The File: A Personal History by Timothy Garton-Ash HarperCollins 227pp, £12.99 in UK The author is a contemporary historian who found himself at the eye of a political hurricane. Having gone to East Germany in the 1980s to research a doctoral dissertation on Berlin under Hitler, he wound up writing a devastating portrait of Honecker's squalid statelet and serving as the most thoughtful and best-informed Western observer of the unravelling of the Soviet empire. It was, he writes, "like being lashed to the saddlestraps of a racehorse at full gallop: very exciting, but you don't get the best view of the race".
Since then he has retreated from the hurly-burly of the "Velvet Revolution" to the comparative calm of Oxford and reverted to his original calling - that of the contemporary historian trying to make sense of recent events. The first product of this contemplative period was a magisterial collection of essays, The Use of Adversity, on the fate of Central Europe. Now he has gone to the other extreme and turned his scholarly inquisitiveness inwards on himself.
The trigger for this was his discovery that the East German secret police - the Stasi - had a file on him. This is not surprising: he was, after all, a foreign journalist with "bourgeois-liberal" leanings; he might have been a spy.
The File is an extraordinary book, a gripping, alarming, thought-provoking, often moving exploration of a period of history and a time of life. It tells us a great deal about Garton-Ash, much about Honecker's GDR and more than we want to know about human frailty and cowardice. Unlike many Germans, Garton-Ash's life was not endangered or ruined by Stasi surveillance. But he was staggered by the duplicity of the people he thought he knew: his faith in human nature - and indeed in himself - has taken quite a battering. "These files", he observes, "change lives."
We have heard a great deal about the de-classification of Stasi files - of wives who have discovered that it was their husbands who denounced them to Honecker's hoods, of brothers who were betrayed by their siblings, of neighbour ratting on neighbour. But what we have not had until now - in English, at any rate - is such a thoughtful exploration of what all this means.
Garton-Ash sought out those who had spied on him, but in inquisitive rather than vengeful mood. What, he wanted to know, had motivated them? And what he found were not monsters but "ordinary" people. "If only I had met," he laments at one point, "a single clearly evil person. But they were all just weak, shaped by circumstance, self-deceiving; human, all too human. Yet the sum of all their actions was a great evil."
It's the old story, in other words: ordinary people mouthing the usual rationalisations - duty, patriotism, obeying orders; a feeling of having no choice but to collaborate with the regime; the need to choose between competing evils. Very few declined the Stasi schilling. A few - a very few - confided in the object of their surveillance and jointly concocted a story which would satisfy the authorities while leaving the target undamaged. But most just co-operated, shrugging their shoulders at the devastation such snooping could inflict. Garton-Ash the journalist experienced the usual difficulty of seeing the wood for the trees; but what Garton-Ash the historian has found in the undergrowth is Kant's "crooked timber of humanity".
On a wider canvas, The File makes one reflect on the wisdom of the de-classification process. Only the Germans would have done it on such a comprehensive scale. There are 111 miles of Stasi files, and the annual budget of the de-classification authority is over £100 million. The project is breathtakingly ambitious, but is it wise? Is it better in the end to forget, if not to forgive? Just as social interaction would be impossible if we all told the truth all the time, ultimately every nation has to be (in Ernest Renan's phrase) a community both of shared memory and shared forgetting. We have trouble in a part of this island getting that balance right. Maybe we have more in common with the Germans than we think.
John Naughton is a writer with the London Observer