Современная словацкая драма о Второй мировой войне

Abstract

The paper addresses the Slovak drama of the 21st century dedicated to the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Slovak National Uprising. After the “velvet revolution” of 1989, interest in the military and insurgent theme in Slovak art as a whole declined sharply, but as early as in the 21st century playwrights and theaters of Slovakia are increasingly beginning to return to these topics. Many of these plays created in the last twenty years were written in order to actualize public discussions about the period of the Slovak Republic (1939–1945), around the mass deportation of Jews from its territory, around the arization, etc. The main task of these plays` authors is to put serious moral questions before the viewer. For this purpose, the paper focuses on social and historical context in which National Socialism spread in Slovakia. Such are, for example, the works of R. Ballek “Tiso”, P. Rankov “It Happened on the First of September (or Some Other Time)”, A. Gruskova “The Woman Rabbi”, V. Klimachek “The Holocaust”, Y. Yuraneva “The Silent Whip”. One of the most important questions that Slovak writers and society have been asking in recent decades is the question of how and why Slovaks actually joined Nazi Germany during the Second World War, what prompted them to do this.