The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism
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Manufacturer: Vintage
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 947
EAN: 9780679744993
ISBN: 0679744991
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 464
Publication Date: 1996-03-19
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 1996-03-19
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Reviews:
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The Pulitzer Prize-winning look at the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Stylish and Urgent
Comment: When Communism came crashing down alongside the Iron Curtain at the turn of the 1990s, it left a changed Eastern Europe to sift through the debris. Former Soviet Bloc countries found themselves struggling to come to terms with the events of the last fifty years, and to establish new systems in the shadow of the old.
This is the conflict Tina Rosenberg portrays in "The Haunted Land." A journalistic veteran of the South American dictatorships, Rosenberg travels to Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the former East Germany, and tries to uncover and analyze the questions and problems they face after Communism. Czechoslovakia is attempting to cleanse itself of those who "collaborated" with the Communists, a task that proves difficult in a society in which complicity can mean being--not evil, but merely unwilling to risk one's life speaking out. In East Germany, Rosenberg covers the trial of the last Berlin Wall guards to shoot someone attempting to cross the border between East and West Germany, an act that was legal--even demanded--at the time. And in Poland, she follows the course of the man who instituted martial law in that country: did he condemn Poland, or save it?
Rosenberg's approach is to seek out issues at the personal level, whether that person be a former high official, an ex-resistance fighter, or an everyday citizen who may or may not have been co-opted as a secret police informant. She tells their stories, and through them, the stories of their countries. Though Rosenberg no doubt spent countless hours interviewing her subjects, the book rarely reads like an interview; Rosenberg's storytelling has more character, plot, suspense, and sheer narrative panache than many novels.
If the focus on the personal provides a unique perspective, it may also give rise to one of the book's shortcomings; viz., the "big picture" is sometimes ignored in the heady rush of the particular. Readers with no background in the convulsive politics of the Cold War era may occasionally find themselves wanting for context. This deficiency never really impedes the force of the reporting, but some information from another source might be ideal. (I read the book along with sections of Robert Paxton's Europe in the Twentieth Century, a textbook that neatly covers the broader political sweep.)
My other qualm with the book is that by now it begs a sequel. Published in 1995, I wonder how these countries have changed thirteen years on; there might at least be another edition with an afterword to update us.
That being said, the broad questions that Rosenberg raises are the important ones, and they have not changed. In the orbit of a totalitarian system (both during and after it), we find challenged our ideas of personal responsibility, freedom, and legality. What is the difference, Rosenberg asks, between trying Nazi soldiers for crimes that didn't exist at the time, and trying East German border guards for crimes that didn't exist at the time? What do we do when we are asking who we can blame, and the answer may be "no one in particular"--may even be "ourselves"?
Rosenberg is singularly eloquent in discussing such questions. She has her own opinions, and is not afraid to voice them, but at the same time she leaves plenty of room for the reader to make his own judgments. The comments she does offer are articulate and insightful. Her answers may or may not satisfy every reader, but they will provoke thought, and they should. What Rosenberg has found in the problems of post-Communist Europe is a microcosm of problems everywhere, stunningly incisive particular examples of the most pressing universal dilemmas. She describes the former East Bloc as a "haunted land," and we discover--perhaps to our discomfort--that the ghosts of this place are the ghosts of us all.
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Slow Start, but smooths out nicely.
Comment: Rosenberg's book is divided into 3 sections, each dealing with a newly democratic nation. The first section analyzing Czechoslovakia and the Stb starts off extrememly slow, and almost derailed me entirely from finishing the book, but it pulls you in once you get into the discussions on Jaruzelski and Poland. Overall was a good read, and sends a very good and objective message in the end to how a nation can move on from its totalitarian past. Although Rosenberg's constant referalls to her experiences in Latin America can cometimes be completely irrelevant to the topic at hand and get rather annoying after a while. Good read though...
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Summary: Popular history in the making
Comment: Rosenberg's interviews form a Studs Terkel-like mosaic of Eastern Europe emerging from its age of ideology. Her informers recall the excitement of popular democracy movements "... live as if we had democracy in Poland. Don't burn down party headquarters, build your own. Don't worry about the Party or the state. Forget about the government labor unions, found your own ...". Others offer thoughtful consideration of the future, or describe the tragedy of people divided, when the past's state secrets are revealed.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A book which is at once accessable and powerful
Comment: This is a powerful book. What Rosenberg has done is in many ways is to ask powerful questions and put those questions in stories which then strike to the core. Interestingly, Timothy Garton Ash, the great British journalist, has powerful quote as a reviewer where he states the book is powerful than the more dense academic tomes. I could not agree more. What she has done (without the gift of linguistic help as other reviewers fairly make clear) is to expose the grey in trying to determine justice post a very oppresive regime.
Her stories are accessable, powerful and very complex. She is not perfect, and she is in many ways not claiming to be. What she is though is a great journalist who asks great questions and dares to look past the most simple answers.
This book is powerful because you cannot read even one single page without thinking what would I have done in that situation. You are forced to see the world of the former eastern European nations not through rose colored glasses (good students, bad communists), but by looking at the real people and the real decisions that they made.
I love Garton Ash's work, and i have a good deal of his writing on Europe. He however has a tendency towards lionizing the rebels, where as Rosenberg always looks at them for what they are. I think they each see truth and perhaps a different form of that truth.
Her book is again a ringing testimony to the wisdom of our form of government and the blessings of this country. It also does though beg a question of how the war on terror will change our intelligence activities domestically. As with our athletes who seem 20 years behind the East German swimmers in their adoption of performance enhancing drugs, i hope our government has the wisdom to read and understand the lessons of books like these.
A great and profound book in the packaging of a much easier to digest story. This and Stassiland (along with the movie The Lives of Others) makes a great Western view of what was east of the wall.
Happy New Year to all.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Eastern Europes Faces its Past
Comment: When the Iron Curtain was finally opened across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, the harsh light of newly-found political freedom exposed many pressing issues, not least of which was how to exorcise the demons of the communist past, both tangible and intangible. Ms. Rosenberg, intrigued after following similar events in Latin America, spent a good amount of time in Eastern Europe during the heady but rocky years following the Velvet Revolution, the triumph of Polish Solidarity and the fall of the East German police state.
While this book is not a history book--despite its considerable depth and length--it does contribute some ideas, mainly the author's, to the historical debate surrounding the important issue of post-communist governments and how three of them chose to deal with the totalitarian past.
What to do about the recent communist past in Eastern Europe? The three governments featured each follow a general pattern of attempting to purge the former communists, each with mixed results. Sometimes the old anti-communists become as bad as their former repressors. Most of the time the lower-ranking cogs of the former socialist regimes are barred from meaningful lives while the old apparatchiks transition smoothly to new capitalist lives. The results are as frustrating as the questions they were supposed to answer.
Ms. Rosenberg's Western bias does come out occasionally, such as when she wonders why East Germans didn't do more to resist the nascent Communist regime after World War Two (but after a devastating war and a brutal Soviet occupation featuring mass deportations, executions and random violence, who would?). But this and her romantic-but-realistic view of socialism never surface enough to challenge the book's incredibly interesting subjects.
And the characters, with the deep human complexity of those forced to compromise their beliefs or willingly playing along with the various "Systems," are as fascinating as they are ordinary. From nondescript East German border guards chosen precisely for their bland lives to a tough Czech former dissident betrayed by a decades old passage in his secret file to the dark glasses of Polish General Jaruzelski, the people interviewed by the author are extraordinary. There are men like Captain Novotny, formerly of the Czechoslovak secret police, and then there are men like Knud Wollenberger, who betrayed his own wife to the Stasi.
Ms. Rosenberg concludes her work with her idea of what these governments should do to exorcise the malignant demons of the Cold War's past; she favors a lighter touch of government inquiries and official apologies instead of the largely vengeance-driven trials against former regime officials and collaborators, as especially seen in the Czech Republic in the early 1990s. One strong recommendation is that these societies examine themselves in order to better understand how the half-century of Soviet-dominated communism came to be, so that these societies may better prevent a future recurrence. But these are wounds that only generations of time will heal, and scars are permanent.
For anyone interested in Eastern Europe from postwar to the fall of the Great Socialist Experiment, this book is highly recommended.
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