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

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

I not only saw the possibility of nuclear war, I feared it very much. If they started a military conflagration, it would automatically lead to nuclear warfare.

A great number of people in the East German parts had been Nazis, so the change of mind was not altogether there.

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.

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

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.