If you live in a system that is suppressive, you don't walk upright, you always go with your head down.

If you live in a system that is suppressive, you don't walk upright, you always go with your head down.

The Wall was the actual symbol of a defeat, of inferiority.

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 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.

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