The File: A Personal History. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1997 by Sandeep Puri

As a twenty-something college graduate in the early 1980s, Timothy Garton Ash went to live in East and West Berlin. He worked as a clandestine journalist, he studied, he made friends, he roamed around the country, and he thought hard about life in a communist country. He was eventually banned from visiting East Germany because of the journalistic accounts of his experiences that he published in West Germany. Nearly a decade later, when the files of the STASI, East Germany's secret police, became available for people to read, he asked to see the file on him.

Ash was astonished to receive hundreds of pages detailing his movements in East Berlin and recounting his conversations. The informants included people with whom he had only a passing acquaintance as well as his good friends. As he read through the contents of the file, Ash was struck by a simple question: What makes one person loyal and another a snitch? And he set out on a journey back to East Germany in hopes of answering it.

Upon meeting those who had informed on him, Ash would frequently pop a question like, "... do you have an inkling why I have sought you out today?" The informant would reply no, and the conversation would begin. One informant, "Michaela," when being confronted with evidence of her cooperation with the STASI, replied that someone of her position was "obliged" to cooperate. She reports that she tried to tell as many harmless details as possible and that she hoped that this cooperation would make it easier to enjoy privileges like foreign travel. As she reads the pages of information that Ash provides her from his file, she begins to realize the harm in what she has done: "I can't read any more. I feel sick, I want to puke" Ash discovers that Michaela's betrayals included not only him, but also the West German boyfriend of her stepdaughter.

The informant is not the only participant who feels anguish. Ash also becomes uncomfortable during his confrontations, at times wondering whether he is justified in disrupting someone's life. When he meets Frau R., someone whom Ash had considered a friend, he tells her of his discovery of her cooperation with the secret police. "So what should I do? Jump out of the window?" she responds. She denies knowing that she was considered an informer and refuses to look at the evidence Ash has brought to show her. She then begins to describe her life under communism. "[A]s she talks--with pathos now--of the horrors of the camps, of her dead husband, of her faraway son, we both understand that she is placing the weight of her suffering into the scales of my judgement. The weight is heavy. Within minutes I am telling her that I have no right to sit here as her judge" As Ash leaves he asks himself, "By what right, for what good purpose, did I deny an old lady, who had suffered so much, the grace of selective forgetting?"

Ash recognizes that whatever betrayal he feels is nothing compared to what East German victims must feel. He mentions the case of one person who had been imprisoned for five years under the communist regime for attempting to escape. This person, upon reading her file, discovered that it was the man with whom she was currently living who had denounced her to the STASI.

Sandeep Puri is a management consultant living in New York City. He lived and worked in Berlin in 1991.