What if You Could Read Your Own Intelligence File?
In connection with the (oh-so-well-known) designation of April 2023 as Records and Information Management Month, I decided to revisit English historian Timothy Garton Ash’s exploration of the surveillance and information obsession (ideological, political and bureaucratic paranoia?) that characterized the totalitarian system of the German Democratic Republic, or, as it was known to Westerners during the Cold War, East Germany.
Published in 1997, The File: A Personal History centers on the intelligence and surveillance dossier Garton Ash obtained in the early 1990s from the collapsed regime's Federal Authority for the Records of the State Security Service that was compiled on him when he was in East Berlin following his graduation from Oxford in the late 1970s.
The dossier essentially offers its author an alternate history of his comings and goings as reported both by Stasi agents tailing him and through reports on him and his activities by agency collaborators in his own social circle whom he considered friends and acquaintances.
The book cites numerous fragments from the trove of reports contained in his file. To wit: “23:50 both left the gastronomic establishment and proceeded directly to the departure hall of the Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse frontier crossing..” The clinical, depersonalized quality of the reporting lends a sinister, omniscient veneer to the all-encompassing bureaucratic envelope of his existence there.
The book is a great reminder that the past isn’t a fixed commodity. Our sense and understanding of it is a story that is subject to change as information related to it emerges. As he makes his way through the file, Garton Ash has to contend with the realization that people whom he trusted were relaying information about him back to the Stasi, which had concluded that “‘there were grounds for suspecting that G. [for Garton Ash] has deliberately exploited his official functions as research student and/or journalist to pursue intelligence activities.’” This is essentially the charge, of course, that has been directed at Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, whom Russia, successor state to the German Democratic Republic’s former patron, the Soviet Union, has detained.
German reunification was perhaps bumpy but ultimately successful while Russia’s path since the fall of the Soviet Union has taken a considerably darker turn over the past dozen years with imperial recidivism and ambition on ugly and destructive display in its unprovoked war in Ukraine and crackdown on dissent at home. Germany now is no longer bookended by a stable US on one side and its own recent historical memory guiding and restraining its relationship with Russia on the other, signaling the beginning of new power dynamic paradigms, the reemergence of fault lines in Europe and a yet to be fully defined leading role for Germany on the continent.
The East German state’s uncompromising intrusion into the lives of its citizens is also one of the subjects of the remarkable film The Lives of Others. The technology component of this examination should compel its audience to consider the amount of information that is now being collected for commercial purposes by technology companies that have insinuated themselves into the everyday fabric of the lives of citizens in otherwise democratic countries where they even might enjoy mandated protection against such collection. The ocean separating the US and Europe here is not only literal, but figurative, too.