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

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

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

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.

These were the things that the government supplied you with - in turn, of course, demanding obedience. But you must not imagine that it was a constant feeling of outrage that was in the minds of people and the hearts of people.

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

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.