This papers sets to examine the absence of history in Slovak post-communist nationalism, to paraphrase Shari J. Cohen. Rather than investigating the failure to construct an inclusive narrative of the Second World War and the Holocaust, however, this paper scrutinizes official and popular representations of Slovakia’s troubled past both in the ‘transitional’ postwar period as well in the everyday life of today’s (post-1993) Slovak Republic. Hence, by taking both the history and legacy of the authoritarian wartime regime (1938/9-1945) as the point of departure, I explore the potential and the limits of trials, memorials, official declarations of sorrow, as well as truth and/or historical commissions. I investigate these ‘standard’ or ‘classical’ measures of establishing accountability for past harms in context of new artistic representations (including literary, theatre and cinematographic depictions) of both complicity and resistance to past injustice.
