Winner of the 2011 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for political writing.

 

One of the country's most distinguished writers and publishers returns to her roots to explore the consequences of democracy in the former Hapsburg lands.

 

In 1989 the Berlin Wall was dismantled. Communism gave way to democracy. Since that time the former borderlands of the long defunct Hapsburg Empire and the more recently dispersed Soviet Empire have been trying to invent their own versions of democracy and market-driven economics. But these experiments have led to a widening gap between rich and poor. The worldwide economic crisis has severely tested Central Europe's determination to live peaceably, and there are many disquieting signs of old hatreds and racial tensions returning.

 

Author Anna Porter travels through the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia to speak with leading intellectuals, politicians, former dissidents and the champions of aggrieved memories. She interviews great figures of the revolution (V�clav Havel, Adam Michnik, George Konr�d) and its new custodians, among them Radek Sikorski and Ferenc Gyurcs�ny, and also examines the younger generation with little or no experience of Communism and no interest in its aftermath. She visits Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, Prague's Jewish Museum and Hungary's House of Terror, each an attempt to reckon with dark episodes of history.

 

The Ghosts of Europe is an exploration of power, nationalism, racism and denial in nations with a tumultuous history and an uncertain future.

Anna Porter was born in Budapest, Hungary, during the Second World War and escaped with her mother at the end of the 1956 revolution to New Zealand, where she graduated with an MA from Christchurch University. Like so many young Kiwis, after graduation she travelled to London, England, where she had her first taste of publishing. In 1968, she arrived in Canada, and was soon swept up in the cultural explosion of the 1970s. At McClelland & Stewart, run by the flamboyant Jack McClelland, she quickly found herself at the heart of Canadian publishing. In 1982, she founded Key Porter Books and published such national figures as Farley Mowat, Jean Chrétien, Conrad Black, and Allan Fotheringham. She went on to write both fiction and nonfiction works, including Kasztner’s Train, which won the Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the Jewish Book Award, The Ghosts of Europe, which won the Shaughnessey Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and has published four mystery novels. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the Order of Ontario. She lives in Toronto with her husband, Julian Porter. Visit her at AnnaPorter.ca.

Anna Porter's profile page

• Winner, Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing

"The Ghosts of Europe, is a fascinating commentary on the politics, history and culture of a part of Europe that for half of the last century lay mysteriously behind the Iron Curtain...Porter is a superb companion on this fraught, fascinating and sometimes disturbing journey, and she writes with intelligence, [and] dispassion."

Times-Colonist

"Anna Porter is the modern version of a Renaissance explorer. She views old lands with a fresh eye and sends back essential dispatches about new worlds. A must read."

Peter C. Newman

"The Ghosts of Europe, is a fascinating commentary on the politics, history and culture of a part of Europe that for half of the last century lay mysteriously behind the Iron Curtain."

Montreal Gazette

"In Anna Porter, we are in the presence not only of a journalist on a personal odyssey back to her own origins in Communist Hungary, but of a gifted storyteller who shapes a historically consequential narrative."

Shaughnessy Cohen Prize Jury

"The Ghosts of Europe is essential reading for anyone who cares about Central Europe’s past and its impact on the present. This book is in Anna Porter’s bloodstream and she writes with passion and conviction...Every page brims with information and first-hand knowledge."

Kati Marton, author of "Enemies of the People"

"An ambitious, disturbing, darkly fascinating amalgam of history and documentary about the peoples of Central Europe...Porter conceived of The Ghosts of Europe as more than a collection of interviews. She provides context by layering in the region’s blood-soaked history, documenting these former Habsburg lands as they shed their totalitarian skins."

Quill & Quire

"With each country she visits, Porter offers a succinct, highly readable, contemporary history, interspersed with interviews with influential national figures regarding past, present and future...The prime virtue of the book may be its ability to deal with moral conundrums without a display of moral indignation -- indeed, with the recognition that nearly everybody has a reason for doing what he or she has done."

National Post

“Intimate and insightful: an exile’s poignant return home, an accomplished journalist’s shrewd analysis.”

David Frum

"Anticipating the 20th anniversary of the 1989 revolution, Anna Porter felt empowered to visit four of the liberated countries --Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and her native Hungary -- to see and hear for herself what had happened. It turned out to be both a hectic and sometimes painful learning experience, and The Ghosts of Europe will make any thoughtful reader a lot wiser in the world."

Literary Review of Canada

"The Ghosts of Europe...[knits] up the threads of the present with the turbulent past...creating a complex tapestry of light and shadow that provides no easy answers...Focusing on the past century, Porter covers a dense landscape of loss, grievance, revenge and barely submerged guilt that echoes to the present day, raising troubling moral questions."

Toronto Star

"One couldn’t ask for a more well-connected tour guide. Porter deftly lays out the tumultuous history of these countries, interweaving it with a series of recent personal conversations with such storied members of the resistance as Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik and their former Communist overlords and a range of politicians, businessmen, intellectuals and archivists...Highly readable and enormously informative, this is a book that will make your head spin."

Maclean's

"The theme of retrospect and prospect runs through Anna Porter's intriguing and accessible narrative of contemporary central Europe. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Porter set out to explore the changing political and cultural landscapes at the heart of Europe's latest transformations, in Poland and Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia...The portrait she paints is important and true."

Globe & Mail