in those days. As a matter of fact, the regimes in both countries were strengthened and social conflicts were weakened, but there was no connection with dissidents in Slovenia and repressions there were considerably milder. He also introduces various small groups of nonconformist intellectuals and types of their social criticism according to Ramšak: they were nationalistic “critics of socialist humanism”(labelled as “anarcholiberals”), academic sociologists, neo-Marxists produced by left-wing students’ movement (including philosopher Slavoj Žižek), and civic democratic or Catholic intellectuals the key representative of whom was Edvard Kocbek (1904–1981), a writer and ex-guerilla fighter. Slovenia’s political leadership was trying to eliminate criticism going beyond set limits by administrative sanctions; court trials and prison terms were exceptional. According to the reviewer, the author has presented an exhaustive account of the critical thinking in Slovenia during the period in question and drawn adequate conclusions without any effort to look for sensations. He has thus covered a hitherto overlooked and not very rewarding topic, and he has probably exploited it to the maximum extent possible.
More...Fučíkovy reportáže jako hold sovětskému experimentu
The object of interest of the study are articles of the Communist journalist, literary critic and publicist Julius Fučík, which were written during his stays in the Soviet Union in 1930 and 1934 to 1936. The title of the study paraphrases the name of a selection of some of the texts published as "V zemi, kde zítra již znamená včera" [In the Land where Tomorrow Already Means Yesterday] (Prague, K. Borecký 1932), which became a “ubiquitous” propaganda slogan after the war. A few years after his death at the gallows in Berlin, Julius Fučík (1904–1943) turned into anicon of Czechoslovak Stalinist propaganda which was spreading his story as that of a paragon of a dedicated communist, with inexhaustible work and vital élan, and a determined fighter against Nazism. His cult, which was primarily targeting young people, was organized around a narration about his sacrifice, which Fučík wrote himself and smuggled out of prison on scraps of paper and which was published after the war in many countries as "Reportáž, psaná na oprátce" [Notes from the Gallows]. However, an important factor of this worshipping was also Fučík’s admiration of Stalin’s Soviet Union, which he was uncritically promoting even at a cost of official persecution. The author asks himself a question why it was travelogues written by Julius Fučík which, selected from a massive body of texts of various left-wing authors adoring the Soviet social experiment between the wars, were canonized after the war. Having analyzed them, the author infers that Fučík depicts the Soviet reality as a heroic age, born out of the Bolshevik revolution, continuing by enthusiastic building of socialism, and heading toward a happy future of humankind after the overthrowing of capitalism. In doing so, he stylizes his narrations as chapters of a heroic epos reliving the ancient Promethean myth. The role of the mystical hero is taken over by udarniks and that of the fire by nationalized production assets and technologies representing tools of a watershed civilization change. Its dynamism also creates a new global social spacetime, with borders of the Soviet state separating the future of humankind in the East from the human prehistory in the West. The author shows that Fučík was obviously writing his reportages with subversive intention, using a multitude of examples to illustrate the contrast between the rapid economic growth in the Soviet Union and the deep crisis in the West. Fučík’s convincingness is enhanced by his specific, vivid writing style and a clear narration framework applying principles of historical materialism about the alternation of socioeconomic formations to specific stories. Combined with Fučík’s loyalty to the current party line, participation in the resistance movement, and his martyr’s death, all of the above provided those formulating the post-war cultural policy with enough suitable material to create an unblemished communist hero.
More...Kolik pojetí totalitarismu znáš, tolikrát jsi revizionistou?
The article offers an insight into the intellectual history of theories of totalitarianism and in an innovative way approaches the conflict between the proponents of different concepts of totalitarianism and the so-called revisionists. It seeks to provide a brief overview of the very complicated and, on both sides, very diverse debates and disputes. The authors deal with intellectual, societal and political sources of the theories of totalitarianism and offer their periodization in two waves and in important national contexts (Germany, Italy, France, and the United States). They also point out that more often than not the term “totalitarianism” is the only aspect that links the completely different traditions. The authors identify this striking incoherence in the different academic and non-academic genres, in the unclear relation between the theory and the empirical referents (that is, different political regimes, systems, movements, etc.), or in methodological statuses and approaches to conceptualization of totalitarianism (the relation between the term, the academic concept/empirical type/ideal type and the theory). They explain the rises and falls of the popularity of the concepts of totalitarianism, with special emphasis on some debates that have recently appeared in the Central European academic milieu. As the authors of this text claim, the renewed interest in totalitarianism is owed in part to the “new revisionism” whose representatives oppose the vaguely defined (or undefined) totalitarianism theories. The authors consider this dispute, apparent mainly in the recent debates on the communist past, a misunderstanding and point out two fundamental problems. Firstly, the argument is often led with the vaguely defined concept of totalitarianism which is often confused with the “perspective from above”. Secondly, the new revisionists often refute the theories of totalitarianism using, paradoxically, arguments that rather confirm than dispute these theories. The article shows that the gap between the different theorists of totalitarianism was actually much wider than the gap which is opening between the “new revisionists” and the “totalitarians”.
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The reviewer sets the monograph of the Slovak historian Miloslav Szabó, entitled "Klérofašisti: Slovenskí kňazi a pokušenie radikálnej politiky" [Clerical fascists: Slovak clergy and the temptation of radical policy (1935–1945)] (Bratislava, Slovart 2019), in the context of contemporary transnational research works and debates on the relation between Catholicism and fascism in the twentieth century. The author drews inspiration from the methodological tools of research into hybrid forms of fascism and from the concept of clerical fascism, which he applied to the environment of the Slovak Christians, mainly Catholic clerics, in the late period of the First Czechoslovak Republic and during the Slovak State (1939–1945). He traces their ideological and political radicalization, describes the dynamics of the development of their opinions, placing them in the context of the changes in the ideological and political climate. Using specific examples, he also outlines a typology of a clerical fascist activist, an extremist and a martyr. The reviewer sees the first type, characterized by a more or less tactical shift towards fascism and the Ludak regime and probably predominant among the Slovak clergy, as the most productive area for research. According to the reviewer, the author takes the research on the issue further thanks to his approach and knowledge. Finally, the reviewer raises the question of the applicability of the concept of clerical-fascism to the Czech Catholic environment of the first half of the twentieth century.
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