The File Read Online Free
Author: Timothy Garton Ash
me.” One could describe the syndrome in Freudian terms: file envy.
Actually, mine is very modest compared with many. What is my single binder, against the writer Jürgen Fuchs’s thirty? My 325 pages against the 40,000 devoted to the dissident singer Wolf Biermann? Yet small keys can open large doors. This is a way into much bigger rooms. Wherever 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 thing 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.
II
I SET OFF FOR BERLIN ON MY TWENTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY , July 12, 1978, driving my new, dark blue Alfa Romeo up the motorway from London to the Harwich ferry terminal. From the Hoek van Holland, I raced down the autobahn to the Helmstedt frontier crossing, at the “iron curtain” between West and East Germany, then nervously observed the speed limit on the designated transit route across East Germany to West Berlin. I lived in West Berlin for a year and a half, before driving through Checkpoint Charlie on January 7, 1980, to that room in East Berlin. My original purpose was to write an Oxford doctoral thesis about Berlin under Hitler.
For this period, from July 1978 to January 1980, the chronology I recently compiled for my history of Germany and the divided continent lists major political events from “Summit of world’s leading industrial countries (G7) in Bonn” to “President Carter announces sanctions against Soviet Union, interrupts ratification of SALT II treaty, and threatens boycott of Moscow Olympics.” In between it notes the election of Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II and his first papal visit to Poland, the first direct elections to the European Parliament,Nato’s “twin-track” decision (to deploy new nuclear missiles in Europe if the Soviet Union would not negotiate a reduction in theirs) and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. We see now that this was the buildup to the last great confrontation of the Cold War: Reagan versus Brezhnev, American Cruise missiles against Soviet SS20s, the Polish revolution in
Actually, mine is very modest compared with many. What is my single binder, against the writer Jürgen Fuchs’s thirty? My 325 pages against the 40,000 devoted to the dissident singer Wolf Biermann? Yet small keys can open large doors. This is a way into much bigger rooms. Wherever 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 thing 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.
II
I SET OFF FOR BERLIN ON MY TWENTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY , July 12, 1978, driving my new, dark blue Alfa Romeo up the motorway from London to the Harwich ferry terminal. From the Hoek van Holland, I raced down the autobahn to the Helmstedt frontier crossing, at the “iron curtain” between West and East Germany, then nervously observed the speed limit on the designated transit route across East Germany to West Berlin. I lived in West Berlin for a year and a half, before driving through Checkpoint Charlie on January 7, 1980, to that room in East Berlin. My original purpose was to write an Oxford doctoral thesis about Berlin under Hitler.
For this period, from July 1978 to January 1980, the chronology I recently compiled for my history of Germany and the divided continent lists major political events from “Summit of world’s leading industrial countries (G7) in Bonn” to “President Carter announces sanctions against Soviet Union, interrupts ratification of SALT II treaty, and threatens boycott of Moscow Olympics.” In between it notes the election of Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II and his first papal visit to Poland, the first direct elections to the European Parliament,Nato’s “twin-track” decision (to deploy new nuclear missiles in Europe if the Soviet Union would not negotiate a reduction in theirs) and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. We see now that this was the buildup to the last great confrontation of the Cold War: Reagan versus Brezhnev, American Cruise missiles against Soviet SS20s, the Polish revolution in
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