The File: a Personal History

However, the depth to which this book addresses the issues of the Stasi is questionable. Lets not forget that Garton Ash was submitted to the mildest of the human rights abuses that the Stasi have been known to have committed, and this along with many other issues lead to 'The File' being an example of the Stasi's activities, but by no means representative of their worst.

Nevertheless, an entertaining read.


Night and fog lead to the mists of the morning.   June 22, 2001
1 out of 19 found this review helpful

Berlin, a city divided ,in a country the same.Where the War has broken everything, the lives of the people, families, fathers and sons. Here is where the streets end themselves in politics. This is where the ruins are removed, only to make a Death-Zone. Walls proliferate, and the biggest of them all falls across Berlin, like a scab in maintainance of a wound. The roads are cleared, the debris lies in peoples hearts instead, piled up in consequence. West and East, Berlin streets echo with the footsteps of each other.In the East , dark memories mass, still cling to pockmarked buildings, survivors of the battle. In the West, new glass shines back the blinding sun of to-morrow or even the day after. Underpinning all, like the sand beneath Berlin itself, are the Nazis and their man, Adolf Hitler. Into this comes the boarding school boy from the land of continuity, out of Oxbridge, to take on the World. Perhaps he knows how it is to be dispossesed and disowned for he wanders in the half - light of that city, Berlin,East and West,inexperienced yet perceptive, in sympathy with its people. There he finds discontinuity, schism,division,all played out on the streets in a banality of pursuit, of shadowing, after a haunted truth. It seems the personal is political, in a sadness beyond telling, typed out by informers in a message to the blind, between lines of false praise to the Ministry. Minds made ghosts, wandering in Friedrichstrasse, in Unter den Linden, wafting across bounderies at their masters whim. Immaterial themselves, they sieze, in paradox, the minutia of each moment, record each step and breath of their "object", that unofficial stranger whose footsteps guide their own. It must mean something, in their amorphous eyes - this Englishman, walking in the damp and dark with a woman of the DDR. So they hide and watch time burn and sift the ash for meaning. And it meant nothing! Nomore than just two people holding the hours between them. Two lives stepping together through their own shadows. All is marked down for other eyes, a life made menu of a forgotten meal, placed in its file by other hands like treasured dust. It was licenced craziness all this, a State paid metaphysic to find meaning. What they found was emptiness and defeat. Sometimes they found themselves, here where everything and nothing was proven. This was a self-made crisis and the only way to understand it was by the heart. But the heart was walled in! Swimmers, minus the micro-chip, they were drowned in the miles of information. They suffered in this lonely place, made speechless by the ocean of words. Silence, stagnation, watchfulness,the organs of a State with its back to the wall. Down came the Wall. All "The Files" woke up. Previously forbidden eyes now viewed themselves. Now began an autopsy using light. Everything was revealed, betrayals, greed, fear,the jottings of lives lost to themselves,seeking security in the shadows of power. Men and women,but mainly men, of quiet desperation, servants of a State which sought the narritive of itself in the rape of its citizens. The authors "File" turns up. Buff-coloured, dusty,faded,stained by theft. The child he never knew he had, another self, strange, out of the hands of strangers. It is a coffin and a grave as well, borne from a shelf. It beckons as if below the earth. So he ,in his turn, pursues light, truth in that darkness, through the shuttered places of the I.M.'s (informers).He meets them, finds faces busted by the years and the knowledge of deceit. They live within walls still, now cardboard thick, everything they have ever done , contained inside the files of others. The clock ticks for them, a hunter, each moment is transfixed in a landscape of memory. They wait to be broken as if in a circus of pain. The past they made now stands by their door on watch. They have no-one and nothing to write about. Their nakedness and their life draws jeers and prosecution, hate and laughter. Humanity divided, plundered depths, a heart the same. The author deals also with those Stasi officers who dealt with him. Often he find them in a form of hiding, desperate for their cases back and their importance. They are unrepentant, having done no more than any guardian does or would. Many are dressed in the cheap leasurewear of the poor, their big bellies wrapped in the colour of poverty and a rich anger. They live on in a new silence, in new traps of meaning,from words turned informer. Back in England ( or is it Britain) he visits M.I.5. His experience of the secret police sits like a crow upon his shoulders. It pecks at his heart. Is the Stasi mind-set everywhere? Here in England too? The file he has in Berlin moulders inside him, like stale food, forcing him to vomit up a neccessary question. Fatherless boys, war-torn societies,these are part of the cause, the author thinks, of the whole tragedy of his and the others files. And I thought " How many in M.I.5 went to boarding school and were brought up minus mum and dad?" But the author has learned. Love saves a lot of wasted time.He tells us he will try to be a proper parent to his children,a father to his boys. This is a useful book in our continued discussion of Europes past ,present and future.


Forgiven but not forgotten?   March 12, 2008
Joachimski (Muenchen)
Timothy Garton Ash discovered after the reunification of the two Germanies, that the Stasi had kept a file on him under the code name "Romeo"(He thinks this name came from the Alfa Romeo he was driving at the time). They recorded everything about him from his first stay in West Berlin in 1978 as a student of history from Oxford who researched for his thesis on the Third Reich, and got specially interested in his person when he spent some time in East Berlin where he was allowed to study archives for his work.
So these files brought the older Garton Ash of the nineties back to his professional beginnings, and, since he kept his own notes from the time, he is in the unique position of comparing his own view of his life and past events with the outward view of those informing on him. The first half of the book deals with the incongruities of personal memory and historical events and the forever shifting perception of how things happened and what your own role was. This is sometimes a trifle tedious, because, as Garton Ash himself says, as a priviliged foreigner he had no negative or even dangerous consequences to fear, compared with East Germans, whose file brought them to Bautzen prison for years or ruined their personal and professional life. On the other hand, the "outsider's" view of this total surveillance of every move you made, every personal contact you established, is gripping in its honesty.
In the second, more thrilling part of the book Garton Ash interviews all the people who spied on him, the "IMs" as they were lovingly called by the communist system of the GDR. And the author tries very hard to be fair, to find out what made these informers do their dirty work. There is a German saying: "To understand all means to condone all", and sometimes Garton Ash is dangerously close to that. Still, it's very unusual for a Briton to show so much understanding, that he even doesn't give the real names of his informers, in order not to cause them problems. And, in an ironic turn at the end, we learn that the British Secret Service had a file on the author, too.
All in all, "the File" is a valuable counterpart of "The Balaton Brigade" by Georgy Konrad.