Sharon Macdonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today, Routledge, London, 2013, 320 pages, £24.99 paperback. ISBN 9780415453349.

Macdonald’s Memorylands is an ambitious synthesis of a very wide range of literatures from multiple disciplines relating to the intersections between heritage, memory, place and identity in contemporary Europe. It is one of those books you read with a pad of paper and pencil at your side, hastily scribbling down articles and essays that you’ve not encountered before but are sure – from Macdonald’s reportage – you simply must read. Having worked my way through the book I was left with a new reading list and a range of suggestive ideas and methodologies to pursue.

However this strength of range and ambition is also the downside of a book which races, almost breathlessly, through such an expansive literature (the references account for over thirty pages of a relatively slim volume). Reading it, I jotted down ‘smorgasbord’, influenced no doubt in part by the recurring references to foodstuffs as one key culture of memory and identity among the many that Macdonald introduces her readers to. Across the pages, Macdonald moves from ‘Soviet sausages’ in the nostalgia of post-Soviet Lithuania and Alyssa Grossman’s fieldwork practice of inviting Romanians to bring along foodstuffs to a ‘memory meal’ that reminded them of the socialist past, to French Grand Cru chocolates and the Italian Slow Food movement.

There is something exhilarating about reading this range of tidbits that range far and wide spatially and conceptually, but there are too many moments where the breadth loses coherence and depth. For example, in the chapter on commodification, Macdonald’s case study of her own research on The Skye Story warrants further expansion, but is too quickly supplanted by shifting to reference a wide range of work on authenticity. This is a missed opportunity as the later chapters where Macdonald pauses – too briefly – to draw on her own fieldwork are the most original and compelling.

In successive chapters, Macdonald explores two rather different museums on Skye. The first – Aros: The Skye Story – uses contemporary museal technologies to tell a hidden, Gaelic, history to tourists to the Island as well as locals ‘no well versed in their history’ (page 117). By contrast, the second – the Skye Museum of Island Life – was developed by an individual from a collection of some ‘old things’ (page 151) in his craft shop into a group of old buildings filled with old stuff to show young people on the island how ‘their forefathers lived’ (page 152) in a context of rapid change. By placing these two museums in two thematic chapters on commodification and musealisation, Macdonald does not fully pursue deeper comparative analysis of these radically different uses of the past as a vehicle for ethno-nationalism on the one hand and a more nostalgic attempt to rescue a fast-eroding past on the other. Those kinds of distinctions are critical and yet tend to disappear beneath the extraordinary range of material offered.

Perhaps inevitably, given the scope of Macdonald’s ambition, there are gaps in the literature and an over-reliance on a number of texts. In the chapter that represents the literature I know best – on Cosmopolitan Memory and Holocaust Commemoration – Levy and Sznaider’s important work is drawn on and critiqued, but tends to set the agenda rather too much and ends up framing the chapter. Where Macdonald does challenge Levy and Sznaider’s thesis of cosmopolitan memory, for example pointing to Israeli nationalist memory of the Holocaust, she draws on one study – Feldman’s work on Israeli youth pilgrimages to Poland –, but not on a much wider literature on Israeli national memory of the Holocaust, or examples from across the globe of the complex links between national identity and the Holocaust. Perhaps more telling is a lack of references to post-communist Europe. Arguably recent events there provide a convincing challenge to Levy and Sznaider. While the Stockholm declaration did establish Holocaust remembrance as a central tenet of a new European identity, this has come under pressure from so-called Prague Declaration in 2008 that sought to shift the priority given to the Holocaust by arguing that ‘both the Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes’ were equally disastrous for, and so important to, Europe. These attempts to challenge the perceived privileging of the Holocaust have taken museal form in controversial museums such as the House of Terror in Budapest, created by the rightist government of Viktor Orbán.

As this example shows, there is far more going on in Europe’s memorylands than Macdonald seems to suggest. In particular, there is considerably more happening in the post-communist states than simply ‘ostalgie’. There have also been – in particular on the part of rightist nationalist parties – attempts to challenge the pre-eminence of the Holocaust past as a cornerstone of European identity and reassert another history of political violence – that associated with the communist regimes that ruled for the second half of the twentieth century. In failing to work with this important phenomenon, Macdonald’s rendering of the nature of Europe as memoryland lacks a critical dimension of the contemporary politics of memory in post-communist Europe.

It is not the only omission. What also remains relatively unexplored – ironic given the title – are the spatialities of memories in contemporary Europe. There is more on heritage and identity here than there is deep engagement with the suggestive idea of ‘memorylands’. While Macdonald does point to the importance of objects and scales of memory from the local through the national to the transnational, there is surprisingly little on place. The end result is a book that is stronger on outlining a diverse range of literatures produced by scholars of memory than it is in digging down into the layered landscapes of memory that make up Europe’s ‘memorylands’.