Quotes About East Germany

#1. I grew up in East Germany, so we had to learn Russian in school ... everybody hated it. I never thought it would come in handy ... And being an actor, I've been able to use it quite a bit.

Tom Wlaschiha

#2. Very early, it became clear to me that East Germany could not function.

Angela Merkel

#3. After the turmoil of the Second World War, my family ended up in Russian-occupied East Germany. When I attended fourth grade, I had to learn Russian as my first foreign language in school. I found this quite difficult because of the Cyrillic alphabet, but as time went on, I seemed to do all right.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf

#4. When I was 11 years old, my family had to leave East Germany and begin a new life in West Germany overnight. Until my father could get back into his original profession as a government employee, my parents operated a small laundry business in our little town. I became the laundry delivery boy.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf

#5. We needed 40 years to overcome East Germany. Sometimes in history, one has to be prepared for the long haul and not ask after four months if it still makes sense to keep up our demands.

Angela Merkel

#6. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phony and fragile as East Germany did thirty years ago.

Paul Mason

#7. It is wrong to divide the nation white against black, native born against immigrant or one religion against another. It is also wrong to divide people by income. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Obama divides Americans against each other. This is wrong.

Grover Norquist

#8. Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the '30s, East Germany in the '50s, Czechoslovakia in the '60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the '70s, China in the '80s and '90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists.

Naomi Wolf

#9. Nuking Russia might not be a bad idea as far as the bleedin' world is concerned. They've plunged a lot of people into miserable lives. You've only got to be in East Germany to see it. It's a horrible way to live. It's like Doncaster.

Mark E. Smith

#10. You know, North Korea situation is far worse than East Germany, and South Korea is weaker than West Germany.

Kim Dae-jung

#11. It's a historical fact that the Stasi did horrible things and that they monitored a lot of people in East Germany, but I find it very interesting to think about the importance of the Western secret services back then and still working today.

Christian Schwochow

#12. The people in East Germany have lived through so many changes in the last 15 years like never before in the country, and they did this often with great enthusiasm. But in the West we also have a high degree of transformations.

Angela Merkel

#13. I was the very first athlete in East Germany allowed to go professional.

Katarina Witt

#14. Imagine the day after the Berlin Wall came down if everybody in East Germany was plump and comfortable-looking and dressed in Caribbean pastels, and you'll have a pretty good idea what the Fort Lauderdale Airport terminal looks like today.

David Foster Wallace

#15. The former East Germany hardly had a monopoly on complicity. Life's every moment caught one out in one form or another.

Paul Russell

#16. I grew up in East Germany, and we were short on technology. So my father was really proud to be the owner of a turntable.

Apparat

#17. In East Germany it was very normal for a woman to go out and work even if she had children. A few weeks after giving birth women would return to their normal working life. We never had housewives in East Germany.

Christian Schwochow

#18. East Germany was so total in its totalitarianism that everything was banned which wasn't compulsory.

P. J. O'Rourke

#19. I don't have to come back, because I am still here! And I'm not an '80s thing. I already worked with my first band back in East Germany and that was soooo '70s, young man. I'm a '70s thing. If I'm a thing at all ... and an exciting thing.

Nina Hagen

#20. It is not in the interest of the German people or in the interest of world peace that Germany should become a pawn or a partner in a military struggle for power between the East and the West.

James F. Byrnes

#21. Russia is Germany's most important neighbor in the East, and it will remain so.

Helmut Kohl

#22. My last wish is that Germany realize its entity and that an understanding be reached between East and West. I wish peace to the world.

Joachim Von Ribbentrop

#23. If once again Germany destabilizes Europe, then Germany will be not be divided again, but wiped off the map. East and West have the necessary technology in order to enforce this verdict. If Germany begins again, there is no other solution.

Lech Walesa

#24. 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.

Stefan Heym

#25. You see the mistakes of one system - the surveillance - and the mistakes of the other - the inequality - but there's nothing you could have done in the one and nothing you can do now about the other. She laughs wryly. And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.

Anna Funder

#26. Germany and Israel should dream together for a Middle East in which all the countries are willing to exchange the dispute of the parents with peace for their children.

Shimon Peres

#27. East Germans are the Greeks of Germany," I say. "Be careful," she says.

Michael Lewis

#28. Morocco has a lot to do in terms of democracy. The daily practice of democracy evolves in time. Trying to apply a Western democratic system to a country of the Maghreb, the Middle East, or the Gulf would be a mistake. We are not Germany, Sweden or Spain.

Mohammed VI Of Morocco

#29. In opening China, the English have secured their presence in East Asia. If we don't commit more resources to get into Southeast Asia now, they or Germany, or even little Belgium might find it ripe for the taking.

Jules Ferry

#30. The penalties for being an accessory to the attempt to flee the [GDR] were greater than the crime of trying to flee itself.

Anna Funder

#31. With some other top players I'm part of a company trying to put on events in Europe, especially Germany, but also Poland, Austria, Russia. There's so much talent coming out of the Far East now, and we want the same thing in Europe.

John Higgins

#32. 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.

Stefan Heym

#33. There are also people who lived in either side of Germany, but who never had or have any relationship with the other side whether it was former East or former West Germany.

Christian Schwochow

#34. I accept responsibility for U-boat warfare from 1933 onward, and of the entire navy from 1943 on, but to make me responsible for what happened to Jews in Germany, or Russian soldiers on the east front it is so ridiculous all I can do is laugh.

Karl Donitz

#35. In places like Germany or France the idea of black-white is not so much black-white but "our people and them," and "them" can be people from the near east like Turks or Muslims or North Africans, all of whom might well be considered white in the United States.

Nell Irvin Painter

#36. I grew up spending time at my grandmother's farm in Germany and she lived a few kilometers away from the border between east and west Germany. It was so strange that roads which used to connect two towns now ended in the middle.

Matthea Harvey

#37. The history of the GDR journalism is a story of partisanship.

Patrick Conley

#38. More riveting to me in the end than the politics of Berlin was the vast social experiment its division had become... it was possible to have freedom and plenty in the West and craft an empty life; it was possible to "have nothing" in the East and create a life of intimacy and dignity and beauty.

Krista Tippett

#39. Taking your clothes off in front of strangers is something of a hobby in Germany, among both men and women, especially in the former communist East, where it was one of the few freedoms allowed.

Luke Harding