The File: A Personal History

After 1989 Garton Ash retrieved the Stasi file the East German state had kept on him as a young historian in Berlin, and then went looking for the people who had informed on him — colleagues, a landlady, an academic friend — to ask why. The book alternates the file’s clipped official prose with his own diaries of the same days and with the interviews, and the effect is a study of how ordinary motives produce collaboration.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in the Marxism and Collective Psychology section 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 about it afterwards.

Where I saw it: On Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Marxism and Collective Psychology, saved to Kyle’s “Books To Read” Apple Note. The full 211-entry transcription lives on 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.