Stefan Heym Quotes
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.
I was in psychological warfare in World War II, so I know psychological warfare when I see it.
If you live in a system that is suppressive, you don't walk upright, you always go with your head down.
Show me one place where a whole government is concerned with a book of a writer and is concerned enough to suppress it.
A great number of people in the East German parts had been Nazis, so the change of mind was not altogether there.
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.
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.
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.
You must have, if socialism was to succeed, a socialism with lots of democratic elements in it.
I did not oppose unification, I knew unification would have to come, but not in the form in which it did come. There were two ways of doing it and they took it the radical way, the forceful way.
In the question of peace, people spoke up and demonstrated for peace and against the threat of war, the threat of atomic war.
I disapproved of the fact that the government here refused to adopt the few reforms that Gorbachev put over in the field of media and the field of culture.
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.
I defended myself at the first opportunity I had, which was a meeting of writers in which I proved that Honecker had based his whole attack.