Timothy Garton Ash

In 1978, fresh out of Oxford, Timothy Garton Ash set out for Berlin to see what he could learn from the divided city about freedom and despotism. As he moved from west to east - from Berlin glamour to Berlin danger - the East German secret police, the so-called Stasi, was compiling a secret file on his activities, monitoring his Berlin days and nights and tracking his growing involvement with the Solidarity movement in Poland. Fifteen years later, with the wall torn down and Berlin now unified, Garton Ash visited Stasi headquarters to find his file. The thick dossier he was given forms the basis for this real-life thriller in which he traces and confronts the German friends and acquaintances who informed on him, and the officers who hired them. Behind Stasi reports of suspicious meetings we discover the love affairs, friendships, and formative intellectual encounters that actually occurred. And behind a baffling web of lies, half-truths, and forgotten stories we find a forty-year-old man spying on his younger self.

The Oxford-based Central and East European Publishing Project was a remarkable initiative to support embattled Central and East European publishers and journals, and to punch holes through the cultural iron curtain by encouraging translations and a 'common market of the mind' between East and West. The nine years of its existence straddle the largest watershed in European history since 1945, and the Project's history - told here by some of its leading participants - illuminates the nature of the recent changes in Central and Eastern Europe. In a vivid personal account, Timothy Garton Ash recalls the work of the Project, ranging from smuggling in subsidies to underground journals and samizdat publishers in the pre-1989 period to supporting high-quality translations and East-West workshops in the period after 1989. Also included are an Introduction in which Ralf Dahrendorf, Chairman of the Project, reflects on the importance of both publishing and foundations for a healthy civil society; an annotated catalogue of the Project's work, prepared by Elizabeth Winter; and a detailed and original report by Richard Davy on the state of publishing in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary, with suggestions for further Western help.

"Timothy Garton Ash chronicles this formative decade through a glittering collection of essays, sketches, and dispatches written as history was being made. He joins the East Germans for their decisive vote for unification and visits their former leader in prison. He accompanies the Poles on their roller-coaster ride from dictatorship to democracy. He uncovers the motives for monetary union in Paris and Bonn. He walks in mass demonstrations in Belgrade and travels through the killing fields of Kosovo. Occasionally, he even becomes an actor in a drama he describes: debating Germany with Margaret Thatcher or the role of the intellectual with Vaclav Havel in Prague. Ranging from Vienna to Saint Petersburg, from Britain to Ruthenia, Garton Ash reflects on how the single great conflict of the cold war has been replaced by many smaller ones. And he asks what part the United States still has to play. Sometimes he takes an eagle's-eye view, considering the present attempt to unite Europe against the background of a thousand years of such efforts. But often he swoops to seize one telling human story, that of a wiry old farmer in Croatia, a newspaper editor in Warsaw, or a bitter, beautiful survival from Sarajevo."--BOOK JACKET.

From West Germany's "buying free" of people from East German prisons to the summit conversations between Kohl and Gorbachev, from the German minorities in Eastern Europe to the Bonn government's attitude toward opposition movements such as Poland's Solidarity, every important facet of the policy of Ostpolitik is explored.