Politics and Public Space in Slovakia between 1938 and 1945: The example of Prešov (original) (raw)
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BRATISLAVA UNDER FASCIST DICTATORSHIP
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According to the renowned French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, space is an instrument of power. It is a space of conflict between creators and users. The state, or the ruling regime as the dominant actor, actively uses space for social control through centrally adopted and hierarchically applied power measures (Gottdiener, Hohle and King 2019: 74-76). This, one of Lefebvre's many characterizations of space, implicitly incorporates the idea that the more power-centralized and hierarchized a state regime is, the more profoundly it can influence society through its interventions in various aspects of space. Lefebvre's theory of space is too complex. Therefore, this chapter will work with the mezzo level analytical tool. It will examine, using the example of the capital city of Bratislava, precisely what kind of interventions into the urban public space and what origin the para-fascist regime of the independent Slovak state (1939-1945) intended to use in order to gain the consent of the citizens for the new state project through the materialization of its own ideological assumptions and the use of adopted models. Since the chapter is limited in scope, it has opted for a case study, which does not aspire to analyze the selected problem in a general and systematic way, but through selected individual examples-two spectacular urban and architectural projects. The main intention is transcending the fixation on a national interpretation and placing urban design in the context of the socio-political project of the regime; it means overcoming the hurdles of understanding the importance of urban design for dictatorships (authoritarian or totalitarian regimes) which were identified by Harald Bodenschatz (2015). In the Slovak case manifested in the example of Bratislava, overcoming both of these obstacles involves, among other things, revealing the character of the regime and its ambition to strengthen the national character of the state. Therefore, the research has been inspired by Roger Griffin's hypothesis that authoritarian para-fascist regimes have attempted
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According to the prominent sociologist Henri Lefebvre, space is an instrument of power. Every state regime strives to use space for social control through various interventions. While in democratic regimes the use of public space is the result of by majority-accepted interventions, in non-democratic regimes these are power interventions usually based on ideological starting points, not generally accepted by society. On the contrary, interventions into public space are becoming one of the tools for implementing state ideology into the consciousness of society. In their research on public space, German sociologists Walter Siebel and Jan Wehrheim defi ned its four basic dimensions-legal, functional, social and material-symbolic. Interdisciplinary sociological-historical research of interventions into each of these dimensions seems to be a suitable analytical tool in understanding the relationship between public space and the state regime, the conclusions of which allow a detailed understanding of the nature of individual non-democratic (authoritarian or totalitarian) regimes typical for twentiethcentury Europe, as well as transnational ideological connections. In the article we introduce our interdisciplinary socio-historical approach on the example of the authoritarian para-fascist regime of the Slovak state (1939-1945).
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This paper is concerned with monumental art in Slovakia before and after the fall of Communism in 1989. Generally, art in public spaces is important, because it influences the knowledge and feelings the people who use this space have about the past and the present, and thus influences the shared social construction of who we are as a social group. In this article we concentrate on the period of Communism and the formal and iconographic aspects that were essential to art at that time. We also look at the political use of art—the ways in which explicit and implicit meanings and ideas were communicated through art to the general public. We touch also on the present situation regarding the perception of “Communist art”. In the final section we discuss the state of affairs of the last twenty years of chaotic freedom in the post-socialist era. On the one hand, since there is no real cultural politics or conception for artworks in public spaces at the level of the state many artworks simpl...