The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

by Tina Rosenberg

Book Overview

In this timely book, the author investigates the aftermath of communism in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslavakia. Each chapter centres round a legal case, highlighting the knotty moral, political and legal questions raised by the changes.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679744991
• ISBN13: 9780679744993
• Release Date: March 1996
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.1" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

A book which is at once accessable and powerful

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.

Surveying the Psychological Wasteland of the Former East Blo

We stand at a point six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and look across a war torn psychological landscape. A haunted land where emotional wreckage lies strewn across the plains like the rubble of bombed out cities after World War II. Tina Rosenberg attempts to take us into this horrifying scene and examine the damage up close. To look at the savaged emotional architecture of the cold war with a critical eye, and to try to formulate if the building is salvageable, if the old bricks can be used to restore the landscape, or if the entire thing needs to be torn down. I must admit that I was extremely skeptical of this book by the time I had finished reading the introduction. "How," I asked myself, "does an author who, by her own admission, speaks `only rudimentary German and no eastern European language ' expect to get a truly accurate picture of the society? After all, she's at the mercy of the translators or the ability of others to speak English." As I completed my reading of this very well written and thought provoking book I could not, even with serious effort, shake this initial fear about the book's potential shortcomings. It reads less like a history presenting the facts, and more like a long human interest article in the Sunday newspaper, showing only a glimpse of things through interviews with people; some dissidents, some ordinary informers, others former high ranking officials. Few of the interviews struck me as spontaneous, and most of the participants seemed carefully on their guard to say precisely what they wanted to say, revealing nothing that would shake their own self-image. But, despite the obvious flaws of the book as a historical thesis, it brings us a very interesting portrait of the real pain that some of the ordinary people whose complacency, or participation, allowed the regimes to exist. As a study of how ordinary people are pulled into participation in, or complacency towards, such totalitarian regimes this book is as valuable to us as Albert Speer's memoirs, Inside the Third Reich.

The painful process of conversion to democracy

This was a great read, one of those nonfiction works that goes like a novel; I couldn't put it down. It's divided into three sections which focus on Germany, Poland and (then) Czechoslovakia, and focuses not only on the state systems and structures of regimes, spying agencies, etc., but on the individual perspectives and costs. There's a metric ton of reportage packed into the 400-page book, with a very compelling conclusion Rosenberg writes referencing her other work on Latin America. The transition to democracy has not been smooth in any of the countries Rosenberg reports on. Many critics use the word "moral" in praising the book. I think it is, but not in a didactic way. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

well worth reading

A thought-provoking journey concerning the effect our social systems have on our individual psyche. Far from using her book as a forum to condemn the actions of these eastern bloc nations, she chooses instead to raise the underlying questions about ourselves that these events provoked-- the main questions deal with how malleable and easily influenced our own psyches tend to be. In addition it addresses that precarious line concerning how much power a state should or should not have. For those interested in sociology, history, or psychology, it is well worth reading.

A thoughtful and insightful look at Cold War remains

Tina Rosenberg penetrates to the heart of the matter. She combines a telling of events with the thoughts of the people who were there to experience them. Her portrait of General Jaruzelski left the reader feeling like you could have a grasp on the man. The only face that I could remember of the general was the menacing one given to the public by our media. Ms. Rosenberg does show his motivations and why he reacted that way. She tells of the enormous pressure he was under and the role he is attempting to play today. She doesn't take him off the hook for his actions, though. I would recommend this book heartily to anyone who has said to themselves, I wonder what Eastern Europe is like with the Russians out? It was not as simple as we thought it was going to be. The section about the Czech Rebublic makes that perfectly clear. Lustrace has left many cleansed but others soiled. Tina Rosenberg provides reasons why this part of the world can not be cleansed with one swift stroke.