Title: The File
Subtitle: A Personal History
First published: 1998
Description: 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.
Subjects: Intelligence Agencies, Politics and government, Journalists, Germany (East), Intelligence service, Germany (East). Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, Biography, British Foreign public opinion, Deception, East German Foreign public opinion, History, Internal security, Political aspects of Deception, Secret service, Germany (east), politics and government, Journalists, biography, Secret service, great britain, Germany (east), history, Public opinion, europe, Germany (East). Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit, Political aspects, Ministerium für Staatssicherheit
Places: Germany (East), Great Britain
People: Timothy Garton Ash (1955-)
Time periods: 20th century