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.

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 amount of freedom and democracy.

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.

Today, when we live in a what is called Western democracy here... you're not taken seriously all the time. You can write what you want because nobody cares about it. But at that time, they cared very much about what you wrote, so that's an entirely different feeling.

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

And also, of course, I knew that the German people, they're one, and would tend to consider themselves as one; and therefore they would consider the Wall as an enforced imprisonment. And I was right in thinking that way.

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