"Nobody could have had a kinder and wiser headmaster than I. At the age of 92 he decided to write his fascinating autobiography. He was a young officer in the British army advancing into Germany at the end of the war. He boldly concludes that the Germans lack a sense of international fairness."

"The film that restored grace and poetry to Berlin and the German language after forty years of stereotypical war movies featuring stereotypical German actors playing the parts of stereotypical Germans. The fog of war had settled over Birmingham when I came along in 1960, and there was no moving it for some time. Nothing about Germany was to be trusted, as even its postwar art was tainted by the events surrounding the Holocaust, unsurprisingly. But I was glad when this movie came along, despite the awful history of the twentieth century, as it allowed me to love Germany for what it is now, its language, the sound of its spoken word and all its formidable arts. Wim Wenders must surely be Germany’s greatest living director."

"I love the whole BRD trilogy for Fassbinder’s truthful rendering of the German psyche after World War II devastation and post–Marshall Plan de-Nazification, and for the great parts that he offered to his female actors. Being a teenager in the fifties, in Germany, I left for Paris to avoid being sucked into the materialistic obsession displayed here."