Free The File by Timothy Garton Ash

‘relationships’ and eternal ‘relationship’ problems.”
    In East Berlin, I was still meant to be working on mythesis about Berlin in the Third Reich. The file contains references written by my Oxford mentors, Tim Mason and Tony Nicholls, for the British Council, which had arranged my stay as the first visiting research student under the new cultural agreement. Tim Mason was an inspiring teacher and, most unusual among Oxford historians, a Marxist, though of a distinctly unconventional, English-empirical kind. Indeed, he plainly did not qualify as a Marxist in the Stasi’s judgment, for he is assessed in my file as writing “from a bourgeois democratic position.” On the wall of his room in St. Peter’s College hung a poster showing Marx and Engels declaring “Everyone’s talking about the weather—we don’t!” This perfectly summed up Tim Mason’s bottomless contempt for English middle-class triviality, his high seriousness and painfully acute puritan work ethic. Tragically, he would take his own life some years later.
    I am touched—with a sense of obligation—to read Tim’s warm letter of recommendation. I fear he and Tony Nicholls were subsequently disappointed that I did not complete my doctoral thesis on Berlin under Hitler, but I think they saw the point of what I did instead. At its best, the Oxford history school has been tolerant of variety, even of eccentricity. “In History’s house are many mansions,” the then professor of modern history, Richard Cobb, himself a full-blooded explorer of the outermost frontiers of the discipline, used cryptobiblically to declare, at one of his not always entirely sober, sparsely attended, yet, for me, utterly entrancing lectures, delivered in some inspissated corner of the university on a dismal Friday afternoon.
    In fact, I did continue to spend time in the archives,but the East German authorities gave me only very restricted access to the relevant files. The main reason was probably that a full reading of the Nazi records would have shown how relatively small, and perhaps also how penetrated by the Gestapo, had been the communist resistance to Nazism; whereas the East German state was built upon the myth of a large communist-led “antifascist resistance.” I also worked at the old Prussian State Library on Unter den Linden, in the so-called Special Research Department, which contained all the books and journals that the state did not want its ordinary citizens to read. It was known colloquially as “the poison cupboard.” While I read yellowed copies of the Nazi newspaper
Völkischer Beobachter
, a senior officer of the “Felix Dzerzhinsky” Guards Regiment, the military arm of the Stasi, sat at the next table studying copies of a West German illustrated news magazine and a Western armaments journal.
    As my glance strayed from the Nazi newspaper to the Stasi officer, so altogether my attention was shifting from Hitler’s Germany to Honecker’s. I now firmly planned to write a book about the current German dictatorship. Communist austerity brought a distinct simplification of everyday life: one small room instead of five large ones, one kind of heavy black bread in the gloomy state-owned corner store, rather than the twenty different kinds of bread, roll, croissant and pastry at the baker’s near my flat on the Uhlandstrasse. Helped by this enforced simplicity, I became more single-minded and set out to gather all the information I could.
    IM “Schuldt” rightly observed that I studied the press closely. I watched television, listened to the radio,read the more adventurous current fiction, which was also a partial substitute for the lack of a free press, and went often to the theater. The Berliner Ensemble had now become little more than a Brecht mausoleum, but at the Deutsches Theater or the Volksbühne I found the kind of sly cultural resistance so familiar from my studies of Berlin in the 1930s. Sometimes it was the very same theaters, and