Exit into History

Shortly after the dramatic events of 1989, Eva Hoffman spent several months travelling through her native Poland and four other Eastern European countries which had just undergone an historic transformation. This is the personal narrative of that journey and a portrayal of a social landscape in the midst of change. While making her way from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Hoffman ranged from capital cities to wayside villages and sleepy provincial towns; she visited shipyards, museums, homes and coffee-houses of the intelligentsia; and she talked with a great variety of people, many of them struggling with the transition from an unwanted past to an uncertain future. Most of all, she uses her bi-cultural perspective to enter deeply into Eastern European minds and sensibilities and to convey what the larger social shifts mean to particular people: to former dissidents wielding political power, deposed apparatchiks turned successful entrepreneurs, artists and technocrats, literate ex-censors, Polish aristocrats, Hungarian gypsies and Bulgarian Turks.