A foreman in the East wouldn't know how many workers he would have the next day, because part of his working force had left the system to go to West Germany.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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