Publishers Weekly
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Freelance journalist Rosenberg's frequent trips since 1991 to eastern Europe and the former Soviet empire led to this trenchant report on the moral, political and legal dilemmas confronting Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia as they face their Communist pasts. She focuses on Czech dissident/human rights activist Rudolf Zukal, whose parliamentary career was shattered in 1989 by the revelation that he had been an informer for the secret police in the early 1960s. She also interviewed Polish Communist leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who, at his 1992 impeachment trial, argued that his imposition of martial law in 1981 was a necessary evil to save Poland from a Soviet invasion. Documents and testimony presented here contradict that rationale, showing that Jaruzelski was anxious to undercut Solidarity's growing power. Rosenberg also profiles Berlin Wall border guards and East German secret police informers now condemned for their unquestioning obedience to the old regime. Rosenberg wrote Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Rosenberg, the first freelance journalist to receive a MacArthur "genius" grant, has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and The New Yorker; her first book--Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America (1991)--was widely praised. In this study, Rosenberg investigates another kind of violence: the repression and coercion that were, until recently, an inescapable part of daily life for most citizens of Eastern Europe. Focusing on Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Germany, and Poland, Rosenberg humanizes her description of the aftermath of Communism's collapse with tales of three individuals: Rudolf Zukal, a longtime Czech dissident, denounced in 1991 as a collaborator; Wojciech Jaruzelski, the general who headed Poland after the first Solidarity uprising; and Michael Schmidt, an East German border guard who was tried, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, for killing the last person who attempted to escape to the West. Rosenberg compares totalitarianism in Latin America and Eastern Europe, suggesting that trials and punishment are vital for Latin America's "regimes of criminals" but are clumsy tools at best in coming to terms with Eastern Europe's "criminal regimes," which drew most citizens into their operations. A provocative study of a critical component in building the world's newest democracies. --Mary Carroll

Choice
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

Freelance journalist and scholar Rosenberg, presently a fellow at the World Policy Institute, has turned her superior talents to a profound question facing Eastern Europe since the collapse of communism. How does society-- its people and its leaders--restore the truth and the historical past after communism? The need to come to terms with history after any war or revolution is problematic and is not always a matter of restoring truth. The legacy of living in communist societies makes this task perilous and necessary. Eastern Europeans have had to adjust their sense of the historical past to a reconstituted present on several occasions in this century, as new orthodoxies replaced old. With depth, and a style appealing to general readers as well as scholars, Rosenberg weaves a tapestry of stories, personal and public, gathered since 1991. She concentrates on the four previously communist nations of Poland, Germany, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, where the ghosts of the haunted lands raise profound ethical dilemmas. Rosenberg suggests that these countries are not truly dealing with the past, because of the way it lives within them. One great challenge is for democratic societies to purge themselves of a communist past, and punish old villains (yesterday's heroes?) without violating democratic ideals. A powerful text. All levels. A. R. Brunello; Eckerd College

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

MacArthur Foundation grant recipient Rosenberg follows her acclaimed study of Latin America's transition to democracy, Children of Cain (1991), with a similar look at Eastern Europe, specifically, the former Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Germany. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the movement toward something like democracy in the former Warsaw Pact countries, those nations were faced with the dilemma of how to address the crimes of the previous regimes. In Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Germany this shared problem was met with solutions of varying degrees of efficacy. Lustrace, the Czech policy, used names culled from secret police files to purge alleged informers and secret police agents from public office; but the results have been so disastrous that some leading dissidents have found themselves tarred with the brush of stool pigeon. In Poland, General Wojciech Jaruzelski was placed on trial by the new government for invoking martial law in 1981, an act he claims was taken to avert a Russian invasion. In Germany, a somewhat fairer version of lustrace has been installed, but former East German border guards were tried for murder in the shooting of their escaping countrymen in the last days of the Wall. Rosenberg recounts the events in these three responses to the past with a firm grasp of the issues at stake and a finely balanced moral sense. The result is a thoughtful book about ``human beings' ability to rewrite the past to suit the present'' and the necessity of facing the past as it really was. The book is slightly marred by some repetitiveness, and the author lacks the encyclopedic grasp that Timothy Garton Ash or Misha Glenny have of the region's history and politics, but there is much of value here. An intelligent examination of a complex issue, a useful corrective to the euphoria of the West in the wake of its ostensible victory in the Cold War.