The File: a Personal History

The File: A Personal History

“These files change lives .” The OPK, Operative Personenkontrolle or Operational Person Control, files kept by the East German Stasi, the secret police, changed many lives when the information they gathered went public. One such file was kept on historian/journalist/student Timothy Garton Ash. He was described by the Stasi as someone who “’works purposefully and with scholarly thoroughness’ but displays a ‘bourgeois-liberal attitude and no commitment to the working class .’” In his book, The File: A Personal History, Garton Ash examines his Stasi file containing over 300 pages of information. During the course of exploring his file Garton Ash use the journal and notes he kept during his time in Berlin, in the early 1980’s, to supplement the information contained in the file. He slowly pieces together who the informants were that provided the information to the Stasi. He then systematically gets in touch with each person who was an informant and with the Stasi agents that managed his file.

In his book Timothy Garton Ash tells a story of his time in East and West Berlin while working on his thesis about Berlin under Hitler’s rule. During the time he was being watched by the Stasi, he never had any idea he was a person of interest. Even though the surveillance did not affect his life he is disappointed and loses faith in the people that informed on him. When he ultimately confronts each of these informers there seems to be no closure on what happened. Each person has their own reasons or excuses on why they did what they did. But the overall consensus was that most people were pressured and/or they did not realize how the information they provided was being used. Timothy Garton Ash imagined that “conversations like this taking place every evening, in kitchens and sitting rooms all over Germany. Painful encounters, truth-telling, friendship-demolishing, life-haunting .” The information in these files broke family ties, ended...