Bratislava Slovakia
After World War I, the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire began. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and the United States played a major role in the establishment of the new Czechoslovak state. American Slovaks proposed renaming the city “Wilsonovo mesto” (Wilson City), after Woodrow Wilson.[67]
On 28 October 1918, Czechoslovakia was proclaimed, but its borders were not settled for several months. The Allies of World War I drew a provisional demarcation line, which was revealed to the Hungarian government on 23 December, in the document known as the Vix Note.
On 27 March 1919, the name Bratislava was officially adopted for the first time to replace the previous Slovak name Prešporok.
At the beginning of August 1919, Czechoslovakia got permission to correct the borders for strategic reasons, mainly to secure the port and to prevent a potential attack of the Hungarian Army on the town. On the night of 14 August 1919, barefoot Czechoslovak soldiers silently climbed to the Hungarian side of the Starý most (Old Bridge), captured the guards, and annexed Petržalka (currently part of Bratislava’s 5th district) without a fight. The Paris Peace Conference assigned the area to Czechoslovakia to create a bridgehead for the newly created Czechoslovak state to control the Danube.
Left without any protection after the retreat of the Hungarian army, many Hungarians were expelled or fled. Czechs and Slovaks moved their households to Bratislava. Education in Hungarian and German was radically reduced in the city. By the 1930 Czechoslovak census, the Hungarian population of Bratislava had decreased to 15.8%.
In 1938, Nazi Germany annexed neighboring Austria in the Anschluss; on 10 October 1938, based on the Munich Agreement it also annexed (still-separate from Bratislava) Petržalka and Devín boroughs on ethnic grounds, as these had many ethnic Germans. The Starý most (Old Bridge) became a border bridge between Czechoslovakia and Nazi Germany.[]
Bratislava was declared the capital of the first independent Slovak Republic on 14 March 1939, but the new state quickly fell under Nazi influence. In 1941–1942 and 1944–1945, the new Slovak government cooperated in deporting most of Bratislava’s approximately 15,000 Jews; they were transported to concentration camps, where most were killed or died before the end of the war in the Holocaust.
Bratislava, occupied by German troops, was many times bombarded by the Allies. On 4 April 1945, Bratislava was liberated by the Soviet Red Army 2nd Ukrainian Front during the Bratislava–Brno offensive. The Czechoslovak government and president Edvard Beneš then moved to Bratislava on 8 May.
At the end of World War II, most of Bratislava’s ethnic Germans were evacuated by the German authorities. A few returned after the war, but were soon expelled without their properties under the Beneš decrees, part of a widespread expulsion of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe.
After World War II, Slovak Republic lost its so-called independence and was reunified again with the Czech Republic as Czechoslovak Republic. After the Communist Party seized power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, the city became part of the Eastern Bloc. The city annexed new land, and the population rose significantly, becoming 90% Slovak.[
Iron Curtain memorial in Bratislava, 400 people were killed trying to cross the border into the West during the communist era.
Large residential areas consisting of high-rise prefabricated panel buildings were constructed. The Communist government also built several new grandiose buildings, such as the Slovak Radio Building, Slavín, or Kamzík TV Tower. A quarter of Bratislava’s Old Town was demolished in the late 1960s for a single project: the bridge of the Slovak National Uprising. To make space for this development, much of the city’s centuries-old, historical Jewish quarter was razed, including the 19th-century Moorish-style Neolog Synagogue.
In 1968, after the unsuccessful Czechoslovak attempt to liberalize the Communist regime, the city was occupied by Warsaw Pact troops. Shortly thereafter, it became the capital of the Slovak Socialist Republic, one of the two states of the federalized Czechoslovakia.
Bratislava’s dissidents anticipated the fall of Communism with the Bratislava candle demonstration in 1988, and the city became one of the foremost centers of the anti-Communist Velvet Revolution in 1989.
By late 1991, amid a catastrophic political crisis, with several republics already departing the Union and Gorbachev continuing the waning of centralized power, the leaders of three of its founding members, the Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian SSRs, declared that the Soviet Union no longer existed. Eight more republics joined their declaration shortly thereafter. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991 and what was left of the Soviet parliament voted to dissolve the union the following day.
In 1993, Bratislava once again became the capital of the newly formed independent Slovak Republic, following the Velvet Divorce.
Bratislava, a pretty town with an interesting history.
A la prochaine,
