Books like The File by Timothy Garton Ash
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.
First publish date: 1998
Authors: Timothy Garton Ash
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Books similar to The File (6 similar books)
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A definitive, document‑rich history of the CIA, revealing why presidents and CIA leaders have struggled to grasp global realities and how repeated failures have threatened U.S. national security.
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In this Narrative, John Koehler details the widespread activities of East Germany's Ministry for State Security, or "Stasi." The Stasi, which spread its tentacles like a giant octopus over East German society to repress political opposition and cause the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of citizens, has proved to have been one of the most powerful secret police and espionage services in the world.
Koehler methodically reviews the Stasi's activities within East Germany and overseas, including its programs for internal repression, international espionage, terrorism and terrorist training, art theft, and special operations in Latin America and Africa.
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"Timothy Garton Ash chronicles this formative decade through a glittering collection of essays, sketches, and dispatches written as history was being made. He joins the East Germans for their decisive vote for unification and visits their former leader in prison. He accompanies the Poles on their roller-coaster ride from dictatorship to democracy. He uncovers the motives for monetary union in Paris and Bonn. He walks in mass demonstrations in Belgrade and travels through the killing fields of Kosovo.
Occasionally, he even becomes an actor in a drama he describes: debating Germany with Margaret Thatcher or the role of the intellectual with Vaclav Havel in Prague. Ranging from Vienna to Saint Petersburg, from Britain to Ruthenia, Garton Ash reflects on how the single great conflict of the cold war has been replaced by many smaller ones. And he asks what part the United States still has to play. Sometimes he takes an eagle's-eye view, considering the present attempt to unite Europe against the background of a thousand years of such efforts.
But often he swoops to seize one telling human story, that of a wiry old farmer in Croatia, a newspaper editor in Warsaw, or a bitter, beautiful survival from Sarajevo."--BOOK JACKET.
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