Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.

I haven't been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I'm not silent.

As far as I know, the question of whether and how it could be strategically or morally justified was never the subject of open debate in Germany after 1945, no doubt mainly because a nation which had murdered and worked to death millions of people in its camps could hardly call on the victorious powers to explain the military and political logic that dictated the destruction of the German cities.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

I was brought up largely by my grandfather because my father only returned from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1947 and worked in the nearest small town, so I hardly ever saw him.

I write contemporary fiction, and that is what my readers want to read.