The book is not terribly well-written. Ash can be a dry writer at times. Additionally, someone who has no prior knowledge of the subject will probably not get, from this book, a good understanding of just how brutal and savage the GDR and the Stasi were.
It seems like a bit of an oversight in a book like this, that's asking how people could do the things they did, to not explicitly talk much about those things. But the compelling subject matter makes up for these flaws. Jun 09, Marie rated it it was ok Recommends it for: anyone with academic interest in East Germany.
Shelves: memoirs , nonfiction , europe. Well, I made it to page 87, not quite halfway through, and decided to stop. I found myself wanting to be done with the book, which is never a good sign. I have too many books on my "to read" list to waste time on a book I'm not enjoying or finding interesting at least. The book's premise was interesting: an English journalist and researcher who spent time in East and West Germany and Poland gets hold of his Stasi file after the Berlin Wall comes down.
He compares the file to his own personal diar Well, I made it to page 87, not quite halfway through, and decided to stop. He compares the file to his own personal diary and seeks out those who informed on him.
I had hopes for this book, and at first I settled in, thinking I would learn a great deal about East Germany and the Stasi. But as I was wading through the plodding details of way too many people and not enough background, I felt that I was reading a recitation of facts. It didn't keep my interest well enough to want to read on.
If I compare this book to others I've read about China or the Cultural Revolution, or other nonfiction about other countries, the writing pales in comparison. It seems to be an academic recitation of facts, without any insights. It wasn't horrible, but it just wasn't good enough to keep my interest. Onto more interesting books! Mar 05, Thomas rated it really liked it. I came to read this because of my interest in memoir. And there is memoir here, as the author moves between the things he discovers in the Stasi file kept on him during his time "behind the wall" in East Berlin during the early s and his own journal of the period.
The writing here moves from the odd records of these files and his own journal entries, which he then follows with his attempts to track down the Stasi secret service informers now living in various states of retirement or obscur I came to read this because of my interest in memoir. The writing here moves from the odd records of these files and his own journal entries, which he then follows with his attempts to track down the Stasi secret service informers now living in various states of retirement or obscurity who kept the file on him.
This was written in , and Garton Ash's detailing of computer technology seems dated at this point, but his reflections on the tensions between a secret service in a communist dictatorship and secret services in liberal democracies raise questions about protecting freedoms and the right and need for privacy in a way that has a peculiarly current ring Edward Snowden, Apple's courtroom battle with the FBI over accessing a terrorist's cell phone records. It is also interesting that he ends by reflecting on the lack of a father figure in the lives of many of the informants who followed him.
Totalitarianism was an end in itself, not a means. Dec 05, Laurie rated it liked it Shelves: 20th-century-europe , cultural-conflicts , eastern-european-nations , history , memoirs , political-intrigue , germany. As interesting as it was to read about Stasi surveillance methods and listen to interviews with former Stasi officers and informers, I was left feeling that Garton-Ash is rightly very critical of Eastern European systems of government while not taking seriously enough damage done by the West.
Garton-Ash has made his career offing his readers excellent analysis and critic of dictatorial governments and freedom movements in Eastern Europe. However, the longer I live and think the more I see the As interesting as it was to read about Stasi surveillance methods and listen to interviews with former Stasi officers and informers, I was left feeling that Garton-Ash is rightly very critical of Eastern European systems of government while not taking seriously enough damage done by the West.
However, the longer I live and think the more I see the judgments of human rights abuses by Western powers, including the U. Jan 10, Naomi rated it really liked it Shelves: non-fiction , memoirs-biographies. This memoir, of one individual's personal experience with the Stasi and attempts to find out more about it after the fall of the Wall, started off really slow for me, despite my interest in the topic.
I bought this at a second hand book store in a tiny town in the middle of Texas, and have been looking forward to reading it since. The slow start was a disappointment, because I expected to immediately be swept up in the story. I do believe that one reason it took me a while to get absorbed in thi This memoir, of one individual's personal experience with the Stasi and attempts to find out more about it after the fall of the Wall, started off really slow for me, despite my interest in the topic.
I do believe that one reason it took me a while to get absorbed in this book is because of the amount of technical information thrust at the reader all at once. At first I was focused on trying to keep the names of various individuals and Stasi departments separate, and wasn't as involved in the greater story.
Once I got these things straightened in my mind, I was able to become more involved with the story, thus able to enjoy it more. I like that the author combines excerpts from his file with his own journal entries and interviews with individuals who played a role in his life during his time in West and East Berlin, and also Poland.
I was fascinated, and still am, with the idea of contacting and confronting individuals who were informing on you. I am glad the author decided to do so, but I also feel like more could have been done with the information.
This story feels almost incomplete to me. Of course, it's difficult to cram so many facts and personal recollections and feelings into a certain book. The author gave some great insight into a wide variety of topics that were pertinent to his overall reason for writing this. I enjoyed reading these insights and thinking about them myself. I just wish that after I finished reading it, I felt more of a sense of closure.
Instead, I feel like the story has barely begun and there is much more to learn. Granted, I understand that what the author is able to write so long after the events occurred is limited, especially when individuals are unwilling to participate, or have since disappeared or passed away. If you found this interesting, then I would also recommend watching the film, 'The Secret Lives of Others. Nov 01, Hannah Givens rated it liked it Shelves: history , politics , nonfiction , memoir , public-history.
This book succeeds on the strength of its topic. It's voyeuristically fascinating, essentially a memoir about a man reading his own East Germany secret-police file and interviewing the people who informed on him. Comparing his own memories of bopping around Germany and Poland, totally unaware he was suspected of being a British spy. It's a place and time we don't address terribly often, but related enough to World War II and the Cold War that it seems significant, relevant to things we find sign This book succeeds on the strength of its topic.
It's a place and time we don't address terribly often, but related enough to World War II and the Cold War that it seems significant, relevant to things we find significant. I have to confess I ended up a bit bored, though. It's a small book, but it becomes repetitive.
His interviewees aren't very forthcoming, so it's a string of requests for depth that end up unfulfilled. On the whole I think the book does provide some insight, though. Ash is sort of a journalist-historian, and I appreciated his understanding of memory. That's the main takeaway here -- Our memories are fallible for so many reasons, but one is that we can and will forget anything that doesn't support our self-images.
After the reunification of Germany Timothy Garton Ash got to read the Stasi file that had been compiled on him while he was doing research in East Germany.
He then contacted the people who had informed on him and also the former intelligence officers who had managed his case. This is a totally creepy story, all the more disturbing because you can't find any really monstrous villains, even though East Germany under the Stasi was Hell.
Mar 28, Darlene rated it did not like it. I suffered through pages of this Cold War memoir. Was it the dated subject matter, the writer's confusing shuffle of personal diaries and East Germany Secret Police files and later recall, or the writer's self-important speculations and observations then and and 15 years later that made it a plodding, uninteresting read?
Jun 15, Newt Taylor rated it it was ok. Timothy Ash must have a following, otherwise who would read this? View 1 comment. Jan 18, Susannah Belcher rated it it was amazing. Considered, wise and thought provokingly moral account of actions and ethics in the GDR. Deserves multiple readings. Feb 04, J. Garton Ash is famous for the Magic Lantern, but this work is so sad, personal, and moving, its an absolute must read.
According to Ash, the GDR secret police or Stasi, had , unofficial collaborators, referred in the book as IMs, and another 90, full time employees. During the Nazi period, the secret police numbered 15, for a territory that included Greater Germany, Austria and what today is the Czech Republic.
Ash became a target of GDR surveillance efforts when he attended graduate school in both East and West Germany in the early s. While he suspected he was being watched when he was in the GDR, he did not confirm his suspicion until after the two Germanys were unified and the government opened up the Stasi files to anyone who was spied upon. Two-thirds of the book deals with the information in his file, the informers who submitted the surveillance reports and the Stasi officials who reviewed and controlled the informers.
Since Ash was not a spy, the information collected had little value and really did not hurt him in any way other than the loss of privacy. Eventually Ash was expelled from East Germany but not because the Stasi found anything truly incriminating.
Instead, the expulsion was a result of the articles he wrote about the Solidarity Movement in Poland during the early s that were published in West Germany. There was nothing secret about that. Ash's perspective changes in the last third of the book. Instead of discussing files and informers, he discusses the benefits and liabilities for Germany a of releasing Stasi files after unification and the morality of espionage. The East German internal surveillance was extensive and often involved close family and friends spying on one another.
Divorces and family estrangement were the results of this information becoming available. On the plus side, making this information available to the affected parties sometimes brought a peace of mind, especially when the spied-upon learned who wasn't an informer.
On a national level, the opening of the Stasi files has reinforced what East Germans perceive as a neocolonial attitude of West Germans towards the residents of the former GDR. West Germans, because they lived in a freer society, never had to make the agonizing choices that those in East Germany had to face. As a result, many East Germans have closed ranks around certain people who served in the Stasi or were informers.
Finally, Ash tries to put the spy game in some sort of a moral framework as it applies to both individuals and governments. Since both sides engaged in espionage during the Cold War, was there a moral difference between the security agencies of a communist country like the GDR with a democracy like the U. K, asks Ash, especially when covert actions were involved and not just intelligence gatherings?
Was there a moral equivalence between the two sides, as Markus Wolf, the Stasi official that oversaw foreign intelligence activities? While Ash is reluctant to compare espionage directed at foreign countries, he is less so when it comes to domestic security service in a democracy. Here, he says that ends and means are almost inseparable because spying on your own citizens directly infringes on the freedom that your government is supposed to defend.
At least for the UK, nothing in its domestic security apparatus compares to the Stasi. More importantly, no one can compare the consequences for those who are spied upon or the political system they serve.
Mar 10, Andrew Marshall rated it liked it. It promises to be a great read. Garton, an Oxford History Professor and expert on Central European Revolutions, opens up his Stasi file and is transported back to the late seventies and the divided city of Berlin. What can he learn about younger self through the eyes of the East German secret police and what can he learn about tyranny and freedom? As a historian, he is also interested in the difference between source material in this case the official documents and the lived life.
He goes onto It promises to be a great read. He goes onto confront the ordinary East German citizens - some he considered friends - who informed on him and the Stasi operatives who followed him.
Unfortunately, Garton Ash delivers an interesting rather than the compelling read I was expecting. It's partly because he's a historian rather than a writer. There are few moments when I am sitting beside him on his journey into the past. I really felt his anxiety about opening the file for the first time and whether a lover, who opened the curtains, wanted to see his face as they made love or to give the watching state an opportunity for blackmail.
However, this is a rare moment of empathy that Garton Ash conjures up. He provides glimpses of his student life and his younger more romantic self but despite the Stasi notes and his own diary, it never really comes to life. Perhaps, the problem is that as a British subject there was not much the East German state could do to harm him and therefore the stakes are low.
However, he does provide some telling anecdotes on the impact of the wall through the people he met when he was a student. There is one East German whose parents lived in the Western part of Berlin but the night the wall went up, he was staying with his grandparents and the authorities simply refused to let him be reunited with them and he was ultimately put into an orphanage.
If only there had been more powerful material like this. His meetings with the informers and the Stasi officers start well but soon descends into the usual: we were good people, you don't understand that it was different back then and I was doing my duty. However, he makes some good points about how all these men and it was all men had lost fathers to the war, prisoner of war camps etc and the state or older men within the Stasi has posed as surrogate fathers and lured them over to the dark side.
At the end of the book, Garton Ash becomes quite poetic on this theme and once again, I would loved for the History Professor to unbutton himself and provide more material like this. There is a second problem, the book was published in - before the threat of religious inspired terrorism. So a lot of the debate about how much the state should spy on its subjects, the balance between security and freedom and even the methods no need for wire tapes when the secret services have access to our meta data is all rather dated.
Still a good book on an important topic Mar 19, Sue Pit rated it really liked it Shelves: non-fiction , german , british. A personal, "was there" perspective in East Germany in the communist era of the files that Stasi's kept on "suspect persons", which included the author.
I appreciated how the author adopted from this experience the "A A personal, "was there" perspective in East Germany in the communist era of the files that Stasi's kept on "suspect persons", which included the author. I appreciated how the author adopted from this experience the "As If" approach But it significantly illustrates why informers acted as they did and such is instructive to us to this day, perhaps now more relevant than ever in our society.
Small but fascinating book of a British man who moved to Berlin in the late s, ostensibly to write a thesis on historical events, but actually to research and understand the political separation at the time and to grasp the mentality of both rulers and workers in East Berlin. At the time Garton Ash did that by writing for BBC, while the book is the product of him requesting ex-East Berlin records of him to be retrieved, as per the newly established in the early s Gauck Authority.
Compa Small but fascinating book of a British man who moved to Berlin in the late s, ostensibly to write a thesis on historical events, but actually to research and understand the political separation at the time and to grasp the mentality of both rulers and workers in East Berlin. Comparing his East Berlin file to his own diaries and memories of the time, he builds a compelling narrative supported by interviews with the men who worked in the East German secret police and whose names appear in the file.
And finally, he concludes that king and country have a lot more influence on a person's life than is believed, as administrations, policies, and personal fears can easily turn a normal person into an informer or a follower. At the end, we are all part of a society which sets us on a path and guides our choices, often without our knowledge or consent. There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Be the first to start one ». Readers also enjoyed. Biography Memoir. About Timothy Garton Ash. Timothy Garton Ash. Much of his work has been concerned with the late modern and contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe. Books by Timothy Garton Ash. When Dana Schwartz started writing about a 19th-century pandemic ravaging Edinburgh in her latest book, Anatomy: A Love Story, she had no idea Read more Personal Historian also imports your word processor documents and photographs so that your existing work can be effortlessly incorporated into your histories.
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Because a personal history should be much more than a lifeless description of events, we wanted this book to be a little more colorful and have a little more personality. Yes, you will find the expected technical descriptions and walk-throughs. This page book is written by Michael T. Booth, the author of Personal Historian.
In addition to writing Personal Historian, he is also an accomplished trainer, teaching thousands of individuals how to write their life stories. Introduction Features Book Videos. Introduction You sit down at your computer and open your word processor. Features Personal Historian is software that assists you in writing a personal history about yourself, another individual, or a family.
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Garton Ash was one of the many people who requested to see their Stasi file. In this book Mr. Garton Ash compares the data he finds in the file with his own diary. He mixes this with a description of Central Europe in that decade, with pressure from Western peace movements and Polish and other dissident movements like Solidarnosc.
Plus he looks up some of the former Stasi workers and informers found in his file. I found that the book was averagely interesting read. Garton Ash was a foreign subject and could only be evicted from the country. Ash was a British student in East Germany and after the fall of communism and the making public of the Stasi records he returns to Germany to read his own file and interview those individuals who informed on him. It is a striking exploration of a police state and how individuals justify their behavior after the fact.
My only disappointment is that it is still the book of an outsider, Ash was free to leave East Germans were not. I would love to see a book from the German perspective.
That said, it is well-worth reading and a good investigation of an episode in German history that is often neglected. It is also worth finding Timothy Garton Ash's essay on Salon. Add to Your books. Add to wishlist. Quick Links Amazon. Amazon Kindle 0 editions. Audible 0 editions. CD Audiobook 0 editions. Project Gutenberg 0 editions. Google Books — Loading
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