James Mace Ward. Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia.
2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 119; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ahr/119.2.639
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)European history and politics
ResumoJames Mace Ward's new biography of Father Jozef Tiso, the president of independent Slovakia between 1938 and 1945, provides readers with an opportunity to become better acquainted with one of wartime Europe's most enigmatic leaders. Whether categorized with more infamous contemporaries such as the Ustasha leader Ante Pavelić or taken as emblematic of the “clerical-fascist” sympathies of the Catholic Church, Tiso has rarely been studied in his own right or as objectively as in this book. Rather than seeing him as representative of a particular ideology, Ward considers how diverse religious, national, and cultural influences shaped Tiso's complex worldview and multiple identities, which ranged from loyalty to Hungary and early antisemitism, to social Catholicism, Czechoslovak sentiment, and finally Slovak nationalism. Tracing Tiso's life from his humble beginnings as a seminary student in the Kingdom of Hungary to his afterlife in the independent Slovakia of the 1990s, Ward aims “to make comprehensible how experiences of Catholicism, nationalism, and state building can combine with the international system to produce genocide, and why the memory of this tragedy in Slovakia remains so contested” (pp. 10–11).
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