The Haunted Land
by Tina Rosenberg
Summary
When communism fell in 1989, the new democracies of Central Europe inherited a question no revolution escapes: what do you do with the people who ran the old regime, and with the millions who quietly helped it? The Haunted Land is Tina Rosenberg's report from inside that reckoning, built from years of interviews across Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the former East Germany, and it remains the essential book on what came to be called transitional justice. In Prague she follows lustration, the screening law that barred former secret police collaborators from office, and the tragedies of the files themselves, which ruined the innocent alongside the guilty because the police records lied. In Germany she sits through the trials of the Berlin Wall border guards, teenagers when they shot, prosecuted by a state that no longer exists for obeying its laws, while the men who gave the orders negotiate their comfortable defenses. In Poland she circles General Jaruzelski, who imposed martial law and argues he did it to forestall Soviet tanks, a claim the evidence complicates in both directions. Rosenberg's gift is for the impossible case, the informer who was also a victim, the judge implicated by the act of judging, and her conclusion is appropriately unheroic: societies need truth more than punishment, and usually get less of both than they deserve, because the files are poisoned, the judges are compromised, and the voters would rather move on. The book won the 1995 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, one of the rare books to take both.
Historical Context & Significance
Rosenberg wrote at the exact moment the questions were live, in the early 1990s, when the files were opening, the trials beginning, and every post communist government was improvising its answer; her earlier book on Latin America's violence, Children of Cain, had trained her on societies digesting their own crimes. The double award in 1995 and 1996 recognized reporting that had become political philosophy. The book's cases became the standard references as truth commissions and lustration debates spread from South Africa to the Balkans, and the MacArthur Fellowship she had received in 1987, while reporting in Latin America, looked prescient in retrospect. Every country that has since opened its secret police archives has rediscovered her cases, because the dilemmas she documented repeat themselves wherever the files survive the regime.