Word: stasis
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...filter against life's banalities. But how true is memory to the life one really led? How does it coincide with the picture found in the dispassionate data compiled by others--personnel files, Social Security records, even the watchful accounts of policing agencies like the fbi or the notorious Stasi in the former East Germany...
...College, Oxford, reconstructing one's past involves a "continuous remixing of memory and forgetting." For much of 1980, while working on a doctorate in history, Garton Ash lived in East Berlin. Inevitably, he became an object of interest to East Germany's omnipresent secret police, known by the acronym Stasi. In The File (Random House; 262 pages; $23), Garton Ash, now 42, tries to reconstruct that year behind Berlin's Wall by comparing his private notes from the period with what he found in Stasi's newly opened records. Going further, he located and interviewed some of the informers...
...Stasi had 90,000 full-time employees and 170,000 "unofficial collaborators"--which meant that roughly 1 out of every 50 adult East Germans was linked to the secret police. As Garton Ash learned, they included professors and acquaintances as well as police pros. Evading Stasi's embrace was not easy, since informers were played by their agency controls "like a fish on a line." These spies, the author concludes, were motivated less by malice than by human weakness and by an "almost infinite capacity for self-deception...
...buys an old piece of western equipment for his lab, and spends a year rebuilding it, and is proud of it--and then scientists from the West arrive and say, 'This East German science is ridiculous,' and his lab is closed." In her chapter about the opening of the Stasi files, Kramer focuses on a poet, Alexander Anderson, who is a devotee of French literary criticism. When informing on a fellow poet named Uwe Kolbe, he "supplied the Stasi with the bewildering news that Kolbe was 'relieving the noun of its burden ... with phonetic adjectival exaggerations...
...released within 30 days. Two months later, the car bomb went off for which Carlos now stands trial. According to the French daily Le Monde, one of the two lawyers he retained last week for his defense, Jacques Verges, is identified in the files of the former East German Stasi secret police as the man who passed that letter to the French authorities, a role that suggests , an active participation with the terror clique. Verges dismisses the charge as "part of the Stasi program of disinformation." Former French government officials, however, confirm the report...