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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.

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