The File: A Personal History.

• Author: Puri, Sandeep

As a twenty-something college graduate in the early 1980s, Timothy Garton Ash went to live in East and West Berlin. He worked as a clandestine journalist, he studied, he made friends, he roamed around the country, and he thought hard about life in a communist country. He was eventually banned from visiting East Germany because of the journalistic accounts of his experiences that he published in West Germany. Nearly a decade later, when the files of the STASI, East Germany's secret police, became available for people to read, he asked to see the file on him.

Ash was astonished to receive hundreds of pages detailing his movements in East Berlin and recounting his conversations. The informants included people with whom he had only a passing acquaintance as well as his good friends. As he read through the contents of the file, Ash was struck by a simple question: What makes one person loyal and another a snitch? And he set out on a journey back to East Germany in hopes of answering it.

Upon meeting those who had informed on him, Ash would frequently pop a question like, "... do you have an inkling why I have sought you out today?" The informant would reply no, and the conversation would begin. One informant, "Michaela," when being confronted with evidence of her cooperation with the STASI, replied that someone of her position was "obliged" to cooperate. She reports that she tried to tell as many harmless details as possible and that she hoped that this cooperation would make it easier to enjoy privileges like foreign travel. As she reads the pages of information that Ash provides her from his file, she begins to realize the harm in what she has done: "I can't read any more. I feel sick, I want to puke" Ash discovers that Michaela's betrayals included not only him, but also the...