Vol. XXXV · 2004

Peter Bugge

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ANY MODERN ATLAS OR ENCYCLOPEDIA will inform us that Bratislava is the capital of the Slovak Republic, the center of Slovak political and cultural life. But before World War I-or even toward the end of it in 1918-it was far from clear that the city could or should be defined as "Slovak," to say nothing of a "Slovak capital"; that it was to belong to the future state of Czechoslovakia; or that it was to be called Bratislava. This essay will describe the processes that led to these outcomes, and how a name shift became a crucial instrument in the "Slovakization" of the city. In focusing also on the ways local and central actors responded to these political and symbolic transformations, I hope to shed new light on the complexity of collective identifications and allegiances, and on the significance of renaming as a catalyst for processes of nationalization in Central Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century.