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The File: A Personal History

by Timothy Garton Ash, Ash Timothy Garton

3.75 of 5 stars 3.75 · rating details · 246 ratings · 29 reviews

"Eloquent, aware and scrupulous . . . a rich and instructive examination of the Cold War past." --The New York Times

In 1978 a romantic young Englishman took up residence in Berlin to see what that divided city could teach him about tyranny and freedom. Fifteen years later Timothy Garton Ash--who was by then famous for his reportage of the downfall of communism in Central E...more

Paperback, 272 pages

Published September 29th 1998 by Vintage (first published 1997)

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Jan 23, 2011 Natalia Pì rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

A terrific read for anyone who likes history, especially that of the Cold War, and does not mind a different sort of narration of it.
In this book, Garton Ash examines the file that the Stasi built on him between 1978 and 1989, which he was able to access after the fall of East Germany. I loved this book, because it is not only a (very good) history book, but it's also a reflection about memory and about human nature.
The author meets most of the people who either informed the Stasi on him during...more

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Dec 15, 2009 Stephanie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Timothy Garton Ash's The File: A Personal History is an exploration of the author's own file that was kept on him by the East German secret police, the State Security Service, "the Stasi." Mr. Ash lived in East Berlin for a few years in the late 70s and early 80s, ostensibly to finish his Ph.D. thesis on the German Communist resistance to the Nazis (Mr. Ash, a British citizen, was getting his doctorate from St. Antony's College at Oxford), but actually to report, as a journalist, on the East Ger...more Timothy Garton Ash's The File: A Personal History is an exploration of the author's own file that was kept on him by the East German secret police, the State Security Service, "the Stasi." Mr. Ash lived in East Berlin for a few years in the late 70s and early 80s, ostensibly to finish his Ph.D. thesis on the German Communist resistance to the Nazis (Mr. Ash, a British citizen, was getting his doctorate from St. Antony's College at Oxford), but actually to report, as a journalist, on the East German dictatorship. Therefore, Mr. Ash was indeed a spy, albeit a "spy" for the media, rather than for MI5 or MI6.

Upon the reunification of Germany, the Stasi's files were largely thrown open to the public. A staggering number of people have applied, and been granted permission, to see their own files. Upon reading them, they have found unwelcome and sometimes horrible truths -- wives finding that their own husbands informed on them for the Stasi, for example. Mr. Ash tells the story of delving into his own file, and comparing the informers' reports with his own memory, or, indeed, with his diary entries from that time or with articles he then published under a pseudonym in West Berlin. Mr. Ash then tracked down, and interviewed, most of the informants in his file. He questioned their motives for choosing to become Stasi informers, and compared those motives and choices with his own: he came close to joining MI6 at one time, and he himself chose to clandestinely gather information and report it, although not to any secret police or government agency. Mr. Ash also draws necessary and unsettling parallels between the East German citizenry's acquiescence in and participation in the communist dictatorship and the German people's in the Nazi regime.

While I was reading this book, I was absolutely staggered by one of the numbers Mr. Ash quoted: 1 in 50 East Germans were informers for the Stasi. When I told this to my husband, he said, "Steph, don't be such a hypocrite -- the FBI and the American people are just as bad." Now, I know in my bones that this is not so, and I set out to prove him wrong. I submitted a FOIA request (Freedom of Information Act request) to the FBI, seeking a compilation of the numbers of FBI informants during the years J. Edgar Hoover was the director of the FBI (the darkest period, in my estimation), whether expressed as raw numbers or as a percentage of the American population. "Hah!" I thought, "For one thing, there was no such thing as a FOIA request in East Germany."

While I waited for the results of my FOIA request, I finished the book. And Mr. Ash explored just that same territory, in Britain, that I was attempting to explore here in the U.S.: that is, to compare the workings of the state security service in a democracy with the workings of the Stasi in the East German dictatorship. And the results were not altogether heartening. I was also astounded to learn that in Britain, there is no such thing as a FOIA request: British citizens cannot request to see the files that MI5 or MI6 hold on them. Mr. Ash learned that MI5 maintained a file on him through interviewing a gentleman at MI5, and by asking the question point blank. The gentleman, in his discretion, chose to answer, although he could rightfully have chosen to neither confirm nor deny the existence of a file on Mr. Ash.

And then when I got the results of my FOIA request, I was further disheartened. This is what I got: "The FOIA does not require federal agencies to answer inquiries, create records, conduct research, or draw conclusions concerning queried data. Rather the FOIA requires agencies to provide access to reasnably described, nonexempt records. The questions posed in the referenced letter are not FOIA requests becasue they do not comply with the FOIA and its regulations." Now, I know damn well that my request was broad enough to describe at least one document that certainly must already exist in the FBI's files; there must be, at least in the FBI's accounting records, line items of the moneys paid out year by year to confidential informants, and such a document would provide me with the information I sought, in addition to other, irrelevant (for my purposes) information. If I were litigating, and not merely doing a FOIA request in order to prove a point in a discussion with my husband, I would fight this denial and I would win. If I were personally a litigious person, I would investigate federal law to confirm whether I could sue and recover damages for the FBI's failure to comply with FOIA. But the FBI's response to my FOIA request is an answer of a different sort: by narrowly interpreting my request and denying me the existing records I asked for, the FBI is undermining the scope and reach of FOIA and on the spectrum ranging from "democracy" to "dictatorship," is edging itself further to the right, that is, closer to the Stasi.

And one passage from Mr. Ash's book has stayed with me: "The domestic spies in a free country live this professional paradox: they infringe our liberties in order to protect them. But we have another paradox: we support the system by questioning it." I support my free country, the United States, by questioning it and by submitting my FOIA request. I would be a greater supporter, and a truer patriot, if I were to pursue my FOIA request and fight the FBI's denial. (less)

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Jan 03, 2013 Will rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"Whenever there has been a secret police, not just in Germany, people often protest that their files are wholly unreliable, full of distortions and fabrications. How better to test that claim than to see what they had on me? After all, I should know what I was really up to. And what did my officers and informers think they were doing? Can the files, and the men and women behind them, tell us anything more about communism, the Cold War and the sense or nonsense of spying? This systematic opening...more "Whenever there has been a secret police, not just in Germany, people often protest that their files are wholly unreliable, full of distortions and fabrications. How better to test that claim than to see what they had on me? After all, I should know what I was really up to. And what did my officers and informers think they were doing? Can the files, and the men and women behind them, tell us anything more about communism, the Cold War and the sense or nonsense of spying? This systematic opening of secret-police records to every citizen who is in them and wants to know, is without precedent. There has been nothing like it, anywhere, ever. Was it right? What has it done to those involved? The experience may even teach us something about history and memory, about ourselves, about human nature. So if the form of this book seems self-indulgent, the purpose is not. I am but a window, a sample, a means to an end, the object in this experiment.

To do this, I must explore not just a file but a life: the life of the person I was then. This is not the same things as 'my life.' What we usually call 'my life' is a constantly rewritten version of our own past. 'My life' is the mental autobiography with which and by which we all live. What really happened is quite another matter.

Searching for a lost self, I am also searching for a lost time. And for answers to the question How did the one shape the other? Historical time and personal time, the public and private, great events and our own lives. Writing about the large areas of human experience ignored by conventional political history, the historian Keith Thomas quotes Samuel Johnson:

How small, of all that human hearts endure
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

But looking back I see how much the experience of my own heart, at least, was caused by our modern 'laws and kings': by the different regimes of East and West, and the conflict between them. Perhaps, after all, Johnson was expressing not a universal but a purely local truth. Happy the country where that was ever true."(less)

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Jan 08, 2010 Ebru rated it 5 of 5 stars

Fantastic personal account of what it is like to read your Stasi file. Beautifully written, and a compelling mix of memoires and history, which brought me to tears during more then one passage.

"I place a compact disc in the computer's CD-drive, and click the 'play' button on screen. From a loudspeaker somewhere behind the text I have just typed there comes the voice of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, recorded in 1958, at the height of the Cold War, singing Schubert's great dark song. Can any father h...more

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Apr 07, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arts-and-historical

In 1978 a romantic young Englishman took up residence in Berlin to see what that divided city could teach him about tyranny and freedom. Fifteen years later Timothy Garton Ash--who was by then famous for his reportage of the downfall of communism in Central Europe--returned. This time he had come to look at a file that bore the code-name "Romeo." The file had been compiled by the Stasi, the East German secret police, with the assistance of dozens of informers. And it contained a meticulous recor...more

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Sep 08, 2009 Salina rated it 3 of 5 stars

- Confusing start with timeline, terms, names, places
- Improved when he talked about each person he went back to visit
- Thought I was educated and well-read, but some of the terms and references in the book made me feel quite ignorant - I felt like an intellectual light-weight
- Although it did not captivate me, it did help me understand why the informants did what they did and how ordinary people could get manipulated/corrupted and by extension how they could have their good intentions perverte...more

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Jul 30, 2011 Kurt rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: thriller, memoir

That's right. I tagged this as "memoir" and "thriller." It's an unlikely combination, but then The File chronicles an unlikely moment in history. Not the police state of former East Germany. Police states are a dime a dozen. Nope, the unlikely bit is the moment in the mid-1990s when a newly re-unified Germany allowed everyone to apply to see the file that the East German secret police, the Stasi, kept on them.

For all that the KGB were designated by Hollywood as the Big Bad (in today's televisio...more That's right. I tagged this as "memoir" and "thriller." It's an unlikely combination, but then The File chronicles an unlikely moment in history. Not the police state of former East Germany. Police states are a dime a dozen. Nope, the unlikely bit is the moment in the mid-1990s when a newly re-unified Germany allowed everyone to apply to see the file that the East German secret police, the Stasi, kept on them.

For all that the KGB were designated by Hollywood as the Big Bad (in today's television parlance), the Stasi kept more records, kept more thorough records, and compromised a greater percentage of their country's population. Family informed on family, neighbors on neighbors, husbands and wives on their wives and husbands. Everyone got a code name. Everyone got a handler. Everyone got a file - everyone who informed, and everyone who was informed-upon.

When I read this for the first time in early 2001, carrying out academic research in Prague, The File already felt like an anachronism, a peculiar book documenting a particular moment in history. Then came 9/11. Then came the Patriot Act, and the War on Terror, and a mere 8 months later, the book felt like a cautionary tale.

In The File, Timothy Garton Ash documents how he retrieved his own file and methodically interviewed all of the people who had informed on him, people he barely knew, people he considered confidantes and friends. He interviews members of the Stasi, a branch of the military, as far up the chain of command as he can go and gives them a voice even as he explores his own misgivings.

Historically speaking, from the perspective of the U.S., the Warsaw Pact were the Big Bad. But for the Stasi themselves, they were protecting their country. They were doing what our CIA do, ferreting out dangers to the country, to the society, to their heritage as they saw it. He explores the inherent tension between freedom and law enforcement, and individual freedom versus national self-defense.

Inevitably, the greatest damage done by the police state driven to protect itself is to society and to the relationships between citizens. Garton Ash himself betrays the trust of a former girlfriend who did something he never understood. On the verge of making love one night, she threw back the curtains on the French doors of her apartment and turned the light on. She is not listed in his file as an informant, but the circumstances have always puzzled him. When he asks her about the event, she is deeply hurt that he could imagine she would have tried to set him up to be spied upon. "I don't remember opening the curtain," she says, "but yes I turned on the light. I wanted to see your face."(less)

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Jun 11, 2008 Marie rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anyone with academic interest in East Germany

Shelves: nonfiction, memoirs, europe

Well, I made it to page 87, not quite halfway through, and decided to stop. I found myself wanting to be done with the book, which is never a good sign. I have too many books on my "to read" list to waste time on a book I'm not enjoying or finding interesting at least.

The book's premise was interesting: an English journalist and researcher who spent time in East and West Germany and Poland gets hold of his Stasi file after the Berlin Wall comes down. He compares the file to his own personal diar...more

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Jan 23, 2013 Amro rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I never expected to enjoy this so much. It's a great read - try not to read it in one sitting! The small, petty, and ultimately horrific, way that small inconsequential details could be sown together by the paranoid Stasi could, and did, ruin lives. Everyone seems to have been spied on, and extensive records were kept. Uniquely Germany has allowed people to view their secret police files (unlike Poland, Russia, etc etc).

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Nov 21, 2012 Helen Stanton rated it 5 of 5 stars

Absolutely stunning.....a must read for anyone interested in 20th Century history. A work of non fiction that reads like a spy thriller. He ponders the methodology of historical research and its value.....compares and contrasts the Nazi regime and that of DDR.....documents the fall of communism in Eastern Europe .......and the end is so moving I had a tear in my eye.

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Mar 28, 2013 Darlene rated it 1 of 5 stars

I suffered through 100 pages of this 1997 Cold War memoir. Was it the dated subject matter, the writer's confusing shuffle of personal diaries and East Germany Secret Police files and later recall, or the writer's self-important speculations and observations then (1980) and and 15 years later that made it a plodding, uninteresting read?

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Mar 10, 2013 Tereza Fuková added it · review of another edition

Obdobi studene valky me zajima, zvlaste potom Berlinska oblast, ale tahle knizka mi prisla celkem zbytecna.
Prvni polovina byla jeste celkem zajimava, ale potom autor zabredne do filozofickych a moralnich temat a kniha se stava pomalu necitelnou...

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May 04, 2010 Tuck rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

a classic for anyone interested in the cold war, east germany, stasi, polish solidarity, spies and intrigue, AND what it means to write history. match with "stasiland" by anna funder for a very insightful look into western madness.

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May 17, 2009 Guy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: germany, history, non-fiction

A fascinating topic and well developed. Makes me want to see my own Stasi file (which I'm quite sure existed) from my own time in East Germany in the early 80s.

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Aug 16, 2011 Rika rated it 3 of 5 stars

Communist country kick book #2. This one was perhaps less interesting... maybe because East Germany has less of the mystery and intrigue of North Korea?

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May 05, 2011 Desi added it

Shelves: abandoned-without-finishing, nonfiction-general, history, books-i-own

Neat exploration of some issues, but not particularly engaging. It was much more personal and memoirish than I expected it to be in the moment of "I need a book" desperation the night I pulled it off the shelf.

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Nov 27, 2007 Maren rated it 4 of 5 stars

I was enthralled by the Oscar winning German film The Lives of Others and discovered this slim book about the Stasi and their aftermath by Timothy Garton Ash. Ash was a British student in East Germany and after the fall of communism and the making public of the Stasi records he returns to Germany to read his own file and interview those individuals who informed on him. It is a striking exploration of a police state and how individuals justify their behavior after the fact. It is well-worth readi...more

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Jan 25, 2013 Sarah Laurenson added it

Fascinating, especially in terms of memory, interpretation, historiography, morality and liberty.

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Oct 03, 2011 Katie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Just one man's account at how pervasive the Stasi were in East Germany.

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Oct 31, 2010 Joelle rated it 4 of 5 stars

Ideal for getting my head into Berlin.

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Sep 22, 2008 Ken rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The author uses big words and extra long sentences to try and prove how smart he is. He drops names of obscure writers and philosophers into the text assuming that everyone has heard of them. C'mon buddy. I'm reading this book to get an idea of how the Stasi worked in East Germany and how they affected your life personally. It's not to bone up on my obscure European writer trivia, that's for sure.

When he finally gets to the interviews with the former Stasi officers, I found the book very interes...more

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Apr 08, 2013 Phillip Tigue rated it 3 of 5 stars

Okay.

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Jan 15, 2009 Denise marked it as to-read

On Cathy's list

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Feb 08, 2013 Mills College Library added it

Shelves: february-2013, weekly-02-08-2013, history-new-books

943.1 G2443f 1998

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Apr 04, 2011 Dan Weiss rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: deutsch, eastern-europe

An original book. Although some degree of bias is unavoidable, the author tries to objectively pursue all aspects of his file. I would like to be able to identify with the author...but when he talks about driving his Alfa Romeo into East Berlin...

A good narrative and a must read for anyone interested in the Stasi or East Germany in particular. If anything the author's active life is a nice motivation.

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Aug 14, 2008 Ryan rated it 3 of 5 stars

I have a fascination with the former East Germany, so this book naturally took me. In the mid-nineties Garton Ash reads his file the Stasi kept on him. In an attempt to understand why acquaintances informed on him, Garton Ash confronts them. The book has its high points and low points, but is an good look at an country and system I find fascinating.

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Apr 17, 2008 Tessa rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfic

I felt that this could have used a little more clarity in regards to chronologically going through the file, for people with a loose history background like me. For that reason, it started out slow, but deals very well with the ambiguity of the subject and of the historical situation.

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Jun 10, 2007 Eli rated it 4 of 5 stars

Haunting and deeply morally insightful treatment of the mechanics of every day life in a police state, and its morally corrupting effect on its inhabitants.

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Mar 20, 2007 Jenny rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: communism-totalitarianism

A good companion to "The Lives of Others"

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May 13, 2013 Janine rated it 3 of 5 stars

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