City of Angels, or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud

Three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the writer Christa Wolf was granted access to her newly declassified Stasi files. She was not surprised to discover forty-two volumes of documents produced by the East German secret police. But what was surprising was a thin green folder whose contents told an unfamiliar story: in the early 1960s, Wolf had been an informant for the Communist government. And yet, thirty years on, she had absolutely no recollection of it.