Lessons from Stasi files: twenty years after studying in East Berlin, Timothy Garton Ash read his secret police file.

Twenty years after studying in East Berlin, Timothy Garton Ash read his secret police file. Pierre Spoerri looks over his shoulder.

Today, almost ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germans still speak about the amazing process which led to the reunification of their country. But neither West nor East Germans care to think back to the darker aspects of life under the regime of the so-called German Democratic Republic--although the unhealed history of these decades continues to influence the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

Timothy Garton Ash's book, The File(*), deals with this subject--and shows that real life can be more fascinating and haunting than a spy thriller. He describes with unusual honesty what he experienced as a student in East Germany and how, 20 years later, he relived that period of his life while reading through his file in the offices of the Stasi, the GDR's notorious secret police.

He describes the thoughts which went through his mind when the file was delivered to him. `Actually, mine is very modest compared to many. What is my single binder, against the writer Jurgen Fuchs's 30? What are my 325 pages against the 40,000 they devoted to the dissident singer Wolf Biermann? Yet small keys can open large doors and this is a way into much bigger rooms.

`Wherever there has been a secret police, not just in Germany, people often protest that such files are wholly unreliable, full of distortions and fabrications. How better to start testing that claim than by seeing what they had on me? ... 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.'

Little did Garton Ash know what he was getting into when he travelled to take up his place at the Humboldt University in East Berlin: `I set off for Berlin on my 23rd birthday, 12 July 1978, driving my new dark blue Alfa-Romeo up the motorway ... to the Helmstedt frontier crossing at the "iron curtain" between West and East Germany.' For the first year and a half he lived in West Berlin and then, in January 1980, crossed Checkpoint Charlie and moved to East Berlin. `My original purpose was to write an Oxford doctoral thesis about Berlin under Hitler.'

As Garton Ash was intensely interested in people and politics, it was only natural that during those years in East Germany he met all kinds of people of all generations and political views. He also travelled frequently to the countries further east where he studied the inner processes which were ultimately to lead to them shaking off communism and choosing the democratic path. And all the time he was being observed and reports about him were sent to the Stasi's headquarters.

Garton Ash compares what the Stasi observed with what he remembers himself, from a one-night stand with an East German girl student to deep conversations with some of the dissidents. But the most interesting chapters come when he meets again--both through his file and later in person--some of the people who spied on him and discovers their personal histories.

One was Herr Zeiseweis, once deputy head of department XX, which was responsible for controlling Berlin's dissidents, churches, cultural life and universities. `Little Herr Zeiseweis exudes an air of bureaucratic rectitude and quiet self-importance. Today he wants above all to stress that he had high standards of conduct and decency. He was a devoted family man. He had always been true to his wife, and she to him. There were bad things in the Ministry, yes, he admits it.... But he would have nothing to do with that.'

Garton Ash describes Zeiseweis as `a perfect textbook example `of the petty bureaucratic executor of evil. Proud of his correctness, loyalty, hard work, decency--all those "secondary virtues" which have been identified as a key to collaboration with Nazism. He is incapable of acknowledging, to this day, the systemic wrong of which he was a loyal servant.'

Everyone Garton Ash talked to blamed someone else--government workers blamed the Party; the Party, the Stasi; and the Stasi, specific departments within the Stasi. `When the communists seized power in Central Europe, they talked of using "salami tactics" to cut away the democratic opposition, slice by slice. Here, after communism, we have the salami tactics of denial.'

For me, as someone who has spent many years in Germany, the most relevant chapters of the book are those where Garton Ash goes into the question of what we can do as individuals and nations to deal with the more unpleasant pages of our own history. English, he points out, has no word for this process, but German has two--`Geschichtsaufarbeitung and Vergangenheitsbewaltingung. "Treating", "working through", "coming to terms with" or even "overcoming" the past. The second round of German past-beating, refined through the experience of the first round, after Hitler.'

While reading his file--part of the 18 kilometres of Stasi files which are still being systematically analyzed and evaluated by a staff of 3,000--Garton Ash reaches some conclusions. `Two schools of old wisdom face each other across the valley of the files. On the one side, there is the old wisdom of the Jewish tradition, to remember is the secret of redemption. And that of George Santayana, so often quoted in relation to Nazism: those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

`On the other side, there is the profound insight of the historian Ernest Renan that every nation is a community both of shared memory and shared forgetting. "Forgetting," writes Renan, "and I would say even historical error, is an essential factor in the history of a nation." And there is the everyday human experience that links "forgive and forget" in a single phrase.'

Garton Ash finds `real wisdom' in both views, which cannot easily be fused. `The closest I can come to it is a prescription staged through time: find out--record--reflect, but then move on. That is the least bad formula I know for truth and reconciliation: between peoples (Poles and Germans, English and Irish), of a people with itself (South Africans and South Africans, Salvadorans and Salvadorans), between individual men and women, and with ourselves. Of us with them, us with us, him with her--and me with myself.'

Garton Ash ends the book by asking himself what he can pass on to his own sons who `in just a few years' time, as the century ends ... Will set off on that perilous journey between childhood and maturity, each to their own personal Berlin. With luck, they will never have to confront the extreme choices that so many had to face in Europe over this rotten 20th century.... How to arm them for this journey? ... And how to impart not just the values but also the courage to our children?' Questions that we all need to ask ourselves.