States of secrecy

Philip Knightley on a looking-glass war

The File: a personal history by Timothy Garton Ash, HarperCollins, pounds 12.99

After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the Germans embarked on a course of action unprecedented in political history - they opened the secret police records of East Germany to public scrutiny. Any citizen who was in a police file and wanted to read it was given the legal right to do so. Nearly 1.5 million people applied to learn what they had been accused of and who had informed on them.

Among these applicants was an Oxford historian, Timothy Garton Ash, who had gone to East Germany in 1976 to write his doctoral thesis about Berlin under Hitler. Garton Ash wanted to see his file for several reasons. He wanted to know why he had come under scrutiny by the Stasi, and who had informed on him. He wanted to rediscover the person he was then, and he had a more ambitious aim: to see whether the Stasi files and the men and women behind them would reveal more about Communism, the Cold War, and human behaviour. Could he discover what it is that makes one person a resistance fighter and another a collaborator, "one person a Stauffenberg, another a Speer"? This frank, erudite, disturbing book is the result.

It has to be said that Garton Ash fails to find a convincing answer to that last question. He found no heroes but lots of collaborators. They betrayed friends, family, lovers, neighbours, colleagues. As he laboriously tracks down the people who informed on him, confronts them, and listens to their excuses, you can only despair at man's capacity for treachery.

One former Stasi officer tells Garton Ash of a letter read out at a Stasi training course. Written by a woman to her husband, it was so wise, so deep, so full of warmth and love that no one who heard it ever forgot it. But it was being read at the course because the husband was a Stasi informer and had informed on his wife. "The woman obviously suspected something, but the Stasi case officer had worked out a line with him and he had managed to keep her trust. That's how you should work, was the instructor's message."

Garton Ash learns that one of the people informing on him, "Michaela", was also informing on the West German boyfriend of her own stepdaughter. When he confronts Michaela, she admits it immediately: "One was obliged to in my position." She says that there was a war on, a Cold War between her system and the West, and that some people thought Garton Ash worked for British intelligence.

Soon Garton Ash begins to doubt his right to confront these informers. Maybe Spain had the right idea when, after Franco, it drew a thick line under the past. What was Germany achieving with its trials, purges and truth commissions?

He goes to see an old German Jewish lady, a friend who had treated him like a son but who, nevertheless, had informed on him. When he tells her that he knows, she says: "So what should I do? Jump out of the window?" He comes away asking: "By what right, by what good purpose, did I deny an old lady, who had suffered so much, the grace of selective forgetting?" His friends told him that by confronting people, observing their reactions and planning to publish, he is becoming an informer himself. He should let bygones be bygones, and give priority to compassion. What had seemed a straightforward project had become a moral maze.

Garton Ash's doubts grew. As a youth he had flirted with the British Secret Intelligence Service. It offered him a job but he declined it. When he came back to Britain from working on this book, an SIS officer contacted him and asked him if he would mind "keeping an eye" on students and visitors to Oxford who might be working for hostile powers. He declined.

Then a senior MI5 officer admitted that it had a file on him. No, he could not see it because that might "compromise covert sources". Garton Ash wonders who they could be. "Surely not colleagues or friends. Surely." All security services are the same. Only the ideology is different.

"If only I had met, on this search, a single clearly evil person," he concludes. "But they were all just weak, shaped by circumstances, self- deceiving; human, all too human ... We, who never faced these choices, can never know how we would have acted in their position." At the end of this important book, that is the lesson.