This collection about propaganda and the mass media during the height of the Cold War includes seventeen short essays that were first delivered in 2007 as papers at the University College Dublin conference “Propaganda and the Mass Media in the Making of Cold War Europe.” The authors explore the way media cultures represented and helped construct Cold War attitudes and identities, giving special emphasis to state media institutions and their impact on Cold War political culture. Particularly welcome are the chapters on nation-states located at the periphery of the European core, which are often marginalized in mainstream scholarship.

The book is divided into three parts: “Eastern Approaches: Myths and Their Makers”; “Getting the Message Across”; and “The Politics of Entertainment.” While this organization lends some coherence, it is not always clear why a given essay is included under a given header. The first section concentrates on cults of personality and propaganda in the Soviet Union and the satellite countries of the Eastern bloc. Russel Lemmons describes the East German antifascist myth focused on Communist leader Ernst Thälmann and the Buchenwald concentration camp, while Balázs Apor investigates the Hungarian case and communist leader Mátyás Rákosi. Niamh Cullen offers an interesting Western bloc parallel in her chapter on the Italian Communist Party's attempt to appropriate the “martydom” of Piero Gobetti, a left-liberal, antifascist intellectual and friend of Antonio Gramsci, who was killed by Italian fascists in 1926. Issues of institutional censorship and self-censorship, along with state attempts to impose socialist realism on writers and artists in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, are covered in chapters by Jana Fischerova and Marietta Stankova. A perceptive essay by Judith Devlin examines preparations for and celebrations of Joseph Stalin's seventieth birthday in the Soviet Union in December 1949. Her reconstruction of the popular response to state efforts to turn the ceremonies into a display of universal loyalty—read through the commemorative “gifts” sent to Moscow by local civic groups and regional institutions across the Eastern (and sometimes Western) bloc—reveals the nuanced popular appeal of Stalinism after the war.

The second section turns to the ways political authorities used mass media, including poster art and urban planning, to transmit Cold War myths to the people. Radio was the key delivery vehicle. Jennifer Spohrer's history of Radio Luxembourg from the 1930s to the 1950s shows how Western promotion of “freedom of information” after the war helped break down existing regulatory barriers to international broadcasting in Western Europe. In an interesting comparative essay, Vlasis Vlasidis covers state-sponsored public radio in Greece and Yugoslavia in an era of civil war and political consolidation. Nicola Hille looks at the use of political poster art in East and West Germany. Hans-Jürgen Schröder's work on the various ways U.S. and Western European officials used everyday propaganda to promote the Marshall Plan offers an insightful take on the early history of European integration and the official promotion of (U.S.-style) productivity and prosperity. Two chapters survey urban planning and architecture in the Eastern bloc: Arnold Bartetsky compares Communist attempts to use remodeled cityscapes to promote Communist cultural and political identities in East Berlin and Warsaw, while Marina Dmitrieva examines the propaganda that surrounded the construction of “Stalin's skyscrapers” in Eastern bloc cities, including Moscow, Leningrad, Warsaw, and Bucharest. Despite official criticism of Western “formalism,” Stalinist skyscrapers looked a great deal like their U.S. counterparts; “Stalinist Americanism in architecture” (154) was, in fact, the norm in these early projects.

The third section concentrates on the ideological messages embedded in popular entertainment and consumer cultures in both blocs. Radio again played a central role, as Olaf Mertelsmann's study of the ways Estonian listeners reacted to competing official and Western radio broadcasts suggests. Popular faith in the coming of a “White Ship” that might rescue Estonians from communism—apparently announced by Voice of America—faded as Soviet rule endured. Elisabeth Kolleritsch and Christoph Hendrik Müller examine the emerging importance of jazz as a form of cultural politics in postwar Austria and West Germany. Imre-Jósef Balázs uses literature to examine the top-down construction of the Communist “New Man” in Romania. The concluding essay by Nils Arne Sørenson on the Danish “Campaign against Nuclear Arms” suggests that the Danish New Left had roots in this popular protest movement of the 1950s, and brings the story into the 1960s.

War of Words offers a variety of productive approaches to Cold War media politics, yet there are also missed opportunities. For instance, the separate section on the Eastern Bloc and the reliance on the concept of the “cult” in that section raise the question of why the book lacks a fourth section on “Western Approaches: Myths and Their Makers.” This omission leaves the impression, doubtless unintended, that propaganda was somehow a Communist but not a Western liberal project. Several of the essays show, in fact, that this was not the case. Moreover, the volume has too many of the typical problems that often undermine anthologies. A number of the essays are too narrow or weakly argued, and some of the topics are familiar and better developed elsewhere. Though the authors generally provide compelling, original empirical evidence, they hardly engage with larger debates on Cold War history, a perennial field that has reemerged with real vigor over the past decade. It may be unfair to blame these problems on a lack of editorial enthusiasm, but more could have been done to encourage the contributors to shape their material. It does not help that the surprisingly brief introduction lays out the structure of the book but fails to make a convincing case for the volume's importance or its contribution to current historiography.