AFTER THE WALL

EAST GERMANY, WHEN SNOOPING AND SNITCHING WERE NATIONAL PASTIMES

Author: By Michael Gorra

Date: SUNDAY, October 26, 1997

Page: N1

Section: Books

Such numbers mean, as Garton Ash writes, that ``about one out of every fifty adult East Germans had a direct connection with the secret police.'' And to deal with that legacy, the government of the reunified Germany has set up a body known as the Gauck Authority, after ``the forceful and eloquent East German priest who heads it.'' Those citizens of the former East Germany who want to get -- or hang onto -- a government job have to get themselves ``gaucked.'' They need, that is, to have their names checked through the authority's files to make sure that they weren't working for the Stasi. It's the contemporary version of denazification, but this time the process of ``overcoming'' the past is far more thorough than it was after the Second World War, when the Western governments signed up many former Nazis as reliable Cold War allies. One can, Garton Ash notes, come up as ``Gauck positive'' or ``Gauck negative,'' language that he describes as a ``revealing colloquialism: having a Stasi past is like having AIDS,'' leading at the very least to the death of one's career, as well as to a number of suicides by those whose Gauck-positive status the German media has ``outed.''

But a person on whom the Stasi kept watch can also receive a copy of his or her own file and learn who informed on him. It is a risky process, in a way, one that has brought many relationships to their close. Garton Ash finds nothing so dramatic in this thoughtful prowl through the ``modest'' 325-page file that the Stasi accumulated on him after his 1978 arrival as a graduate student in Berlin. A single ``incautious conversation'' may have been enough to get him ``entered into the central files as a suspect,'' but nobody he trusted ever shopped his name. What he discovers instead is the workaday world of East German surveillance: the details of what he thought were casual conversations, or the fact (as he learns, to his embarrassment) that the Stasi gave him the code name ``Romeo.'' He discovers a world marked less by individual evil than by ``self-deceiving'' human weakness.

Yet though he cannot write as a victim, he can examine his own file as a document whose accuracy he is uniquely qualified to judge. As anyone who has read his essays in The New York Review of Books will know, Garton Ash can combine a journalist's feel for the breaking story, for its drama and flow, with a historian's sense of perspective. Here he has had the genuinely provocative idea of visiting not only those who informed upon him but also his case officers, the Stasi officials in charge of his file. ``Why did they do it,'' he wonders. ``What was it like for them? How do they see it now?''

``You must imagine conversations like this taking place every evening . . . all over Germany,'' he writes after a talk with the informer ``Michaela,'' a museum director from Weimar -- cultivated, intelligent, and even a bit of an Anglophile. ``I want to puke,'' she says when he puts his file before her eyes. She says her own behavior ``can't be excused''; then she tries to explain it. She had to talk to the Stasi to keep her job. She had to talk in order to get permission to travel abroad. And anyway she thought he was ``working for British intelligence.'' Garton Ash concludes that while ``Michaela'' did him no ``serious harm, . . . knowing how the system worked, I may fairly guess that [she] did harm others'' -- including her own stepdaughter.

He has more sympathy, surprisingly, for his Stasi case officers than he does for the ``unofficial collaborators,'' and indeed comes away from a meeting with a Major Klaus Risse, the head of the section that watched him, believing that Risse is a ``good man, . . . intelligent, fundamentally decent.'' Risse, who now sells ventilating systems, confesses that he doesn't have good answers for a lot of Garton Ash's questions, and describes instead a world of petty Prussian regulations, a system gnawing away on the very men and women who were supposed to keep it working. And in tracing his biography, Garton Ash finds that Risse, who was born in 1938, has something in common with most of the other Stasi officers he's talked to. Not ideological belief, but a sense of the state as the provider of support and direction, a kind of substitute for the fathers that the Second World War had taken from so many of them.

That may be too easy an explanation -- certainly Garton Ash's sample seems rather small -- and in any case does little to answer the question that underlies this book, the question that underlies so many accounts not only of Germany but of this century's history as a whole. What makes one person a collaborator and another a resister? Garton Ash, who over the years has been close to such figures as Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel, has asked those questions before, above all in his 1989 collection of essays, ``The Uses of Adversity.'' Yet he has little to add to them here, and though ``The File'' is always engaging, it lacks the mixture of raw emotion and dispassionate analysis that one finds in Tina Rosenberg's Pulitzer-Prize winning ``The Haunted Lands'' (1996), the best study to date of Central Europe's attempt to deal with its communist past.

The problem lies, perhaps, in the form that Garton Ash has chosen. ``What a gift to memory is a Stasi file,'' he writes, ``far better than a madeleine'' in helping him recall the young man he was, ``the insouciance with which [he] barged into other people's lives.'' Yet while he writes with a self-deprecating charm, the autobiographical elements of ``The File'' nevertheless seem rather thin. They're too comfortable, written from a position that Garton Ash admits is ``lucky'' -- a position of both physical and psychic safety. And even if that safety is what has made this book at all possible, it still militates against its final success. The fact that he passed more or less unscathed through the Stasi's hands simply means that Garton Ash has little personally at stake here.

One might even call ``The File'' nostalgic -- not for communism certainly, or even for youth, but for those vanished days when one didn't know how the story would come out. No one interested in Central Europe will want to miss this latest book from one of the most interesting political writers now working. But compared to his best work, it seems written at half-pressure.