Anton Štefánek

Anton Štefánek (15 April 1877 – 29 April 1964 ) was a Slovak politician and sociologist who was involved in the campaign for Czech and Slovak unity and independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was an important promoter of the concept of Czechoslovakism and served for 14 years in the Czechoslovak National Assembly and the Senate of Czechoslovakia in the 1920s and 1930s. He also pursued an academic career at Comenius University in Bratislava, culminating in his serving as rector of the university for several years after the Second World War. He was forced into retirement a year after the Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948.

Early life and political career

Štefánek was born in Veľké Leváre what was then the Kingdom of Hungary and is now in western Slovakia. Educated in Vienna, he began a career in political journalism with the publication Hlas (The Voice), edited by Vavro Šrobár. He later edited Slovenský týždenník and Slovenský denník with Milan Hodža. Initially a member of the Slovak National Party, he dedicated himself to agrarian issues and worked with Šrobár and Pavol Blaho to promote Czech and Slovak unity and raise the cultural and political awareness of Slovak peasants in their towns and villages.

He lived in Prague for most of the First World War and was involved with the Maffie, an underground operation of the Czechoslovak National Council in the Czech and Slovak lands. After the war he joined the Revolutionary National Assembly and worked to organise Slovak schools following the establishment of Czechoslovakia. He represented the Republican Party of Farmers and Peasants in the Czechoslovak National Assembly as a deputy between 1925 and 1935 and subsequently as a senator from 1935 to 1939. He became a member of the Republican Executive Committee in 1925 and served in 1929 as the Czechoslovak minister of education and culture and also as minister for the unification of laws. He participated in the anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, in which Šrobár was also involved, before becoming rector of the university in 1945. He was forced for political reasons to retire in 1949, a year after the Communist Party seized power. He died in relative obscurity in 1964 in Žiar nad Hronom, "unjustly forgotten" as Eduard Nižňanský puts it. He was posthumously awarded the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk in 1992 by post-Communist Czechoslovakia.