The only people who agreed with you were the old Communist intellectuals who had done well out of the division of Germany. Yet even they, apologists for a totalitarian regime in which they no longer believed, were not as disingenuous as you.

It was part of your disguise to adopt as a badge of honour the old anti-Semitic insult "rootless cosmopolitan". Your friend Stefan Heym, Communist time-server that he was, was the genuine article. As a Jew, he had been driven out of Germany in 1933, and returned in 1945 as an intelligence officer in the US Army. He might even have interrogated you. Luckily for you, he did not. The East Germans would have had no hesitation in blackening your name, despite the fact that your anti-Americanism and your lifelong campaign to detach West Germany from Nato were quite useful to them.

Why did you lie? For your 60-year silence was a lie, an unspoken reproach that forced you to lie again every time you sat down to write. Perhaps you no longer know why you did it. I have a theory, which may be mistaken, but which takes us back to your own "zero hour" at the end of the war.

When you started your life again after your release from PoW camp, you decided to be an artist. That was your first love, and you were talented. You have never ceased to draw and print. Your collected graphic art, In Kupfer, auf Stein (In Copper, on Stone), documents an impressive body of work. But you were not content to be a humble printmaker. You wanted to be a great writer.

In literature, unlike art, you were a late developer. You did not get your first poem published until you were 28, and you were 32 by the time your first novel appeared. But you were determined to make your name as a writer. It was only when you became a literary celebrity that your secret became a huge liability. If you had grasped the nettle then, your new career, which meant so much to you, might have been stillborn. You chose silence.