Jan Vogler Quotes

People in Tel Aviv can not imagine, but in 1990, here in Leipzig or Dresden, whoever wanted to buy a car had to wait 14 years. The East Germans worked like people in the West, but the fruits of their labor were harvested by a criminal regime.

The portrayal of post-traumatic stress disorder and things like that felt really big and important.

It eats you up. It eats you up. And you have to - I had a lot of help. I had a lot of therapy. And I was able to - because it was hard, you know, to - you can't just lay it on friends and children.

I wasn't cut out to be an opera singer, but it was a nice fantasy for a teenager growing up in Hungary during the Stalinist era.

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.

Through therapy and a lot of thinking and writing my memoirs, I've been able to use my life as a lesson.

A Soviet man is a product of invisible changes, degradation and progressive deformation. Breaking the chain of those changes is hard. Perhaps they are irreversible.

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.

When I turned 11, we had to leave East Germany overnight because of the political orientation of my father. Now I was going to school in West Germany, which was American-occupied at that time. There in school, all children were required to learn English and not Russian. To learn Russian had been difficult, but English was impossible for me.

I was born in Yangzhou, China, two years after World War II ended. I was 5 when my family escaped to Taiwan. Eight years later, we moved to Japan.

One of the most difficult times in my life was when I escaped from Romania in November of 1989.

The shock of any trauma, I think changes your life. It's more acute in the beginning and after a little time you settle back to what you were. However it leaves an indelible mark on your psyche.

To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.

Were it not for Khrushchev’s execution of Stalin we wouldn’t have come to such a sorry state. Since then, we have lived increasingly useless and dirtier lives; this murder of Stalin was also the murder of his people. The country, deprived of high ideals in just a few decades, has run into the ground.

… the unfortunate but inevitable connection between the word “socialism” and the unmitigated crucifixion of Civil Liberties in the East [Eastern Europe dominated by the Russian Communist Party.

I think kids are amazing. You kind of just deal with stuff, don't you? It's only years later that you have to spend thousands in therapy.

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

If the purpose of the wall was to destroy Berlin, Herr Ulbricht and his cohorts have erred sadly. Berlin is not only going to continue to exist - it's going to grow and grow and grow. Its ties to West Germany will not be severed.

I always used the free room that the G.D.R. allowed me... There was no shadow over my childhood.

I never felt the GDR was my home country.

In general, I think we're more or less shaped and formed by our late 20s. Things come along during that time that make us cynical. By the time you're in your 30s, it's hard to unpick those mindsets that have formed. It takes years of therapy to undo them.

I've been in therapy since I was five, but music goes way, way, way, way, way beyond therapy.

If I break my finger, I go to accident and emergency. If I have a cold, I go to the pharmacy. If I'm broken inside, where do I go? So, to help myself heal, I felt the best way to do this would be to talk, to share and to better understand what it is that I have.

I spent a fair amount of time in Communist Poland when I was young - my wife was from there - and I had the impression that boredom was one of the things that was undermining that whole society from the inside.

The 'Demon King' takes out a lot out of Finn Balor the man emotionally and mentally.