Sabine Witt's volume, as the title suggests, examines nationalistic Slovak intellectuals: her intellectuals are Slovak both by origin and conviction. The book examines their beliefs, their actions, their careers, their squabbles with one another, and the institutions they founded and directed. Witt draws on eclectic source material, but journalistic and literary works predominate. Chronologically, the study mostly covers the interwar period, but includes background information on the Habsburg monarchy and some discussion of the Second World War. The book has little overarching narrative. Apart from the opening introductions, the different chapters are fairly self-contained and could be read buffet-style. The book as a whole is somewhat dry, but solid, thorough, theoretically sophisticated, and multifaceted.

The first fifty pages provide theoretical and historiographical introductions. In her discussion of nationalism theory, Witt addresses the standard controversies and cites the standard names, but rapidly identifies those aspects of the theories that shed light on her approach. While Witt's opening chapters read much like the revised doctoral dissertation that the book is, they are stronger and subtler than one normally expects from such chapters.

The next two chapters sketch the political context with balanced overviews. A chapter on the nineteenth century introduces those key figures and events that possessed symbolic value in the interwar period: Bernolák and Štúr, for example, are significant not for what they did in their own time, but for what they “offered young nationalists in the interwar period,” specifically, “a resource for provocation and nationalist mobilization in the Czechoslovak state” (61). An additional chapter then describes political life in the first Czechoslovak Republic and Tiso's wartime Slovak republic. The narrative describes the political forces affecting Slovak intellectuals: Czechoslovaks, Magyarones, the leading Slovak political parties, and the Catholic Church. Witt neglects military events and shows little interest in diplomacy, but she gives a good description of the wartime Slovak state and its social composition.

Witt begins her analysis proper with a survey of Slovak journalism and journalists. She describes not only the political stance of various prominent journals but also their economic history, circulation figures, and links with political parties. While sketching the careers, political views and professional activities of leading intellectuals, the picture sometimes remains oddly bloodless: Witt's somewhat cerebral prose rarely makes space for personality sketches or revealing anecdotes. Nevertheless, Witt assembles an impressive volume of detail and presents it clearly.

The strongest chapter devotes ninety pages to analyzing “the ‘nation’ as institutional practice.” Witt discusses cultural institutions such as the university, artists’ societies, film studios, and student groups. She gives interesting summaries of infighting at the Bratislava theatre (164–74) and conflicts over language codification (181–200). The most valuable sections, however, contrast the role of religion in competing cultural institutions, specifically the collegium Svoradov in Bratislava and the Spolok Svätáho Vojtecha in Trnava. Slovak intellectuals were strongly Catholic and several worked to promote the Church's agenda, but Witt, tracing political disagreements and personal rivalries through various crises and scandals, shows that many were Slovaks first and Catholics only second. Witt's nuanced picture of Slovak Catholicism assigns a surprisingly peripheral role to Andrej Hlinka of the Slovak People's Party (Slovenská ľudová strana, SĽS). Hlinka has dominated the Anglophone historiography on interwar Slovakia, perhaps because the SĽS dominated wartime Slovakia. Witt shows that Slovak intellectuals found several paths to both Slovak nationalism and political Catholicism (215–26, 234–36, 277–79).

The last third of the book dwells on intellectual history and cultural imaginations. An excellent section on “the end of ‘Slavic reciprocity’” (249–55) illustrates the final collapse of Slavdom in Slovak political rhetoric, even though Slovak intellectuals initially turned to Slavic Poland for a model of Catholic nationalism with which to oppose the equally Slavic Czechs. Piłsudski's authoritarianism bridges the gap between declining Slavism and rising fascism (263–65), and Witt deftly shows how Slovak intellectuals gradually turned to Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany for political inspiration. Her discussion of Slovak antisemitism points not only to the influence of foreign fascism, but also to the internal logic of Slovak nationalist ideas (282–90).

The final chapter turns to literary analysis. A short economic overview describes how the much larger Czech book market influenced Slovak letters (289–95). Witt then discusses a series of patriotic novels in depth. She provides plot summaries, but the analysis is mostly thematic: nationalized metaphors of female sacrifice, for example, appear in several different literary works (366–69). Themes of martyrdom, purity, and biological racism combine to create troubling mythologies for the Slovak nation.

Witt's work breaks new ground for Slovak studies outside Slovakia. No Anglophone study discusses the intellectual history of interwar Slovak history in such breadth, in such detail, or with such insight, perhaps because extant studies, including James Ramon Felak's “At the Price of the Republic”: Hlinka's Slovak People's Party, 1929–1938 (Pittsburgh, 1994) and James Mace Ward's Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Ithaca, 2013), have concentrated on the Slovak People's Party. Scholars of interwar Slovakia lamentably neglect politicians and intellectuals who found themselves on the losing side of history, and Witt's study conforms to the dominant trend by focusing on Slovak particularist nationalists: Czechoslovakists and Magyarones remain in the background. Witt also neglects Slovak socialists and Slovak communists. Nevertheless, Witt's wide-ranging curiosity about the cultural dimensions of Slovak nationalism have produced an important study that enriches our understanding.