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.

And of course, in West Germany, they made every effort that people who came from the East would get jobs and would get a comfortable existence. That was part of the Cold War - and part of the winning side of the Cold War.

I was in psychological warfare in World War II, so I know psychological warfare when I see it.

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

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.

The idea of a socialism with a human face was something that I absolutely could support, because it was my idea from the very first.