The File: A Personal History
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
The File: A Personal History
| Author | Timothy Garton Ash |
|---|---|
| Published | 1997 |
| Pages | 259 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | After 1989 Garton Ash retrieved the file the Stasi had kept on him as a young historian in Berlin, then went looking for the colleagues, landlady and friend who had informed on him to ask why. Alternating the file’s official prose with his own diaries and the interviews, it becomes a study of how ordinary motives produce collaboration. |
Where I heard about it
- Brendan McCord — on his Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, under Marxism and Collective Psychology, as the empirical companion to Havel: what the apparatus of a compliant society looks like on paper, and what the people who staffed it say afterwards. Full transcription: The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.
Connections
- Surveillance — the mechanism the book documents from the inside.
- Totalitarianism — the system it examines.
- The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the list this came from.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.