The Haunted Land

"Tina Rosenberg has traveled around the ruins of a fallen empire and she has returned with astonishing tales of human memory and struggle. The Haunted Land is the best portrait of post-imperial Eastern Europe around."--David Remnick, author of Lenin's Tomb

"Brilliant and impassioned... The definitive account of what the transition away from communism in Eastern Europe has meant in moral terms."--David Rieff, Los Angeles Times Book Review

In four newly democratic countries in Eastern Europe, communism's former victims and jailers are struggling to make sense of their history - and sometimes rewrite it. In this groundbreaking, stylishly reported book, a journalist travels across the battlefields of memory and asks: Who is guilty? How should they be punished? And who is qualified to judge them in states where almost every citizen was an accomplice? In East Germany, Tina Rosenberg follows the trial of the border guards charged with the last shooting at the Berlin Wall. In the Czech Republic, she meets a heroic dissident who has now been ostracized for having once cooperated with the old regime. In Poland, she speaks with General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the one-time architect of martial law who now presents himself as his country's savior. Out of these stories of conscience and complicity, courage and optimism, The Haunted Land delivers the final chapter of the greatest moral drama of our time.

As told by MacArthur Fellowship-winning journalist Tina Rosenberg, this "definitive account of what the transition away from communism in Eastern Europe has meant in moral terms" (David Rieff, Los Angeles Times Book Review) make up the final chapter in the greatest moral drama of our time. "Provocative and serious . . . original and useful".--New York Times Book Review. A National Book Award winner.

Tina Rosenberg is a journalist who lived and traveled extensively in Latin America from 1985 to 1991. She was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 1987, and her work has appeared in magazines such as Esquire, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and The New Republic. She now lives in Washington, DC.