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

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

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.

If we had had time and the occasion to develop a new socialism in the GDR, socialism with a human face, with democracy, this might have been an example also to West Germany. The development would have run the other way.

And one of the worst effects was that by suppressing critical thought, it also suppressed critical thought in the field of economics and hampered the development of economics - and the country would fall back further and further in the economic competition with the West.