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Beyond the Danube
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11816 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1994 |
1,348 Words |
| Author
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Juliana Geran Pilon
Juliana Geran Pilon is executive director of the National
Forum Foundation. |
THE BIRTH OF FREEDOM
Shaping Lives and Societies in the New Eastern Europe
Andrew Nagorski
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993
320 pp., $23.00
The complicated, exhausted, tantalizing eastern Europeans who are emerging from four decades outside history deserve a book like Andrew Nagorski's The Birth of Freedom: sympathetic without a trace of condescension, confronting the agony of their reentry into Europe without apology. Only one of them (Nagorski's parents were Polish) could write such a book: impressionistic, personal, almost passionate. Hence its accuracy. For the experience of eastern Europe's birth into freedom cannot be approached except by immersing oneself in the trauma, by being able to assess the event in all its splendor, squalor, and uncertainty.
Nagorski had not expected his assignment, in August 1990, to turn into an observation post at the collapse of the Soviet empire. The earthquake that would level the colossal edifice that year gave little warning, even to the most astute analysts. A journalist for Newsweek, Nagorski was perfectly placed to record the fall of rubble on the ashes of four desolate decades outside hope.
The result is a unique glimpse into a most remarkable metamorphosis of the human psyche, the unfolding of a "psychological process requiring major adjustments of thinking" about all aspects of life. For the collapse of the Berlin Wall was only incidentally architectural: Above all, it implied a regrooving of cerebral neurons, a shedding of the skin that held each solitary heart in exchange for uncertain new cover. The wonder is that--Yugoslavia aside--bleeding has been minimal.
Yugoslavia is not, to be sure, part of the story. Nagorski concentrates on Poland, Hungary, and the recently divorced Czech and Slovak republics, with only the briefest mention of some neighboring nations such as Ukraine and the former East Germany by way of contrast. The choice is wise, for the Balkans require volumes and are likely to remain opaque.
But those three (or four) countries closest to the West are fascinating and complex enough. Hardly monochromatic, each consists of contrasting social strata; all struggle with privatization even as they attempt to cleanse themselves--however clumsily--of an immoral past.
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