Abstract

When the files of a once Secret Security Service are released to its subjects of observation, they also engender unprecedented acts of autobiographical remembering. The fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification on 3 October 1990 have led to the opening of the Stasi files in 1992. Consequently, many former data subjects who access their records are then prompted to write file-based autobiographies as a response to their readings and the remembering processes triggered thereafter. The appellation “data subjects” refers to anyone who has been under the surveillance of the Stasi and whose personal information is kept on Stasi files. This term applies to German and foreign benefactors or victims of that system. The Stasi records are then granted unusual authority in the file-based autobiographies. Autobiographers assume that the files can give order and meaning to their life stories. Files have an author of their own, most commonly a hostile source. They are subject to biases from the part of the Stasi collaborators. Nevertheless, the former data subjects refer to them in order to construct their file-based autobiographies. Scholars like Alison Lewis, Ash and others have viewed the opening of the Stasi files as an opportunity to clarify the identity of their informers and determine the influence the file might have exerted on their lives. This assumption directly relates to the primary purpose of the Stasi Files Act, in German, StasiUnterlagengesetz or StUG, documented in 1991 in the Federal Law Gazette. Article 1 of the Stasi Files Act states that its first purpose and scope consist in regulat[ing] the custody, preparation, administration and use of the records of the Ministry for State Security of the former German Democratic Republic and its preceding and succeeding organizations [...] to facilitate individual access to personal data which the State Security Service has stored regarding him, so that he can clarify what influence the state security service has had on his personal destiny. Some English translations suggest the word fate instead of destiny to designate the German word Schicksal. In those terms, the Stasi Files Act serves to “clarify one’s fate”: “This remarkably nonjuridical goal – expressed with the equally nonjuridical term fate – is based on the assumption that the Stasi files are capable of storing individual life stories.” Authorities regulating the files yet have to consider the new process of remembering that arises as autobiographers read their files. Therefore, this essay analyses why and how the file-based autobiographies contribute to autobiography theories, why recollection mechanisms are initiated by the file and why the personal memory becomes subservient to it..To answer these questions, I refer to the example of Timothy Garton Ash’s file-based autobiography The File: A Personal History. Ash is an English scholar, journalist, historian and professor who lived in Berlin in the 1980s in order to work on his doctoral dissertation. The Stasi opened a file on him due to his suspected, although imaginary, espionage activities. I initially explain the implication of the file-based autobiographies as a new form of writing within the autobiographical theories. I develop this argument around Cornelia Vismann’s term “file-based autobiographies.” I elaborate on her concept and I also evaluate Smith’s understanding of the autobiographical writing process in order to situate Ash’s autobiographical work within that sub-genre. Afterwards, I consider a literary source, Proust’s autobiographical work, and psycho-analytical approaches such as Mace’s and Conway’s in order to analyse the remembering processes engaged by the Stasi files. By combining both areas of scholarship, I seek to establish a theoretical framework of autobiographical involuntary memories in the context of Ash’s file-based autobiography. In addition, I examine Ash’s personal comments regarding the reasons why he considers that the human memory becomes dependent on the file. Roy Pascal’s concept of “memory artist” and Jacques Derrida’s definition of archives also help to elaborate further Ash’s remembering experience. I conclude with a critical view on the different impacts of the files for a non-German data subject like Ash as opposed to a German citizen