The File eftir Timothy Garton Ash

Timothy Garton Ash had a rare opportunity to review his youth. Adding to his diaries as sources of himself as a young man, there existed an outsider’s view also – the view of a secret-police in an autocracy, even more detailed about himself at many points than his own remarks on his experiences at the time. These were the STASI-files of the East-German secret police from the time of Garton Ash’s stay in East-Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s. After the collapse of the communist regime, Ash returns to have a look at his file, now being made available. The result of his findings, and his considerations related to them, is his book, The File: A Personal History.

Garton Ash originally moves to Berlin to study Nazi-Germany but soon his interest turn to another German autocracy, current and only across a wall of concrete dividing his city of residence. He therefore accepted a scholarship and moved to the eastern part of Berlin where he not only studied history but also became part of it. STASI soon began to follow his everyday life in East-Berlin. STASI’s successful methods of hysterical investigation of its citizens and visitors not only included the employees of the secret police but also the so-called ‘IM’ (“Inoffiziele Mitarbeiter”); members of the general public that would, sometimes with hesitancy, sometimes not, report to STASI about their fellow citizens.

Garton Ash describes how some of the people that he communicated with at the time turned out to be IMs that reported on him to STASI. Fortunately Garton Ash is not one of those unfortunates that found out that the people they had the most intimate relationship with, even spouses, had been the ones that reported on them. Still, such horrible examples fill Garton Ash with suspicion which leads him, for example, to wonder whether a former girlfriend in East-Berlin was in fact a Trojan horse for the STASI to have him under further supervision.

STASI’s investigation of Garton Ash resulted in a 325-page file, which is rather minimal in comparison to the usual length of files. The files reflected well the hysterical occupancy of the totalitarian state to keep an eye of the population. The extent of STASI was vast; in the final years of East-Germany STASI employed 90,000 people full-time and had, in addition, 110,000 IMs. No wonder that unemployment became a problem in the Eastern part after reunification!

Garton Ash’s approach is mostly the one of understanding and forgiveness. He tries to realize the difficulties of having an individual will in a strong totalitarian system that does not tolerate disobedience to the state’s policy or rules. He is lucky enough to be a sort of a ‘free rider’ for the most of his time behind the Iron-Curtain. That might explain why he does not have the same difficulties of understanding and forgiving as he might have if the reports on him had led to more serious actions than a ban from visiting the Communist bloc for some time.

He, actually, later experiences the real anxiety himself when he falls in love with a local girl in Poland and therefore becomes included in the fate of people who live by the everyday-fear of its totalitarian authorities. If this would have happened sooner and the reports on Garton Ash would have resulted in affecting his fiancée or their relationship in a harmful way, had he been as ready to understand and forgive? It is not easy to say.

The File makes one think about the difficult choices people in totalitarian states have to make between collaboration and resistance. It is hard for those who have never experienced a dictatorship to realize how difficult it can be to swim against the tide, especially when one’s loved ones may suffer harshly from it. For us, those who are brought up in democracies, it might be more relevant to use this book as an example about how we will end up if countries around the world pursue their post-9/11 ongoing policy of increased supervision of the public. The governments of today claim to pursue this policy of supervision for the “general good”. We should bear in mind that so did STASI.