Volume 42, Number 12 · July 13, 1995
Central Europe: The Present Past
By Timothy Garton Ash
The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism
by Tina Rosenberg
Random House, 437 pp., $25.00
'The past is something, we all have some,' sang—if I remember rightly—the Incredible String Band. But some have more than others, and countries emerging from dictatorships have to confront 'the past' in a special sense. Thus in Germany for forty-five years after 1945 the very phrase 'the past' denoted the twelve years of Nazi dictatorship. Of course there were other things past—the rest of German history, for example—but the past, die Vergangenheit, was Nazism. Then the next German dictatorship passed away, and the country was cast into another bout of trying to come to terms with or to overcome 'the past.'
Review, 3537 words
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