The Haunted Land

The Pulitzer Prize-winning look at the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe

“The definitive account of what the transition away from communism in Eastern Europe has meant in moral terms. Brilliant and impassioned.” —LA 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.