Bringing together historians and social anthropologists, Feichtinger and Heiss's edited collection offers a series of meticulously researched analyses of Central Europe's politics of memory concerning its history of military confrontations with the Ottoman Empire from the fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth. Collectively, the essays illuminate the multiple social and cultural domains in which the construction of images and narratives of the “Ottoman Turkish Other” has taken place: from political iconography to everyday culture, from theater to historiographical publications and travel reports, from legends to monuments, and from cultural rituals to what Pierre Nora terms lieux de mémoire. Among the volume's greatest assets are its geographically and historically wide foci. We thus encounter regional particularities as well as historical shifts in how collective memories not only of the siege (1529) and Battle of Vienna (1683) but of the many local clashes with Ottoman troops over a much longer period were perpetuated and instrumentalized over the longue durée.

Echoing theoretical insights generated by the much-discussed “memory boom” of recent decades, Geschichtspolitik und “Türkenbelagerung” illuminates the political functions performed by the diverse collective memories involved: first, the perpetuation of “enemy images” through enduring though also diachronically shifting “stereotypes and topoi” (see particularly the chapters by Schlegl, Sommer-Mathis); second, the construction of intragroup cohesion and identification; third, the legitimation of local political hierarchies (e.g., chapters by Feichtinger, Gollner). This necessarily involves close examination of the institutions and social actors involved in the politics of collective remembering; as Feichtinger and Heiss outline in their introduction, in the specific historical contexts in question, the church, the aristocracy, and, in due course, citizens and their media played central mnemonic-cum-political roles, albeit with historically changing emphases.

All chapters offer tremendous local knowledge, empirical detail, and careful contextualization, which will greatly appeal to local/regional historians while also enriching Central European studies more widely, both in their historiographical and “presentist” variants, given that several chapters (e.g., Dallinger, Hadler) trace the longevity of discourses of external threats and (successful) defense right up to the very recent past. What is more, the critical engagement with wide-ranging and always locally inflected politics of memory repeatedly points at the divergences between historical realities and their ideological retelling. Its many merits and obvious timeliness notwithstanding, there are also slight omissions or only half-used opportunities worth noting about the volume.

First, at the risk of sounding pedantic, a cross-reference to Aleida Assmann appears in Johann Heiss's chapter (85), though not in his bibliography. More substantially, the editors' introduction, although it sets the stage for the ensuing chapters well, could have appealed to a potentially broader readership by leaving more room for an overview of the historical contexts (and their Eckdaten) in question. Further, and this is a criticism that can be put to much memory studies literature, the difficult question as to when historiography becomes ideological or, approached differently, if and how cultural remembering can avoid complicity in a politics of othering and group-internal structural reproduction warranted more extensive discussion. Finally, especially in light of the interesting inclusion of some very recent, almost current examples of collective remembering, the volume could have positioned itself in relation to the growing literature on, for example, contemporary Islamophobia (e.g., John Bunzl and Farid Hafez, Innsbruck, 2009) or Austrian–Turkish relations (e.g., Sevgi Bardakçi et al., Innsbruck, 2009; Duygu Özkan, Vienna, 2011).

One also detects a recurring reluctance to follow through on some highly relevant theoretical invocations. Mauss and Simmel get mentioned briefly, as do Stuart Hall and Mikhail Bakhtin (by Dallinger), Aleida Assmann (by Hadler), and André Gingrich's hugely pertinent concept of “frontier orientalism” (in Gollner's chapter). The epilogue offers further conceptual strands, though they appear as add-ons rather than as fully employed analytical devices. With the exception of the more extensive conceptual grounding provided in Telesko's chapter and in Prole's, such theoretical cross-references often remain somewhat underused. Consequently, potentially important comparative insights are not always developed as far as they could have been. Given Feichtinger and Heiss's other important work on orientalism and multiculturalism, this seems a little surprising. Readers hoping for broader conceptual reflections on some key topical issues about identity politics, the history of East–West relations, cultural racism, and the construction of “clash of civilizations” narratives (à la Samuel Huntington) may find themselves wishing that this valuable volume had built on its rich empirical insights a little more.