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The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism

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The Haunted Land tries to answer one simple question, how should the former Soviet countries of Eastern Europe deal with those citizens that actively supported the communist regimes? Are they guilty of anything? Can and should they be punished? Most importantly, is the act of seeking out and punishing people for their political actions simply another face of the totalitarianism that was just overthrown?

The questions raised by the book ARE very important. Unfortunately, although the writing is straightforward and the issues presented are raised clearly, the book is somewhat superficial. The author does not speak ANY Eastern European languages. . . and it shows. All of the "meat" of the book comes from structured interviews where the author, subject, and translator have a discussion. The author does not live in a country for five years, talking with fruit vendors, policemen, street cleaners, and other regular people. Instead, she sets up interviews with specific people that she thinks will be helpful and then grills them.

For a much better treatment of a similar subject, read Lenin's Tomb, by David Remnick. He speaks Russian, he lives in Russia for a while with his wife, and for goodness sakes -- he looks Russian! (there's a picture of him with Boris Yeltsin in the book). You can tell, within fifty pages of each book that Lenin's Tomb was written by someone who was there and lived it, while The Haunted Land reads like a college essay.

The Haunted Land was well written and it has a clear point. Unfortunately, there's not much meat here. If you're interested in the story of Communism and its fall, read Lenin's Tomb.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Author has a distinct style, sort of voyeuristic. What you get here is a lot of conversations from some of the players from Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Interesting, but far from being a crucial read.

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.

~

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...

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.