The File

Timothy Garton Ash arrived in West Berlin in 1978, a recent Oxford graduate hoping to learn about liberty and oppression from a city split in two. Yet while he moved from the bright social life of the western side toward the more dangerous east, East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, opened a file on him. It tracked his nights and days in the city and followed his increasing ties to the Solidarity movement in Poland.

A decade and a half later, after the Berlin Wall had fallen and the city was reunited, Garton Ash went to Stasi headquarters to request his file. The large dossier he received became the foundation for this account, in which he tracks down the German friends and acquaintances who reported on him, along with the officers who recruited them. Beneath the Stasi's accounts of suspicious gatherings lie the romances, friendships, and intellectual exchanges that really took place.

The narrative is built from a confusing mix of lies, partial truths, and half-remembered events. Garton Ash, a historian and writer, looks at his own past through the eyes of a surveillance file, with the older man examining the younger one.