This edited volume is composed of sixteen essays held together by an introduction by the editors. Three to five essays are grouped under each of four subheadings: “Mediating the Cold War: Radio, Film, Television, and Literature”; “Constructing Identities: Representation of the ‘Self’”; “Crossing the Border: Interactions with the ‘Other’”; and “The Legacies of the Cold War: Remembrance and Historiography.” According to the editors, the volume intends to explore whether there are “sufficient parallels between Eastern and Western European cultures to justify a specifically European perspective on the Cold War”—or whether “it makes more sense to stick to national perspectives” or “transnational perspectives independent of Cold War politics” (9). The contributions to the volume are supposed to ask about American or Soviet influence on European countries and cultures, about the extent to which “peculiarities still at work in the present” (9) stem from the Cold War, and about how societies remember the Cold War and deal with some of its material legacies.

To that end, the volume features mostly narrow, disparate case studies that deal, for instance, with the following issues in Part II: the cult of the supposed apparition of the Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917, and its impact on anticommunism and Catholicism in Western Europe during the 1950s; automobile culture in the Soviet Union, Romania, and the GDR during détente; the making of Cold War consumer culture in Britain from the 1940s to the 1960s; and the “culture of civil defense” (191) in Sweden during the Cold War. Part II addresses the following subjects: symbolic representations of the “peace camp” (i.e., Socialist countries) and the “war camp” (i.e., the West) in May Day illustrations in Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1960; different concepts of art in the postwar West as well as in East Germany between 1947 and 1960; Third World demands and West German responses at the 1959, 1962, and 1968 World Youth Festivals (a fascinating piece by Quinn Slobodian, which is the only contribution that looks beyond the European and East-West focus); and ethnic and ideological perspectives on modernity and civilization in the border region of Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia between 1947 and 1954.

Except for the insightful comparative and discursive essay by Andrew Beattie on parallels and differences between anticommunist narratives in West Germany during the 1960s and in united Germany in the immediate post-1990 period, all of the other essays focus on specific time frames, subjects, and regions. In an attempt to tie them together to arrive at overarching conclusions, the editors state that European culture was (and is) “plural and multifaceted.” One should speak, then, of “European cultures” rather than of “one homogenous” (16) European culture made up of national variants. The editors assume, further, that European perspectives were not only shaped by the Cold War but also by older traditions and concepts stemming from before World War II. They avoid discussing the extent to which the Soviet Union, and specifically its various parts west of the Ural Mountains, were part of “European cultures” during the Cold War, but it is hard not to agree with their overall conclusions in this wide-ranging volume.