During the four decades of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia a vast
literature on working-class movements has been produced but it has
hardly any value for today's scholarship. This remarkable study reopens
the field. Based on Czech, Slovak, German and other sources, it focuses
on the history of the multi-ethnic social democratic labor movement in
Slovakia's capital Bratislava during the period 1867-1921, and on the
process of national revolution during the years 1918-19 in particular.
The study places the historic change of the former Pressburg into the
modern Bratislava in the broader context of the development of
multinational pre-1918 Hungary, the evolution of social, ethnic, and
political relations in multi-ethnic Pressburg (a 'tri-national' city of
Germans, Magyars, and Slovaks), and the development of the multinational
labor movement in Hungary and the Habsburg Empire as a whole.