(Mirror. This takes 3½ minutes to read.)

Before you read this excerpt, keep in mind that these events were nearly three years before the Slovak Republic’s emergence, and the so-called Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party (HSLS) existed before 1933. The Third Reich’s emergence no doubt contributed to antisemitism’s normalization, and the Third Reich might have even supplemented the HSLS’s income throughout the 1930s, but there is no reason to believe that the Slovakian fascists received orders from Berlin to attack a prosemitic film.

I apologize if this sounds obvious or condescending, but too many Europeans have been eager to wash their hands of the Shoah by claiming that they either had nothing at all to do with it or somebody forced them at gunpoint to collaborate. Such claims only become harder to believe when you bear in mind that their nations had histories of unaddressed antisemitism and anti-Judaism.

Catholic students in Bratislava organized demonstrations against the ‘Jewish’ film Le Golem, which paralyzed life in the city for several days. The […] fascist[] activism of young radicals drawn from HSLS members who gathered around the magazine Nástup mladej l’udáckej generácie (Deployment of the Young Populist Generation) found an outlet in protests against this epic film by the French director Julien Duvivier.⁸⁶

[…]

From the 24 to 27 April 1936 they took to disrupting the film by throwing firecrackers and stink bombs, and demonstrated in favour of a ban while shouting antisemitic slogans and smashing the windows of houses in the Jewish quarter of the city.⁹³ One of the participants — probably a co-organizer, then a law student and later secretary of the HSLS — was Jozef Kirschbaum. In the Nástup mladej l’udáckej generácie (and later also in a police interview) he argued that the demonstrations were authentic protests, an appropriate response to the ‘Jewish question’ in Slovakia:

The offensive Judeo-Masonic bias of the film, which was hyped for about a whole month, only served as a signal for us to go out into the streets and demonstratively express our protest against Jewish expansion in Slovakia, against the economic destruction and annihilation of the broad masses of our people, against the demoralisation and decay caused by Jewish Bolsheviks, and against all the injustice that Jews in Slovakia had so far inflicted and, through the abuse of democratic rights, still inflict.⁹⁴

The violent protest was unprecedented, as there had been no violent academic antisemitism in interwar Slovakia until the demonstrations against Le Golem.⁹⁵ By contrast, Vienna University in interwar period became notorious for its permanent anti-Jewish violence, which resulted in serious injuries and traumas to students and eventually led to the scientific ‘demise’ of the University.⁹⁶

[…]

Both organizers of the demonstrations against the film Le Golem, Jozef Kirschbaum and Jozef Faláth, were among the main (and this time uniformed) instigators of deportations in November 1938, when Slovak authorities hauled off several thousand ‘homeless’ Jews from the territory of the then autonomous Slovakia to the new Slovak–Hungarian border region.⁹⁹

The fact that the protests against Le Golem were an expression of fascist intimidation was noted by the Czech liberal daily Lidové noviny (People’s News), which¹⁰⁰ said that the protesters in Bratislava were emulating the ‘Nazi model’. Street violence was a precursor to more fundamental measures, as promoted by the autonomist Slovák in line with […] fascist régimes, in an attempt to push for the banning of the film ‘at least in Slovakia’, as had reportedly happened in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy.¹⁰¹

While Le Golem was not banned at the time, the production company AB Film, after consulting with the police and cinema proprietors, removed the film from cinema listings in Bratislava. In some small towns they did not screen the film at all for fear of riots, and in Nové Mesto nad Váhom, for example, the district chief prohibited the screening by special decree.¹⁰²

[…]

A diachronic comparison has shown that, as in the case of the Vienna protests against All Quiet on the Western Front, which marked the beginning of the political rise of the Nazis in Austria, demonstrations against the film Le Golem in Bratislava were not an isolated ‘antisemitic moment’ (to paraphrase the historian Pierre Birnbaum, who referred to the Dreyfus’ affair in France at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries using this expression¹⁰³). On the contrary, they should be considered a trigger of the ‘new Jewish question’, which Slovak participants wanted to ‘solve’ in an ever more radical way.¹⁰⁴

The multi-perspective nature of the Histoire croisée method, on the other hand, suggests that similar trends may have comparable consequences, even in different ‘national’ contexts. Spontaneous protests and demonstrations against the ‘Jewish’ films were in both cases — in Vienna at the turn of 1930–1 and in Bratislava in 1936 — intended as a means of exerting pressure, the goal of which was a ban and state censorship, and the subsequent shift from liberal democracy to an authoritarian or fascist form of government that would accomplish the national antisemitic project of building a state without Jews.