Willy Brandt

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{{Infobox PM 

| name=Willy Brandt
| image=Willy-brandt-1965.jpg
| country-de=Germany
| term=October 21, 1969–May 6, 1974
| before=Kurt Georg Kiesinger
| after=Helmut Schmidt
| date_birth=December 18, 1913
| date_death=October 8, 1992
| party=SPD

}} Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm formely known as Willy Brandt (December 18, 1913 – October 8, 1992) was a German politician and Chancellor of Germany from 1969 to 1974.

As his domestic policies largely were blunted by resistance of other parties, the social democrat is most notable for his Ostpolitik, trying to improve relations with the German Democratic Republic, Poland and the Soviet Union. This policy caused considerable controversy in Germany, but won Brandt the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971. He was forced to resign as Chancellor in 1974, after the biggest political scandal in post-war Germany to date.

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Early life, the war

Willy Brandt was born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm in Lübeck, Germany to an unwed and single mother who worked as a cashier for a department store. He became an apprentice at the shipbroker and ship's agent F.H. Bertling. He joined the "Socialist Youth" in 1929 and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1930. He left the SPD to join the more left wing Socialist Workers Party (SAP) which was allied to the POUM in Spain and the ILP in Britain. In 1933, using his connections with the port and its ships from the time he had been apprentice, he left Germany for Norway on a ship to escape Nazi persecution. It was at this time that he adopted the pseudonym Willy Brandt to avoid detection by Nazi agents. In 1934 he took part in the founding of the International Bureau of Revolutionary Youth Organizations, and was elected to its Secretariat.

Brandt visited Germany from September to December 1936, disguised as a Norwegian student named Gunnar Gaasland. In 1937 he worked in Spain as a journalist. In 1938 the German government revoked his citizenship, so he applied for Norwegian citizenship. In 1940 he was arrested in Norway by occupying German forces, but he was not identified because he wore a Norwegian uniform; on his release he escaped to neutral Sweden. In August 1940 he became a Norwegian citizen, receiving his passport from the Norwegian embassy in Stockholm, where he lived until the end of the war. In 2006 the airport of his hometown was renamed like "http://willy-brandt-airport.de"

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Mayor of Berlin, Foreign Minister

In late 1946 Brandt returned to Berlin, working for the Norwegian government.

In 1948 he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in Berlin. He became a German citizen again and formally adopted his pseudonym as his legal name.

Outspoken against the Soviet oppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and against Khrushchev's 1958 proposal that Berlin receive the status of a "free city", he was considered to belong to the right wing of his party, an assessment that would later change.

Brandt was supported by the powerful publisher Axel Springer. From October 3 1957 to 1966 he was Mayor of West Berlin, a particularly stressful time for the city with the construction of the Berlin Wall.

Brandt became chairman of the SPD in 1964, a post he retained until 1987.

Brandt was the SPD candidate for Chancellor in 1961 and lost to Konrad Adenauer's conservative CDU. In 1965 he ran again, and lost to the popular Ludwig Erhard. But Erhard's government was short-lived, and in 1966 a grand coalition between the SPD and CDU was formed; Brandt became foreign minister and vice chancellor.

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Chancellor

After the elections of 1969, again with Brandt as lead candidate, the SPD became stronger and after three weeks of negotiation formed a coalition government with the small liberal FDP Brandt was elected Chancellor.

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Foreign Policy

Image:Willy Brandt Time.jpg As chancellor Brandt had more scope to work his Ostpolitik. He was active in creating a degree of rapprochement with the German Democratic Republic and in improving relations with the Soviet Union, Poland and other Eastern Bloc countries.

A seminal moment came in December 1970 with the famous Warschauer Kniefall in which Brandt, apparently spontaneously, knelt down at the monument to victims of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The uprising occurred during the military occupation of Poland and the monument is to those killed by German troops who suppressed the uprising and deported remaining ghetto residents to concentration camps.

Brandt was named TIME magazine's Person of the Year for 1970.

In 1971 Brandt received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in improving relations with the German Democratic Republic, Poland and the Soviet Union.

In Germany, Brandt's Ostpolitik was controversial, dividing the populace into two camps: one side, most notably those expulsed from formerly German territories, loudly voiced their opposition, calling the policy "illegal" and "high treason", while others applauded Brandt's move as aiming at "Wandel durch Annäherung" (Change through moving closer). Indeed, the policy did help to break the Eastern Bloc's siege mentality and increase the awareness of the contradictions in real-life communism/socialism, and - together with other events - eventually led to its downfall.

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Domestic policies

West Germany in the late 1960s was shaken by student rows and a general 'change of the times' not all were willing to accept or approve. What had seemed a stable, peaceful nation, happy with its outcome of the "Wirtschaftswunder" ("economic miracle") turned out to be a deeply conservative, bourgeois and insecure people with a lot of citizens unable to face - let alone cope with - their Nazi past. It was mostly the students who accused the 'parental generation' of its Nazi past and of a way of life which was considered outdated and old-fashioned. Brandt's predecessor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, had been a member of the NSDAP, Brandt himself had been a victim of Nazi terror. No wider could a gap between two chancellors be. Unlike Brandt Kiesinger was unable to understand the students' political demands. For him they were nothing but "a shameful crowd of long-haired drop-outs who needed a bath and someone to discipline them". The students (and a lot of intellectuals) demanded a different state, turned their parents' values upside down and questioned the West German society in general seeking social, legal and political reforms. On the domestic field, Brandt pursued exactly this, a course of social, legal and political reforms. In his first parliament speech after his election Brandt signalled that he had comprehended what made the students go out and demonstrate against authority. In the speech he claimed his political course of reforms ending it with the famous summarizing words "Wir wollen mehr Demokratie wagen" (lit.: "Let's dare more democracy"). This made him - and the SPD, too - extremely popular among most students and other young Germans who were dreaming of a country quite different from the one their parents had "built up" after the war. However, many of Brandt's reforms met the resistance of state governments (dominated by CDU/CSU). The spirit of reformist optismism was cut short by the 1973 oil crisis. Brandt's domestic policy has been criticized of having caused many of Germany's economic problems.

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Crisis in 1972

Because of these controversies, several members of his coalition switched sides. In May 1972, the opposition CDU believed it had the majority in the Bundestag and demanded a vote on a motion of no confidence (Mißtrauensvotum). Had this motion passed Rainer Barzel would have replaced Brandt as Chancellor. To everybody's surprise, the motion failed. The margin was extremely narrow (two votes) and much later it was revealed that one or perhaps two members of the CDU had been paid off by the Stasi of East Germany to vote for Brandt.

Though Brandt had remained Chancellor, he had lost his majority, as subsequent iniatives in parliament, most notably on the budget, failed. Because of this stalemate, the Bundestag was dissolved and new elections were called. Brandt's Ostpolitik as well as his reformist domestic polcies were popular with parts of the young generation and led his SPD party to its best-ever federal election result in late 1972.

During the 1972 campaign many popular German artists, intellectuals, writers, actors and professors supported Brandt and the SPD. Among them were Günter Grass, Walter Jens, and even the football (soccer) player Paul Breitner. Public endorsements of the SPD via advertisements and, more recently, internet pages have become a widespread phenomenon since then.

To counter any notions about being sympathetic to communism or soft on left-wing extremists, Brandt implemented tough legislation that barred "radicals" from public service ("Radikalenerlass").

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The Guillaume affair and Brandt's resignation

Around 1973, German security organizations received information that one of Brandt's personal assistants, Günter Guillaume, was a spy for the DDR. Brandt was asked to continue work as usual, and he agreed, even taking a private vacation with Guillaume. Guillaume was arrested on April 24, 1974. For some reason, the German government blamed Brandt for having a spy in his party. Brandt contemplated suicide and even drafted a suicide note. But he lived on, accepted responsibility, and resigned on May 7, 1974.

Guillaume had been a spy for East Germany, supervised by Markus Wolf, head of the Main Intelligence Administration of the East German Ministry for State Security. Wolf stated after the reunification that the resignation of Brandt had never been intended, and that the affair had been one of the biggest mistakes of the East German secret service.

Brandt was succeeded as Chancellor by the social democrat Helmut Schmidt, who unlike Brandt belonged to the right wing of his party. For the rest of his life, Brandt remained suspicious that his fellow social democrat and longtime rival Herbert Wehner had been scheming for his downfall, but evidence for this seems scant.

The story of Brandt and Guillaume is told in the play Democracy by Michael Frayn. The play follows Brandt's career from his election as the first left-of-center chancellor in West Germany in 40 years to his downfall at the hands of his trusted assistant Guillaume. The play examines Guillaume's dual identity as trusted personal assistant to the West German chancellor and Stasi spy, and Guilliaume's conflict as his duty to Brandt's enemies clashes with his genuine love and admiration for the chancellor.

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Later life

After his term as Chancellor, Brandt remained head of his party, the SPD, until 1987 and retained his seat in the Bundestag. Brandt was head of the Socialist International from 1976 to 1992, working to enlarge that organization beyond the borders of Europe. In 1977 he was appointed chair of the Independent Commission for International Developmental Issues, which produced a report in 1980 calling for drastic changes in the world's attitude to development in the Third World. This became known as the Brandt Report.

In 1983, it was widely feared that Portugal would fall to communism; Brandt supported the democratic socialist party of Soares which won a major victory, thus keeping Portugal democratic. He also supported Felipe González's newly legal socialist party in Spain after Franco's death.

In late 1989, Brandt became one of the first leftist leaders in West Germany to publicly favor reunification over some sort of two-state federation. His public statement "Now grows together what belongs together" was much quoted in those days.

One of Brandt's last public appearances was flying to Baghdad, to free some Western hostages held by Saddam Hussein, after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Brandt was a member of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1983, and Honorary Chairman of the SPD from 1987 until his death in 1992. When the SPD moved its headquarters from Bonn back to Berlin in the mid-1990s, the new headquarters was named the "Willy Brandt Haus".

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Family

From 1941 until 1948 Brandt was married to Anna Carlotta Thorkildsen (daughter of a Norwegian father and a German-American mother). They had a daughter, Ninja (*1940). After Brandt and Thorkildsen were divorced in 1946, he married the Norwegian Rut Hansen in 1948. Hansen and Brandt had three sons: Peter (*1948), Lars (*1951) and Matthias (*1961). These days Peter is a historian, Lars is a painter and Matthias is an actor. After 32 years of marriage, Brandt was divorced from Rut in 1980 and they never met again. On December 9, 1983, Brandt married Brigitte Seebacher (*1946).

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Matthias as Günter Guillaume

In 2003 Matthias took the part of Guillaume in the film Im Schatten der Macht (lit.: In The Shadow Of Power) by German filmmaker Oliver Storz. The film deals with the Guillaume-affair and Brandt's resignation. Matthias Brandt caused a minor controversy in Germany when it was publicised it would be him who was so take the part of the man who once betrayed and later forced his father to resign. In early 1974 - during a holiday in Norway where the Brandts and the Guillaumes had embarked to - it was young Matthias (twelve years old at that time) who discovered first that Guillaume and his wife 'were typing mysterious things on type writers the whole night through'.

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Brandt's First Ministry, 21 October 1969 - 14 December 1972

Changes

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Works (selected)

  • 1960 Mein Weg nach Berlin (My Path to Berlin), autobiography
  • 1966 Draußen. Schriften während der Emigration. (Outside: Writings during the Emigration)
  • 1968 Friedenspolitik in Europa (The Politics of Peace in Europe)
  • 1976 Begegnungen und Einsichten 1960-1975 (Encounters and Insights 1960-1975) ISBN 3-455-08979-8
  • 1982 Links und frei. Mein Weg 1930-1950 (Left and Free: My Path 1930-1950)
  • 1986 Der organisierte Wahnsinn (Organized Lunacy)
  • 1989 Erinnerungen (Memories) ISBN 3-549-07353-4
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Biographies

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External links

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