"I find it difficult to say whether the leadership's 'second echelon' could have preserved the German Democratic Republic. Helmut Kohl later told me he had never believed that Egon Krenz was capable of getting the situation under control. I do not know - we are all wiser after the event, as the saying goes. For my part, I must admit I briefly had a faint hope that the new leaders would be able to change the course of events by establishing a new type of relations between the two German states - based on radical domestic reforms in East Germany."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (1995)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/German_reunification
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
German reunification
19 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by German reunification →
Related Quotes
"I remember vividly in 1974 being in the mass of people, descending the streets in my native Lisbon, in Portugal, cele…"
"East Germany, apparently the most successful Communist regime, although with its economy wrecked by ideological misma…"
"Others took part in mass demonstrations in East Germany, notably in the major city of Leipzig from 4 September, with …"
"Honecker was deposed by his colleagues on 16 October 1989, but, under pressure from popular action, they could not ga…"
"Just pause for a moment to reflect on what we've done. Germany is united, and a slab of the Berlin Wall sits right ou…"
"On the very same day the first brick of the Ram Shila foundation was being laid at Ayodhya, the Berliners were removi…"
"I remember 1989 vividly, having spent much of that summer in Berlin before the Wall fell. And while largely peaceful …"
"In the summer of 1989, neither Helmut Kohl nor I anticipated ... that everything would happen so fast. We didn’t expe…"
"That summer of 1989, the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Moscow lost its grip on the handle of Soviet power. I…"
"The forty-year-old Iron Curtain fell because tens of thousands of people, long denied democracy, simply voted with th…"