A relevant contribution to the field of fascist studies, Holy Legionary Youth opens new research avenues for students of European Fascism and Eastern European history. Highly interdisciplinary, analytically comprehensive, and informed by a prodigious array of both primary sources and secondary literature, Clark's book is a much-awaited reading for researchers, university professors, and students alike. It will serve as a useful teaching tool for undergraduate and graduate classes on the interwar history of Eastern Europe, the genesis of interwar anti-Semitism, and everyday life under totalitarian regimes.
Hungarian Historical Review
Establishing how the Legionary elite and their supporters lived, what they thought, and what were their shared attitudes towards the future of Romania, Clark substantially advances the field of European and Romanian studies of fascism. As such, there is no doubt that this study will provide a stimulus for future debate and research.
Slavic Review
Roland Clark's Holy Legionary Youth is a truly remarkable book, one that brings the historiography of Romania's most prominent fascist movement, known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael or the Iron Guardon, to a new and higher stage... the book offers fascinating insights into the intricate connections between Romanian traditional religiosity and Legionary fascism. It was not only through the church-sanctioned antisemitism and sporadic participation of priests and ecclesiastical hierarchs in the movement that Legionarism was strengthened.
H-Romania
Romania’s fascist past still arguably holds a firm grip over the country’s historical consciousness. Despite the communists’ attempt to exorcise it once and for all, contemporary Romania is yet to seriously engage with its legionary past. The recent decision to outlaw memory through legislative means suggests a politics of memory based on an attempt to forcefully master the past. It is in this field that Clark’s book could prove enlightening. Besides its undeniable scholarly merits, Clark’s work could also be regarded as contributing to Romania’s incomplete Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past).
Europe-Asia Studies
Clark's book is a fresh, reflexive, witty, and well-documented exploration of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, the central fascist movement in interwar Romania, in its own context, doubled by an attempt to approach Romanian ultranationalism on its own terms.
H-Net