When I was in Leipzig, Germany, I visited the Stasi (secret police museum). It was in the old headquarters building, and looked much as it did after the Wall fell when the angry East Germans swarmed the place after realizing that the Stasi were burning all the secret files . Most of the museum consisted of display boards dating from an informal display of what folks found in the first few days. Unfortunately, most of it was in German, and the only English guide had only a sentence on each room.

I wanted to learn more about East Germany and the Stasi; I found a couple books in Berlin, but “The File” was one of the books I read about on the Net that sounded interesting.

It’s definitely a good read. The author, an English academic, lived in East Germany in the ‘80’s but got banned from the country after he published a couple critical articles in the West German press. He writes about what he found when he looked in his secret police file, and tries to remember the events that his watchers had observed and recorded. It’s a nice description of what East Germany used to be like, how the Stasi acted, and a reminder of how fragile our memory of the past can be.