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 system of socialism with freedom and democracy.

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.

If we had had time and the occasion to develop a new socialism in the GDR, socialism with a human face, with democracy, this might have been an example also to West Germany. The development would have run the other way.

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.

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.

You must have, if socialism was to succeed, a socialism with lots of democratic elements in it.