スロヴァキアの「首都」をめぐる戦間期の議論 ― フェドル・ルッペルトの中心都市論を手掛かりに ―
Fedor Ruppeldt’s Arguments about the “Capital City” of Slovakia during the Interwar Period

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on Fedor Ruppeldt’s arguments concerning the “capital city” of Slovakia, which he wrote and published in several articles during the inter-war period. Through analyses of them, the author describes Ruppeldt’s notion of Slovak national culture and the territory of Slovakia, and compares it with the opinions of other Slovak intellectuals. Before 1918, in the Kingdom of Hungary, Slovakia did not form an administrative unit, and it also lacked its own political-administrative center. This situation changed after the foundation of the Czechoslovak Republic and the incorporation of Slovakia into the new nation-state of Czechs and Slovaks. In February 1919, Bratislava, the westernmost and biggest city of Slovakia, was selected to be the seat of the minister for administration of Slovakia, and became the seat of the newly formed Slovak Provincial Office in 1928. Many Slovak leaders also considered Bratislava to be the political-administrative and national-cultural center, the “capital city” of Slovakia, although the majority of inhabitants in Bratislava had been Magyars and Germans throughout the inter-war period, and their cultural and economic influences in the city were still manifest. Fedor Ruppeldt, a Slovak evangelic intellectual and collaborator with R. W. Seton-Watson, was an ardent opponent of the consolidation of Bratislava as the “capital city” of Slovakia. In his articles, he argued for the town of Martin, the center of the Turiec region in central Slovakia and the recognized center of the Slovak national movement during the second half of the nineteenth century. Ruppeldt claimed that Martin was suitable as the “capital city” of Slovakia using two arguments: analysis of the “center of Slovakia” and the argument about the “concentration of Slovakia.”

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