I defended myself at the first opportunity I had, which was a meeting of writers in which I proved that Honecker had based his whole attack..

We certainly hoped perestroika would win out and that there would be changes. We knew all along that socialism could flourish only with a certain amo….

Show me one place where a whole government is concerned with a book of a writer and is concerned enough to suppress it..

In the question of peace, people spoke up and demonstrated for peace and against the threat of war, the threat of atomic war..

If you live in a system that is suppressive, you don't walk upright, you always go with your head down..

The Wall was the actual symbol of a defeat, of inferiority..

A great number of people in the East German parts had been Nazis, so the change of mind was not altogether there..

I not only saw the possibility of nuclear war, I feared it very much. If they started a military conflagration, it would automatically lead to nuclea….

And of course, in West Germany, they made every effort that people who came from the East would get jobs and would get a comfortable existence. That ….

A foreman in the East wouldn't know how many workers he would have the next day, because part of his working force had left the system to go to West ….

You had censorship. If you brought a manuscript to the publisher, you knew he would suggest changes. If you wanted to write and speak what you though….

I certainly hoped that in the Eastern part of Germany, what was just beginning to be called the German Democratic Republic, you would develop a syste….

I was in psychological warfare in World War II, so I know psychological warfare when I see it..

People who were not active in the intellectual life of the country could go on without feeling restricted, except they could not go where they wanted….

People in the East looked toward the West with longing. They would have liked to have the same comforts, the same goods, the same chances. They saw a….

A Western writer came up to me and said, how come nobody at this demonstration spoke of German unity? I told him, because it isn't on the agenda. Peo….

These were the things that the government supplied you with - in turn, of course, demanding obedience. But you must not imagine that it was a constan….

And one of the worst effects was that by suppressing critical thought, it also suppressed critical thought in the field of economics and hampered the….

The idea of a socialism with a human face was something that I absolutely could support, because it was my idea from the very first..

Even in West Germany in the beginning, people wanted a kind of socialism..

I disapproved of the fact that the government here refused to adopt the few reforms that Gorbachev put over in the field of media and the field of cu….