Timothy Garton Ash lived in East Berlin in the late 1970s and early 1980s, conducting academic research on the German resistance to Nazism. As a foreigner he inevitably came under the scrutiny of the Stasi. Returning to Berlin in 1992 after the demise of the DDR he gained access to the file that had been kept on him, and on reading through it, discovered a network of informants, divided loyalties and betrayals that forced him to re-examine his memories of the time. During the momentous events of 1989 Garton Ash became one of the leading Western commentators on the unravelling of state communism in Eastern Europe, an experience he describes as ‘like being lashed to the saddlestraps of a racehorse at full gallop: very exciting, but you don’t get the best view of the race.’ The File, first published in 1997 and now reissued to mark the 20th anniversary of die Wende, benefits from years of self-reflection, and is a masterful limning of the moral complexities of life under a totalitarian regime. ‘A chilling portrait of treachery and compromise’, thought John Le Carré, ‘an invaluable document for our time, bravely and beautifully written.’
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