A Western writer came up to me and said, how come nobody at this demonstration spoke of German unity? I told him, because it isn't on the agenda. People were interested in having another, better GDR, another, better socialism.

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

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.

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.

In the question of peace, people spoke up and demonstrated for peace and against the threat of war, the threat of atomic war.

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

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.