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

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 certainly hoped that in the Eastern part of Germany, what was just beginning to be called the German Democratic Republic, you would develop a system of socialism with freedom and democracy.

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.

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

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.

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.