The File

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE



In 1978 Timothy Garton Ash went to live in Berlin to see what that divided city could teach him about tyranny and freedom. Fifteen years later, by then internationally famous for his reportage of the downfall of communism in Central Europe, he returned to look at his Stasi file which bore the code-name 'Romeo'. Compiled by the East German secret police, with the assistance of both professional spies and ordinary people turned informer, it contained a meticulous record of his earlier life in Berlin.



In this memoir, he describes rediscovering his younger self through the eyes of the Stasi, and then confronting those who had informed against him. Moving from document to remembrance, from the offices of Britain's own security service to the living rooms of retired Stasi officers, The File is a personal narrative as gripping, as disquieting, and as morally provocative as any fiction by George Orwell or Graham Greene. And it is all true.



Timothy Garton Ash is the author of eight books of political writing - 'history of the present' - which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last three decades. He is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford, where he is Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony's College, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and his weekly column for the Guardian is widely syndicated across Europe, Asia and the Americas. He has received many awards for his writing, including the Somerset Maugham Award and the Orwell Prize.



A chilling portrait of treachery and compromise... bravely and beautifully written



Excellent and fascinating... Garton Ash embarks upon a journey back into memory, dragging up things long forgotten and finding they still have power to move, to distress, and to enrage.



The File is history on the hoof: part reportage, part memoir, often crafted more like a novel than a piece of non-fiction... Garton Ash knows exactly which buttons to press for our illumination.



A kind of meditation on Garton Ash's personal experience with the Stasi, the dreaded secret police organ of the East German regime... Fascinating in its unearthing of some terribly human monsters whose eye recorded the fall of every sparrow.