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I know what Germans are. They are a funny people. They are always choosing someone to lead them in a direction which they do not want to go.

It's not for Germany to decide for the rest of Europe.

I think it has been a tremendous feat on the part of East Germans since 1990 to adapt to everything changing.

But as a German - and I am German-born - we Germans are condemned once again to be radical revisionists.

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.

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.

It is a fact that, if I single out Germany, our rate of growth is too low and we have very high unemployment.

You cannot stoke the fires of prejudice against German people and then not find that somewhere, sometime down the road it doesn't discharge.

At the beginning of the 60's our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country. We kidded ourselves a while, we said: 'They won't stay, sometime they will be gone.' But this isn't reality.

The German future lies in the hands of our Fuehrer.