I worked as a lawyer as a member of the teaching staff of a technical college and then I worked principally as legal adviser to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

All those years we'd spent learning these chops and all those gigs in Germany where you'd play all night and along comes punk. It has nothing to do with that. A lot of people went out of business.

Germany must be a country which generates political ideas and leadership which is capable of compromise which is sovereign and yet knows that it needs its partners on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Communist Party said that I must finish my studies because after the revolution in Germany people would be required with technical knowledge to take part in the building of the Communist Germany.

If we want to implement climate protection worldwide countries like Germany which are capable of developing new technologies will have to hand over some of their knowledge. We can't expect to have our cake and eat it too.

My birth neither shook the German Empire nor caused much of an upheaval in the home. It pleased mother caused father a certain amount of pride and my elder brother the usual fraternal jealousy of a hitherto only son.

But the same intelligence compels Germany to practise the same policy.

I had been involved in U.S. intelligence in Berlin Germany while in the military and had worked with a contact with the Central Intelligence Agency office there.

The Germans certainly - the intelligence service believed that there were WMD. It turns out that we were all wrong probably in my judgment and that is most disturbing.

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany that does not mean that people were not in good spirits or anything of that sort but something much deeper and more important.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

It's in the history books the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

The German national character is a favorite subject of character experts probably because the less mature a nation the more she is an object of criticism and not of history.

I speak Spanish to God Italian to women French to men and German to my horse.

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us the past is fixed while the future is open.

If Germany thanks to Hitler and his successors were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

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.

Sometimes I even now feel like a stranger in my country. But I knew there would be problems because I had seen the world as a skater. And now? A lot of people in eastern Germany have lost jobs rents went up food costs went up unemployment went to 20 percent. Freedom is good but it is not easy.

St. Louis has a lot of weird food customs that you don't see other places - and a lot of great ethnic neighborhoods. There's a German neighborhood. A great old school Italian neighborhood with toasted ravioli which seems to be a St. Louis tradition. And they love provolone cheese in St. Louis.

There are pockets of great food in Spain but there are also pockets of very mediocre food in Spain and the same in Morocco and the same in Croatia and the same in Germany and the same in Austria.

I've published one book before and now I'm writing a book of essays and stories about life in Tokyo. And I have one book coming out in May in Germany about fitness.