 Staadt is not entirely persuaded by the thread he identifies in Gerstner's book whereby the author was constantly on the right side of history even where he pretended not to be, as a socialist student who joined the Nazis to resist them from within, as an embassy worker under the Nazis who helped the French Resistance, as an East German socialist who always knew what was wrong with the system, who sympathised with the victims of the Prague Spring and who was right all along about Gorbachev.Gerstner writes in his autobiography that he was asked by the Politburo member to involve himself socially with the western diplomats "in support of a peaceful future", and to provide reports for the Stasi on matters which might be relevant to government foreign policy.Surviving Stasi records indicate there may have been a little more to it than that.