Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings.

What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?

As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things.

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.

Often I had to imagine the things I needed. I learned very early to read amidst noise. And so I started writing and drawing at an early age.

I did not volunteer for the Waffen SS, but was, as were thousands of my year group, conscripted. I did not then know as a 17-year-old that it was a criminal unit. I thought it was an elite unit.

Whenever there has been talk of exterminating rats, others, who were not rats, have been exterminated.