Name: The File
ISBN: 9780679777854

The File

In 1978, fresh out of Oxford, Timothy Garton Ash set out for Berlin to see what he could learn from the divided city about freedom and despotism. As he moved from west to east - from Berlin glamour to Berlin danger - the East German secret police, the so-called Stasi, was compiling a secret file on his activities, monitoring his Berlin days and nights and tracking his growing involvement with the Solidarity movement in Poland. Fifteen years later, with the wall torn down and Berlin now unified, Garton Ash visited Stasi headquarters to find his file. The thick dossier he was given forms the basis for this real-life thriller in which he traces and confronts the German friends and acquaintances who informed on him, and the officers who hired them. Behind Stasi reports of suspicious meetings we discover the love affairs, friendships, and formative intellectual encounters that actually occurred. And behind a baffling web of lies, half-truths, and forgotten stories we find a forty-year-old man spying on his younger self.

What Hacker News says

harryfJan 2016

Also good is "The File: A Personal History" by Timothy Garton-Ash ( http://www.amazon.com/File-Personal-Timothy-Garton-Ash/dp/06... ). The author returns to Germany after re-unification and researches his own Stasi file from when he was in East Berlin in the late 70's as a part of his post-graduate research from Oxford.

thread

untogJun 2013

I have a nerdish interest in the Stasi for reasons I can't quite explain. I've not seen the movie, but I'd recommend Stasiland:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasiland

as an account of various people who lived under the Stasi. Also, The File:

http://www.amazon.com/The-File-A-Personal-History/dp/0679777...

The (again, factual) story of someone uncovering their own file and researching its history.

thread

saryantJul 2014

I recently read The File by Timothy Garton Ash, a British journalist who spent a fair amount of time in East Germany in the last decade of the DDR. After reunification he was able to obtain his Stasi file. He learned how the Stasi perceived him as a risk and began contacting those who snitched on him.

The stories of how some of the informants became informants are fascinating. One cooperated with the Stasi in order to obtain exit visas for official travel. Some were Ash's friends seeking to boost their careers, some were just pleased to do their part in furthering the cause of socialism.

Ash was never imprisoned or tortured and could leave whenever he pleased (though he was eventually barred from entering the DDR). He didn't really suffer at the hands of the Stasi but the book is a terrific look at the Stasi's surveillance and intimidation through the eyes of a single individual.

http://www.amazon.com/The-File-A-Personal-History/dp/0679777...

thread

jsm386Jan 2010

I think this is pretty predictable. There was an opinion piece by a Fellow at the Open Society Institute in the WSJ yesterday that explained this mindset. The entire piece is worth a read, but here are the two relevant excerpts:

"One night in the mid-1990s when I was working as a journalist in Beijing, I went out to dinner with some Chinese friends. I had just finished reading a book called "The File" by the British historian Timothy Garton Ash. It's about what happened in East Berlin after the Berlin Wall came down and everybody could see the files the Stasi had been keeping all those years. People discovered who had been ratting on whom-in some cases neighbors and co-workers, but also lovers, spouses and even children. After I described the book to my Chinese dinner companions-a hip and artsy intellectual crowd-one friend declared: "Some day the same thing will happen in China, then I'll know who my real friends are."

The table went silent.

...

I do believe, however, that in my lifetime the Chinese people may learn more about some of the conversations that have taken place over the past decade between Internet company executives and Chinese authorities. When that happens, they will know who sold them out and who was most eager to help the Chinese Communist Party in building a blinkered cocoon of disinformation around their lives-and in some cases deaths.

This censored environment makes it easier for the Chinese government to lie to its people, steal from them, turn a blind eye when they are poisoned with tainted foodstuffs, and cover up their children's deaths due to substandard building codes. It is a constant struggle, and sometimes literally a crime, for people to share information about such matters or to use the Internet to mobilize against corruption and malfeasance.

That is the information environment that China's business elites, many of whom have gotten rich running Internet and telecommunications companies, are responsible for helping to build and maintain. For now they are national heroes, having made great (and lucrative) efforts on behalf of China's economic growth and global competitiveness, making China a force to be reckoned with on the global stage. But if history takes some unexpected turns-and that's the one thing you can count on Chinese history doing-it won't always be on their side."

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870436200457500...

thread