Berlin, Aug 11 (DPA) Like an unwanted gift, files from the spying machines of the former East European dictatorships continue to come into the public eye 20 years after their creators did their utmost to destroy them.

Sometimes the revelations border on the asinine -- a recent report showed that the East German secret police, or Stasi, kept tabs on Michael Jackson fans to see who had pro-Western tendencies. Others are weightier, such as when accusations of his cooperation with the state secret police forced Warsaw's Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus to resign in a blaze of controversy in 2007.

But what is clear is that secret police agencies across Eastern Europe employed thousands of agents and informers to track every detail of peoples' lives, keeping an eye out for any sign of subversive behaviour.

For some whose lives were laid bare in the files, the mere existence of these documents can be a continuing painful reminder of life under communism. Others find the chance to read their files cathartic.

'You can learn a lot about yourself,' said Uwe Richter, the public relations officer for the Robert Havemann Society, an archive focussed on maintaining files from East German groups that worked in opposition to the Communist regime.

In one noted case, Vera Lengsfeld, an activist in East Germany and a politician in today's Germany, discovered while viewing her files that her husband had been a secret informant against her.

But, said Jens Planer-Friedrich, a counsellor with the Berlin city-state office for Stasi files, most people who access their files rarely discover such earth-shattering news. Indeed, many are shocked to find that there is so little recorded about their lives.

However, the minutiae can also be surprising, added Planer-Friedrich, who was 20 when the Wall fell and eventually read his own file.

'A lot of people can't cope with that,' he said, noting that he himself was amazed by the trivialities -- and occasional falsehoods -- in his own file. 'It upsets a lot of people. (They ask) how did they know that?'

In his case, Richter was an aspiring actor who was rejected from state theatre schools after failing entrance exams three times. Convinced he was untalented, he gave up that career path, only to discover decades later upon reading his files that he failed only because his political views did not gibe with the state's.

'It gives you back a piece of your biography,' he said.