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> From a CSPAN Booknotes:
November 24, 1996 Memoirs by Mikhail Gorbachev
LAMB: I notice that the German company Bertelsmann bought this book and now it's published in the United States and -- Doubleday. And that one of the first countries you ever went to in your life, in 1966, was Germany and Berlin and you said it was an emotional experience for you. Why is that?
GORBACHEV: Well, for us, relations that we have had with Germany after the war bore the imprint of what happened in the past, the war for which Nazism was responsible, the bloodshed, the bloodbath in which our country and your country, too, was involved. Twenty seven million Russians and people of other nationalities of the former Soviet Union died in the war or in the camps or were killed in bombings, etc. That, given the fact that the gene pool of our country, whole generations were killed -- for example, males born in 1922, '23 -- only a few of them survived. So the war was an extremely painful experience and therefore building relations with Germany after such a tragedy -- this is something that all of us had to do a lot of thinking about, we and the Germans, and a lot had to change in our country and in Germany. And when I visited, even the German's Democratic Republic, the country that was our ally at that time, as a Russian, you know, my heart began to beat faster. There was that building of Reichstag, the burnt building of Reichstag. We saw that mound of earth over the (unintelligible) Chancellory, the Brandenburg Gate, where there were those goose stepping soldiers -- there used to be those goose stepping soldiers.
And I remembered the war. I was 10 years old when the war started and the memory of a child remembers all that, imprints all that. I remembered how the war started on a Sunday. Everyone was planning to go out and to have fun. The grownups had their own fun. We kids had our children's fun and then suddenly stopped. All of us were gathered together in the center of our village, the village of Privolnoye, which is my birthplace, and we listened. There was no radio at home at that time so we were listening from the loudspeaker -- a special loudspeaker that broadcast the speech of Malenkov. That is how it began. And then we had very difficult years. So the war was a shocking experience, an upheaval, and it was not difficult to get over that experience with Germany, even though in the history of our relations there's a lot of periods of cooperation and of positive interaction. But building a new relationship, a partnership of cooperation -- that was a difficult process. And when I went there, I really, you know, watched all of it through a special perspective.
I tried to understand and I remembered a lot. Nevertheless, we saw that Germans are people like us, that they, too, even then, understood the kind of tragedy that Nazism was for them and for the world based on those delirious ideas of race superiority, exclusivity, etc. So emotionally it was a difficult experience. Politically, of course, it was, at that time, quite clear that things have changed. But emotionally that is difficult because other than our head, we have our heart.
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