The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.

I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray - and allowed itself to be led astray.

My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm's fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of 'Tom Thumb' during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig, which my mother took me to see.

Art is uncompromising, and life is full of compromises.

I was assigned to the Waffen-SS but was never involved in any crime. Besides, I always felt the need to write about my experiences in a larger context one day. This has only developed recently, now that I have overcome my inner aversion to writing an autobiography in the first place, specifically one having to do with my younger years.