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 thought had to be written and spoken, you had to act against all these suppressive rules.

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 culture.

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

I did not oppose unification, I knew unification would have to come, but not in the form in which it did come. There were two ways of doing it and they took it the radical way, the forceful way.

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 system that demanded of them sacrifices with nothing but promises for the future.

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

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.