Much has been written about the role of memory in Estonian (and Baltic) post-Soviet identity discourses as well as about public contestations of historical narratives in the new democracies. This book by Meike Wulf adds to this growing body of literature. She provides an interesting twist to the debate, however, by utilizing the tools of Oral history and by focusing on professional historians as an “entry point” for systematically exploring the interactions between social and cultural memory in the production of collective identity during transition periods. Her explanation for this approach is that historians played a pivotal role in the strive for independence and for the young Estonian state. Consequently, around forty life-story interviews with intellectuals and historians, including a few non-ethnic Estonians and Estonians of mixed background, form the core of this study.

The result is a fascinating ride through Estonian post-war intellectual and cultural history, told through the personal narratives of historians of different age cohorts. Wulf approaches her analysis through the prism of “generation,” thus grouping her respondents into four distinct generational cohorts: the “War generation” (born in interwar Estonia), the “post-war children” (born between late 1930s and early 1950s), the “transitional generation” (born between the late 1950s and early 1960s) and the “freedom children” (born in the late 1960s and early 1970s) (71). She then demonstrates how the personal experiences of war, postwar Stalinist terror, de-Stalinization, and stagnation shaped each cohort's historical perspectives and narrations. Wulf's claims that, other than usually assumed in the multi-ethnic context of the Baltic states, the category of generational memory supersedes that of ethno-cultural identification for explaining mnemonic and narrative divergences does not quite convince. The few quotations from non-ethnic Estonian respondents do rather reveal the prevalence of the ethnocultural frame for understanding processes of historical meaning-making.

Chapter 4 then engages with historical writings and scholarly debates that emerged during the first fifteen years of re-independence, when history and “competing interpretations of the nation [were] ‘up for graps’” (105). What makes this chapter worthwhile is that throughout her analysis of formative historical events and narrative tropes found in post-1991 historical writings, Wulf again weaves in statements from the interviews and thus allows us to get a more complex perspective on the historiographical and intellectual processes that cannot necessarily be gleaned from books and media pages alone.

Still concerned with how history and memory are being negotiated in times of change, Wulf finally turns to public history and the material representation of memories in the form of monuments and museums and their contestation in the public sphere. She does this by focusing on four “landmark examples of historical culture” (146) in Estonia's recent history: (1) the Museum of Occupations in Tallinn and its narration of Estonian victimhood; (2) the largely “emblematic” (151) commission of international experts that inquired into the crimes against humanity committed during both the Nazi and Stalinist regimes; (3) the controversies surrounding a monument put up to honor Estonian Waffen-SS veterans; and (4) the violent clashes between mostly young Russian-speakers and the police over the relocation of a Soviet war memorial. Although already much written about, these incidents nevertheless illustrate well the contentious politics of memory behind the multiple local, national, and international interests in the historical controversies in this region.

In sum, the reader gets a nuanced picture of national identity discourses and Estonian historical culture after 1991. It is unfortunate that the original data for the study dates back more than a decade (the last interview was taken in 2004), and that newer studies about Estonian generations have not been consulted. Even though Wulf's declared focus of inquiry is on the first fifteen years of re-independent Estonia, one is nevertheless left wondering how historians born in the late 1970s and 1980s—who by now have entered the political and academic scene—would fit within the proposed framework. Do those who have no personal memories of the Soviet period and whose “generational memory” is mostly framed by the post-Soviet transition experience have another take on the nation's collective past? What role do generational versus ethnocultural frames play in this group's narratives? While these questions will need to wait for the next edition, the book is still recommended to anyone interested in contemporary Estonia as well as in how to explore complex concepts—identity, history, and memory—in an empirically rich and methodologically original way.