The File
A Personal History
by Timothy Garton Ash · first published 1997
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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 ba
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…Stasi for reasons I can't quite explain. I've not seen the movie, but I'd recommend Stasiland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasiland as an account of various people who lived under the Stasi. Also, The File: http://www.amazon.com/The-File-A-Personal-History/dp/0679777... The (again, factual) story of someone uncovering their own file and researching its history.
on “Germans accuse U.S. of Stasi tactics before Obama visit” ↗Also good is "The File: A Personal History" by Timothy Garton-Ash ( http://www.amazon.com/File-Personal-Timothy-Garton-Ash/dp/06... ). The author returns to Germany after re-unification and researches his own Stasi file from…
on “East Germany thrived on snitching lovers, fickle friends and envious schoolkids” ↗I recently read The File by Timothy Garton Ash, a British journalist who spent a fair amount of time in East Germany in the last decade of the DDR. After reunification he was able to obtain his Stasi file. He learned how the…
on “Germany arrests suspected US spy” ↗…are the two relevant excerpts: "One night in the mid-1990s when I was working as a journalist in Beijing, I went out to dinner with some Chinese friends. I had just finished reading a book called "The File" by the British historian Timothy Garton Ash. It's about what happened in East Berlin after the Berlin Wall came down and everybody could see the files the Stasi had been keeping all those years. People…
on “Chinese entrepreneurs, investors on Google: ‘Just quit. We don’t care.’” ↗