Tina Rosenberg - The Haunted Land Facing Europes Ghosts After Communism

Tina Rosenberg

This book was produced in EPUB format by the Internet Archive.

The book pages were scanned and converted to EPUB format automatically. This process relies on optical character recognition, and is somewhat susceptible to errors. The book may not offer the correct reading sequence, and there may be weird characters, non-words, and incorrect guesses at structure. Some page numbers and headers or footers may remain from the scanned page. The process which identifies images might have found stray marks on the page which are not actually images from the book. The hidden page numbering which may be available to your ereader corresponds to the numbered pages in the print edition, but is not an exact match; page numbers will increment at the same rate as the corresponding print edition, but we may have started numbering before the print book's visible page numbers. The Internet Archive is working to improve the scanning process and resulting books, but in the meantime, we hope that this book will be useful to you.

The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to build an Internet library and to promote universal access to all knowledge. The Archive's purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. The Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages, and provides specialized services for information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

Created with abbyy2epub (v.1.7.0)

THE

I

HAUNTED

LAND

FACING

EUROPE'S

GHOSTS

AFTER

COMMUNIS

.*?

NA ROSENBERG

I I'l

T

Lhe

U.S.A. $25.00Canada $35.00

he Haunted Land is a luminous, ground-breaking look at how four newly democraticeastern European nations are dealing with thememories of forty years of communism. As oneofficial orthodoxy replaces another, the peopleand governments of Germany, Poland, theCzech Republic, and Slovakia face ethicaldilemmas as complex and wrenching as any-thing out of Kafka or Orwell.

A soldier who follows orders and kills aman trying to cross the Berlin Wall is put ontrial. A man agrees to inform for the secretpolice so his dying father will be released fromprison. A lifelong secret-police official assignedto arrest dissidents begins to feed them infor-mation. A leader declares martial law, claiminghis act of repression is preventing a Soviet inva-sion. Which of these people is guilty? Howshould they be punished? Who may sit in judg-ment?

In the greatest moral drama of our time,Communist totalitarianism drew well-inten-tioned, even idealistic people into horriblecrimes. Now, as formerly Communist nationsattempt to atone for the past, there is the ever-present temptation to rewrite history to suit thedemands of the present. Tina Rosenberg's jour-nalistic triumph is to put a human face on theabstractions of intrigue and betrayal, memoryand ideology. The stories in this book take placenot just in the highest councils of governmentand courts of law, but also in smoky pubs andthe most private chambers of the soul. TheHaunted Land shows how people struggle withtheir own definitions of guilt as they learn theirbetrayers were their husbands, fathers, and bestfriends. It tells stories of lives in turmoil as peo-ple wrestle with the crimes and everyday com-plicities of the Communist pasttheir leaders',their friends', and, most devastating, their own.(continued on back flap)

Digitized by the Internet Archivein 2012

http://archive.org/details/hauntedlandfacinOOrose_0

Also by Tina Rosenberg

Children of Cain:Violence and the Violent in Latin America

> R 6 7

Tfce Haunted Land

For my parents

Contents

The tiny cluster of East German dissidents boasted few activistswho seemed more dedicated than Vera and Knud Wollenberger.They were both in their late twenties when they met in 1980. Knudmoved into Vera's apartment shortly after, and they were marriedthe next year. They had both grown up in privileged Communistfamilies: Knud's father was a professor of medicine at East Berlin'sprestigious Humboldt University. He married a Danish woman,and Knud, born in Denmark, carried dual citizenship and with itthe right to travel. A scientist in a state economics institute, Knudwas a frequent visitor to England and the United States. Vera'sfather was an officer in the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi.Vera's fury at her father's profession marked her childhood. Ateighteen she moved out of her parents' house and threw herselfinto opposition work.

In February 1981 the couple became founding members of thePeace Circle in their East Berlin neighborhood of Pankow. ThePeace Circle members were socialists but believed that the Commu-nist state had betrayed their ideals. With his long beard and sockswith his sandals, Knud was typical of the men. The women, likeVera, wore simple clothes and no makeup. The thirty or so regularmembers held human rights protests and ecological vigils. Theyorganized seminars on Chernobyl and disrupted government ral-lies with their own signs demanding free speech.

In the beginning Vera was a shy woman, unable to speak up atmeetings. She and Knud would talk over the issues at home, and,once at the Peace Circle, he would do her speaking for her. Butgradually she gained the confidence to express her views. She be-came a leader in the Peace Circle, the head of its ecological commit-tee. Her relationship with Knud changed. He stayed home withtheir children, wrote poetry, and kept bees, while she went to polit-ical meetings. He became Vera's Peace Circle helper. Once the twoof them stayed up all night to make a hundred copies of a seminarinvitation, writing each one by hand and addressing the envelopes.When Vera went to ecological seminars in Czechoslovakia or Hun-gary, Knud always insisted on going with her. Other women, saidVera, envied her her supportive and gentle husband.

It was dangerous work. Members risked their jobs and their free-dom. (Vera herself spent a month in jail in early 1988 and then wasexiled to England.) The Stasi was everywhere. Stasi agents posingas new members started rifts in the group and argued for moderat-ing the Circle's views. Stasi spying and infiltration were the subjectof constant discussion; fear of the Stasi threatened to paralyze thegroup. "Let's not forget about the Stasi," Knud would argue. "Butlet's not spend all our time talking about it, either."