Andrej Hlinka

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Andrej Hlinka (1937)

Andrej Hlinka (* 27. September 1864 in Černová ( Austria-Hungary ), now part of Ruzomberok , † 16th August 1938 in Ruzomberok) was a Slovak Roman Catholic priest and the political leader of the Slovak autonomy movement in the First Czechoslovak Republic . From 1913 until his death in 1938 he was party leader of the clerical-nationalist Ludaks , who campaigned against the state doctrine of Czechoslovakism and for a federalization of Czechoslovakia.

From 1924 he was papal chamberlain and from 1927 apostolic protonotary .

Life

Andrej Hlinka in 1908

Andrej Hlinka was born on September 27, 1864 as one of 9 children of a family of raftsmen in Černová . There he attended elementary school and then from 1877 to 1880 a piaristic high school in Ružomberok, where he definitely decided to serve as a priest. 1881-1883 Hlinka studied at the high school in Levoča . In 1883 he was admitted as a cleric to the seminary of the Spiš Chapter, where he completed his theology studies in 1889, and then worked as a pastor in various cities, most recently in Ružomberok.

Early on he began his political activities in the Christian Democratic People's Party ( Ľudová strana ), which was headed by Count Zichy . When the party gave up the principle of national tolerance and joined the Magyarization of Slovakia propagated by the Hungarian state power , Hlinka resigned from it and became one of the most important spokesmen for the Slovak People's Party ( Slovenská ľudová strana ). In 1897 he became editor of the magazine Ľudové noviny ("People's News"), founded the Slovak People's Bank ( Ľudová banka ) in 1906 and in 1910 the Slovak Publishing Cooperative in Pressburg .

In 1907 he was sentenced to 2 years and 9 months in prison as a result of the Černová massacre . There he held talks with the later Hungarian communist leader Béla Kun and worked as an author and translator of religious writings. After Hlinka was declared innocent by the Holy See, the Hungarian authorities finally had to release him.

In 1918 Andrej Hlinka became a member of the newly formed Slovak National Council and initially supported the ideology of the unified Czechoslovak nation, from which he soon turned away. In the same year the new Slovak People's Party (Ludaken) came into being, of which he became chairman. As such, he traveled to Paris with a delegation from his party in the summer of 1919 to present the Ludaks' demands for extensive autonomy for his homeland to the peace conference . After his return he was interned by the Czech authorities for seven months in Bohemia on charges of treason .

In 1924 he was appointed papal chamberlain and in 1927 protonotary . In 1925 his party took on the name “Slovak People's Party Hlinkas” ( Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana, HSĽS ), and until his death Hlinka was its chairman, chief ideologist and main representative. From 1918 to 1938 he was also the leader of the HSĽS faction in parliament.

Andrej Hlinka died after a serious illness in August 1938 in his birthplace Černová. His body was first buried in the Ružomberok cemetery and ceremonially transferred to a mausoleum on October 31, 1938. Before the Red Army invaded in 1945, his body was taken to Bratislava, where it disappeared after the Prague Spring was crushed. In 2003 the mausoleum was renovated and the empty glass coffin was placed in it.

ideology

5 kroner coin of the Slovak Republic (1939–1945) with the image and motto of Hlinka: "Za boha život, za národ slobodu!" ("For God, life, for the nation freedom!")

As a Slovak nationalist Andrej Hlinka campaigned in the Kingdom of Hungary for the liberation of the Slovaks from Magyar rule and for a common state with the “Czech brother people”. He commented on the definitive secession of Slovakia from the Kingdom of Hungary in 1918 with his familiar sentence:

"The millennial marriage with the Magyars did not succeed!"

Its ideology was characterized by patriotism / nationalism , clericalism and anti-communism . As a Catholic priest, he had a particularly difficult relationship with the Social Democrats. Regarding her election victory in Czechoslovakia in 1920, Hlinka said:

"I will work 24 hours a day until Slovakia changes from a red Slovakia to a white and Christian Slovakia."

Some authors think that he was also an anti-Semite , others think that, on the contrary, he was even friendly to Jews; For example, in August 1936, during a conversation with the Vice-Chairman of the Jewish Party , Matej Weiner, he said:

“I am not an enemy of the Jews, the political party of which I am the leader is not anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism is not our program. As a Catholic pastor, I am aware of the great moral, religious and historical importance of Judaism for all civilized humanity, especially for Christianity. "

On the day of Hlinka's death on August 16, 1938, the Jewish newspaper Bratislavas Židovské noviny wrote about Hlinka:

“... the relationship between him and the Jews was sincere and cordial. He valued his fellow Jewish citizens and as a pastor he proclaimed religious tolerance. "

According to an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Hlinka reported slogans against Jews, Hungarians and Czechs. Others are of the opinion that as a representative of the right he was even influenced by fascism . As the main representative of the Slovak autonomists, Hlinka vehemently rejected the Czechoslovakism propagated by the Prague central government and the centralism in state administration, the result of which was the dominance of Czech in Slovakia. Nevertheless, according to his own statements, he always remained a staunch Pan-Slavist .

Under the catchphrase "National Autonomy", Hlinka called for the recognition of the Slovak (not only Czechoslovak) nation and language, with Slovak also being declared the only official language in Slovakia. In addition, Hlinka called for Slovakia to have its own legislative state parliament in Bratislava and a Ministry for Slovak Affairs in Prague. During a Slovak youth congress in 1932 he declared that he wanted to pursue the Slovak cause "even at the price of the republic". Nevertheless, according to historian Jörg K. Hoensch , Hlinka's adherence to a joint Czech-Slovak state until his death can hardly be doubted, since Hlinka's statement was countered by numerous declarations and actions up to 1938, from which an affirmation of Czechoslovakia as a state emerges.

Until his death, Andrej Hlinka and his party fought for an ethnically defined (not under international law) autonomy for Slovakia, as promised to the Slovaks by President Masaryk in the Pittsburgh Agreement . According to many reports, however, he and his party are alleged to have pursued anti-subversive policies aimed at a Slovak secession from the Czechoslovak state. The fact is that the Hlinka party never formulated a secession in its party program until the end of the First Republic. Also quotes from Hlinka like

"We will not betray our homeland, the Republic of Czechs and Slovaks, for any price, for any promises or advantages."

speak against aspirations towards secession. And even when Hlinka received a visit from a Sudeten German delegation under Karl Hermann Frank in the spring of 1938 , nothing concrete had been agreed on breaking up Czechoslovakia. Hlinka criticized the persecution of Christians in National Socialist Germany and said that Hitler was a "cultural beast". The chairman of the Slovak National Party , which is allied with the Hlinka Party in the so-called Autonomy Bloc , Martin Rázus , expressed himself in the Czechoslovak Parliament as follows about the relationship of the Slovak Autonomous Parties to the state as a whole:

"We love this state, we are ready to sacrifice our lives [...] We do not want to smash the republic with autonomy [...] We stand behind this state, we will defend it, but we demand that you join us with the." Arrange conditions so that we Slovaks can feel at home in this state. "

Reception in contemporary history

Assessment in Slovakia

Andrej Hlinka's statue in Žilina
Image of Andrej Hlinkas on the former 1000 kroner banknote of today's Slovakia
Andrej Hlinkas statue in Ružomberok

In Slovakia, the charismatic and self-confident Hlinka became a national symbol in the interwar period. During a demonstration by Slovak autonomists, he declared euphorically:

"I'm not just Andrej Hlinka here, I'm the people here."

His political critics and opponents repeatedly accused him of excessive self-confidence, which was expressed, among other things, in the renaming of the Slovak People's Party to Hlinka's Slovak People's Party in 1925.

When Hlinka's party, together with his former deputy Jozef Tiso, took power in Slovakia in 1938 after his death and the latter declared itself independent under pressure from the Third Reich on March 14, 1939 , Hlinka became the cult figure of the new regime: an order was named after it him and created two mass organizations that bore his name, the Hlinka Guard ( Hlinkova garda ), an imitation of the SS , and the Hlinka Youth ( Hlinkova mládež ), an imitation of the Hitler Youth .

The Hlinka Guard was involved in the persecution of Jews in Slovakia , among other things .

After Czechoslovakia was renewed in 1945 and the communists came to power in 1948, Hlinka was considered one of the greatest criminals in Slovak history due to his anti-communism and nationalism. Of a coin ( 5 crowns ) minted in Slovakia in 1939 with his portrait (number 5,101,000), 2,000,000 were melted down again by the Bank of Czechoslovakia in 1947.

After the Velvet Revolution (1989), the negative image that Hlinka had been ascribed to Hlinka changed in large parts of the Catholic Slovak public. The Slovak National Biography , published in 1991, calls him "one of the most significant personalities in modern Slovak history, a nationalistic Christian politician and representative of Slovak autonomic efforts". It was depicted on the 1000 kroner banknote of Slovakia that has been printed since 1993 .

In 2007 the Slovak National Party (SNS) demanded that Andrej Hlinka be declared “Father of the Fatherland”.

Hlinka has been officially rehabilitated in Slovakia at the latest since January 1st, 2008, when a law on the merits of Andrej Hlinka passed unanimously by the Slovak parliament came into force . In the legal text it says literally:

“Andrej Hlinka is particularly responsible for the fact that the Slovak nation has become a state-building nation. In recognition of Andrej Hlinka's outstanding merits, a bust of Hlinka and a plaque will be placed in the building of the National Council of the Slovak Republic (NR SR) with the text: Andrej Hlinka has merits to the Slovak nation and the Slovak Republic. "

International assessment

Outside Slovakia, the person Hlinka is viewed more critically, some scholars such as the renowned historian and Eastern Europe expert Leonid Luks even refer to Hlinka as a “Catholic fascist”, while others are of the opinion that Hlinka himself was not a fascist, but was different avowed fascists such as Vojtech Tuka decidedly promoted and integrated into his party.

The anti-Semitic character of his party, which had its roots in autochthonous Catholic anti-Semitism and which he tacitly tolerated as party chairman , also appears problematic . Especially in Marxist historiography, Hlinka appears as the "embodiment of darkness, mysticism , conservatism , bigotry , demagoguery , inconsistency and clerofascism".

literature

Biographies

  • Ľubomír Lipták: Andrej Hlinka (1861–1938) . In: Muži deklarácie. Martin, Osveta 1991, pp. 58-79.
  • Alena Bartlová: Andrej Hlinka . Obzor, Bratislava 1991, ISBN 80-215-0204-5 .
  • František Bielik (ed.): Andrej Hlinka a jeho miesto v slovenskych dejinach. DaVel, Bratislava 1991, ISBN 80-900931-0-8 .
  • Jozef M. Kirschbaum, František Fuga (eds.): Andrej Hlinka v slove a obraze. [Andrej Hlinka in words and pictures.] Zahraničná Matica slovenská, Toronto / Ružomberok 1991.
  • Róbert Letz, Peter Mulík, et al .: Pohľady na osobnosť Andreja Hlinku. [Approaches to the personality of Andrej Hlinka.] Matica slovenská, Martin 2009, ISBN 978-80-7090-951-5 .
  • Karol Sidor: Andrej Hlinka. Bratislava 1934.
    • Karol Sidor, František Vnuk: Andrej Hlinka 1864–1938 . Lúč, Bratislava 2008, ISBN 978-80-7114-682-7 . (Sidor's original biography was supplemented by the second part of Hlinka's life.)

further reading

  • Jörg K. Hoensch , Gerhard Ames: Documents on the autonomy policy of the Slovak People's Party Hlinkas . Oldenbourg, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-486-51071-1 (= publications of the Collegium Carolinum . Volume 44).
  • Ernst Nolte : The fascist movements. The crisis of the liberal system and the development of fascisms. dtv-TB 4004, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-423-04004-1 .
  • Encyklopédia Slovenska . Volume IV. Bratislava 1980.
  • Slovak National Biography . Martin 1991.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ (online) (Slovak)
  2. ↑ dnes.atlas.sk August 16, 2008 (online) (Slovak)
  3. ^ Commemoration of the controversial priest-politician Hlinka
  4. ^ Mausoleum of Andrej Hlinka
  5. ↑ www.sme.sk, on August 16, 2008 (online) (Slovak)
  6. ↑ a b A text signed by 31 prominent Slovak historians - (online) ( Memento from June 20, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ Milan S. Ďurica: Dejiny Slovenska a Slovákov v časovej následnosti faktov dvoch tisícročí. [The history of Slovakia and the Slovaks in the temporal context of the facts of two millennia.] Lúč Verlag, Bratislava 2007, p. 371.
  8. ↑ a b Süddeutsche Zeitung , Klaus Brill : Entangled in brown terror. Was the tribune Hlinka a hero or a pioneer of the Nazis? The Slovaks argue about the past. Printed edition October 30, 2007, book Politik, p. 7, 3rd column
  9. ^ Georg Christoph Berger Waldenegg, Francisca Loetz: Leader of the extreme right. The difficult relationship between post-war historians and "great men" in their own past. Chronos, Zurich 2006, ISBN 978-3-0340-0761-0 , p. 193.
  10. ↑ Ludwig Richter, Alfrun Kliems : Slovak culture and literature in the self and external understanding . P. 79 (online)
  11. ↑ Studia Slovaca: Studies in the History of the Slovaks and Slovakia - By Jörg Konrad Hoensch, page 182 (online) ( Memento of 1 February 2014 Internet Archive )
  12. ^ Autonomy plans in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia 1938/39 - By Adrian von Arburg, page 24 (online)
  13. ^ Jörg K. Hoensch: Slovakia and Hitler's Ostpolitik. Hlinkas Slovak People's Party between Separation and Autonomy 1938/1939. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne / Graz 1965.
  14. ↑ Stephanie Junkers: Ethnic conflicts and state division using the example of Czechoslovakia . Tectum-Verlag, Marburg 2001, ISBN 3-8288-8291-9 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  15. ↑ Slovak culture and literature in terms of self and others, by Ludwig Richter, Alfrun Kliems, page 29 (online)
  16. ↑ Loyalty in the Czechoslovak Republic, 1918–1938, By Martin Schulze Wessel, page 67 (online)
  17. ↑ Slovak culture and literature as perceiving oneself and others, By Ludwig Richter, Alfrun Kliems, page 30 (online)
  18. ↑ Šárka Nobilisová: Andrej Hlinka zomrel pred 70 rokmi . www.sme.sk, accessed on January 17, 2012, 11:42 pm
  19. ↑ Aranka Sigal: Don't you know that you are Jewish? Ravensburger publishing house
  20. ^ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung v. October 8, 2007 , p. 8.
  21. ↑ TA3, Prezident podpísal zákon o zásluhách Andreja Hlinku, from November 19, 2007 (online) ( Memento from August 10, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (Slovak)
  22. ↑ (online)
  23. ↑ (online)
  24. ↑ (online)
  25. ↑ Studia Slovaca: Studies in the History of the Slovaks and Slovakia - By Jörg Konrad Hoensch, page 208 (online)

Web links

Commons : Andrej Hlinka  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Hlinka, Andrej
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Liptov Saint Nicholas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Slovak Catholic priest, politician and nationalist leader
DATE OF BIRTH September 27, 1864
PLACE OF BIRTH Černová
DATE OF DEATH August 16, 1938
Place of death Ružomberok