Read The File for Free Online Page A

men?”
    “No!”
    Heiner, I now discover from Bernd, had decided a couple of years earlier that he was homosexual and at that time was exploring the matter, programmatically. But I don’t think that he was necessarily making a pass at me. He may just have thought he was making me feel at home.
    Bernd tells me that Heiner recently died of AIDS.

I HAD MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT THE SIXTY-EIGHTERS . They were interesting just because they were so unlike most people I had known. I could understand and sympathize with some of their political projects: for example, Friedrich’s campaign to expose the failure to do justice to the victims of Nazi injustice. However, they seemed to me often hysterical, self-obsessed and self-indulgent. I tired of their moaning about problems that struck me either as self-created or as minor compared with those in the East. Heiner told me that President Carter’s visit to West Berlin was just like a visit by Brezhnev to an East European satrap, yet he appeared totally indifferent to what was happening in the professedly socialist state of East Germany, just a few miles away, behind the Wall. For them, the Wall, which encircled West Berlin, seemed to be nothing but a huge mirror in which they could contemplate themselves and their own “relationships.” “The paper narcissi,” says my diary.
    Yet if the sixty-eighters were exotic to me, this heavy-shoed, tweed-jacketed young Englishman must have been a strange apparition to them. Looking back, he now seems pretty odd to me. People may envy the possessorof a file, but being carried off by your poisoned madeleine is not always a comfortable experience. In his novel
Ferdydurke
, the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz imagines waking up one day to find himself sixteen again. He hears his “long-buried, squawky little rooster voice,” sees his “ungrown nose on an unformed face” and senses that his ill-mixed limbs are laughing at each other: the nose mocking the leg, the leg sneering at the ear. Time-travel with a file can be rather like that: a bad trip.
    What the Stasi’s Lieutenant Küntzel called my “legends” were in truth less cover stories than different strands of an unformed life. Like the confused ambitious twenty-three-year-old students who now come to my rooms in Oxford to ask me for life advice, I wanted to do everything at once: to write a doctorate about Berlin in the Third Reich, and a book about East Germany, and an essay about the Bauhaus, and brilliant reports for
The Spectator
, and probably to be George Orwell, foreign secretary and war hero too. Cover stories that I told myself.
    The diary reminds me of all the fumblings, the clumsiness, the pretentiousness and snobbery—and the insouciance with which I barged into other people’s lives. Embarrassment apart, there is the sheer difficulty of reconstructing how you really thought and felt. How much easier to do it to other people! At times this past self is such a stranger to me that where I have written “I” in these last pages I almost feel it should be “he.”
    Personal memory is such a slippery customer. Nietzsche catches it brilliantly in one of his epigrams: “‘I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I can’t have done that,’ says mypride and remains adamant. In the end—memory gives way.” The temptation is always to pick and choose your past, just as it is for nations: to remember Shakespeare and Churchill but forget Northern Ireland. But we must take it all or leave it all; and I must say “I.”

F OR ALL THE DISTRACTIONS, MY DIARY STILL RECORDS my spending long, weary hours working through Gestapo files, in the sinister-sounding Secret Prussian State Archive, and the records of the Nazis’ so-called People’s Court, in the Berlin Document Center. The People’s Court papers were piled on metal shelves, dusty, uncataloged, while the American director of the Document Center, then still an institution of the American military government, went off to play