This edited volume of nineteen chapters is a tour-de-force study of historiographical revisionism and cultural memory at work over decades. For the past some 80 years, the Second World War has continued to play a monumental and ideologically elastic role in the national identities of the five Nordic nations: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Editor Marianne Stecher-Hansen has strategically divided the volume into four pan-Nordic sections: War Historiography, War Literature: Archive, War Literature: Canon, and War Cinema: Remembering and Forgetting. The comparative synthesis of these larger frames works extremely well.Across the sections, four superlative chapters deal with Finland, a nation thrust into three successive wars of survival: the Winter War of 1939–1940, the Continuation War of 1941–1944, and finally the Lapland War of October 1944 to April 1945. Caught between the brutal endgames and territorial claims of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Finland's greatly outnumbered military precariously kept the nation's independence, at enormous cost in blood and sacrifice. Collectively, these chapters by Juhana Aunesluoma, Julia Pajunen, and John Sundholm investigate the political and military stakes of Finland's three wars, in particular how revisionist cultural memories have codified and mythologized over time the national urtext of Väinö Linna's 1954 war novel Unknown Soldiers (Tuntematon sotlias) in film and television versions. Liina-Ly Roos's excellent chapter on Klaus Härö’s 2005 film Mother of Mine (Äidestä parhain) explores the trauma of Finnish “war children” uprooted to surrogate parents in the comparative safety of non-combatant Sweden.Three compelling chapters by Guðmundur Hálfdanarson, Daisy Neijmann, and Pétur Valsson address remote Iceland's comparatively safe, yet fraught experience in World War II and its aftermath. The authors focus on the Allied (first British, then American) occupation of Iceland, as well as on the Cold War NATO-sanctioned aftermath of continued American military presence. The economic boom that ensued with the war helped thrust Iceland into modernity while also causing tremendous social upheaval. The chapters analyze literary works such as North of War and films such as The Girl Gogo, Atomic Station, and Devil's Island as expressions of revisionist history reshaping the trauma of American military and cultural imperialism. The Americanization of Iceland through jazz, rock and roll, youth culture, and especially romantic relationships between Yankee GIs and Icelandic women was consistently perceived as a threat to traditional Icelandic masculine identity and power.Sweden's “neutral” but precarious position and legacy vis-à-vis Nazi Germany and the Allies (including the Soviet Union) is interrogated within four impressive chapters. John Gilmour examines Sweden's ambiguous war and its contradictions and controversies. Amanda Doxtater focuses on author Karin Boye as an ambivalent spectator, diarist, and traveler in the pre-war Third Reich of the late 1930s. Jan Krogh Nielsen writes on ethics in Per Olov Enquist's 1968 documentary novel The Legionnaires about Sweden's morally cynical postwar expulsion of 146 Baltic refugees to the Soviet Union and near-certain execution or the gulag in January 1946. Erik Hedling analyzes the hugely successful Swedish 1973 television series Somewhere in Sweden as a popularized history of non-aligned Sweden's strategic “small state realism” in World War II.Norway's 5 years under occupation are engaged in four stellar chapters. Tom Kristiansen traces Norway's unique status among the five Nordic nations. Nazi-occupied with a puppet regime fronted by Quisling, Norway was also a key Allied nation with King Haakon VII's legitimate government in exile in London and the Norwegian Merchant Marine carrying vital munitions and supplies across the North Atlantic's deadly U-boat-infested waters. Chapters on works by two of Norway's greatest twentieth-century authors showcase Christine Hamm discussing Sigrid Undset's problematic Allied propaganda piece written in exile, Return to the Future (1942), as well as Dean Krouk's psychoanalytic exploration of collective guilt and betrayal in Sigurd Hoel's canonical 1947 novel Meeting at the Milestone. Gunnar Iversen traces how Norwegian cinema has represented the Occupation within at least five distinct ideological, genre-driven phases that have mutated over nearly 8 decades.Denmark's parallel experience to that of Norway is covered in four outstanding chapters. Sofie Lene Bak examines Denmark's collective memory of resilience and solidarity under the German Occupation, a sanctifying national master narrative it shares with the other Nordic countries, for example, as well as with Nazi-occupied France, and the Netherlands. Marianne Stecher-Hansen explores cultural memory in the war film genre through two harrowing 2015 films from Denmark. April 9th portrays a small bicycle platoon of six men at the Jutland border with Germany futilely trying to hold off the pre-dawn surprise attack of Panzer tanks and troops during the overwhelming air, land, and sea invasion that led to the country's capitulation within hours. Land of Mine uncovers the brutal postwar retribution by Denmark as the victors force teenage German POWs to remove thousands of beach land mines in virtual suicide missions. Editor Stecher-Hansen also has a revealing chapter on Isak Dinesen's 1948 “Letter from a Land at War,” based on her experiences in Nazi Berlin before the April 9 invasion. Mark Mussari probes the existential and angst-driven writings of Danish modernist writer Hans Christian Branner under the humanistic crisis of war, resistance, and collaboration.This edited volume is an indispensable contribution to World War II studies of cultural memory and representation. Although too often placed at the margins of great-power narratives about the larger European theater of war, the five Nordic nations here receive the nuanced, rigorous, and riveting investigations they have long deserved, especially within a comparative, pan-Nordic context. Theoretically rich in its engagement with memory and post-memory studies, this collective work brilliantly documents and brings to life a war that ended some 75 years ago yet continues to shape and reshape powerful national narratives of identity, destiny, guilt, innocence, cowardice, and valor.