Willy Brandt
Willy Brandt was a German politician and statesman who was leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany from 1964 to 1987 and concurrently served as the chancellor of West Germany from 1969 to 1974. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 for his efforts to strengthen cooperation in Western Europe through the EEC and to achieve reconciliation between West Germany and the countries of Eastern Europe. He was the first Social Democratic chancellor since 1930 and also the first social democrat chancellor in Germany who embraced the Third Way.
Fleeing to Norway and then Sweden during the Nazi regime and working as a left-wing journalist, he took the name Willy Brandt as a pseudonym to avoid detection by Nazi agents, and then formally adopted the name in 1948. Brandt earned initial fame as governing mayor of West Berlin. He served as the foreign minister and as the vice chancellor in Kurt Georg Kiesinger's cabinet, and became chancellor in 1969.
As chancellor, he maintained West Germany's close alignment with the United States and focused on strengthening European integration in Western Europe, while launching the new policy of Ostpolitik aimed at improving relations with Eastern Europe. Brandt was controversial on both the right wing, for his Ostpolitik, and on the left wing, for his support of American policies, including his silence on the Vietnam War that he broke only in 1973, and right-wing authoritarian regimes. The Brandt Report became a recognised measure for describing the general North–South divide in world economics and politics between an affluent North and a poor South. Brandt was also known for his fierce anti-communist policies at the domestic level, culminating in the Radikalenerlass in 1972.
In 1970, while visiting a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising crushed by the Germans, Brandt unexpectedly knelt and meditated in silence, a moment remembered as the Kniefall von Warschau.
Brandt resigned as chancellor in 1974, after Günter Guillaume, one of his closest aides, was exposed as an agent of the Stasi, the East German secret service. Brandt died from colon cancer in 1992, aged 78.
Early life and World War II
Willy Brandt was born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm in the Free City of Lübeck on 18 December 1913. His mother was Martha Luise Wilhelmine Frahm, a single parent, who worked as a cashier for a department store. His father was a teacher from Hamburg named John Heinrich Möller, whom Brandt never met. As his mother worked six days a week, he was mainly brought up by his mother's stepfather, Ludwig Frahm. He joined the "Socialist Youth" in 1929 and at age 16 became a full member of the Social Democratic Party in 1930 despite the age minimum normally being 18. He also wrote for the Volksbote, a local Social Democrat daily, under editor-in-chief Julius Leber, who would have a "decisive influence" on him.He, along with half the youth-wing of the Lübeck SPD, left the party to join the more left wing Socialist Workers Party in October 1931, which was allied to the POUM in Spain and, more significant to Brandt, had close ties with the Norwegian Labour Party. His break with Leber and the SPD lost him promised financial support for university studies and his job at the Volksbote. After passing his Abitur in 1932 at Johanneum zu Lübeck, he took work at the shipbroker and ship's agent F.H. Bertling. In 1933 he left Germany for Norway 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. Willy Brandt became one of Wilhelm Reich's subjects for his experiments on the electrophysiology of pleasure and anxiety.
Brandt was in Germany from September to December 1936, disguised as a Norwegian student named Gunnar Gaasland. The real Gunnar Gaasland was married to Gertrud Meyer from Lübeck in a marriage of convenience to protect her from deportation. Meyer had joined Brandt in Norway in July 1933. In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, Brandt 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 his real identity was not uncovered as he wore a Norwegian uniform. Upon his release, he escaped to neutral Sweden. In August 1940, he became a Norwegian citizen, receiving his passport from the Norwegian legation in Stockholm, where he lived until the end of the war. He lectured in Sweden on 1 December 1940 at Bommersvik College about problems experienced by the social democrats in Nazi Germany and the occupied countries at the start of the Second World War. In exile in Norway and Sweden, he learned Norwegian and Swedish. He spoke Norwegian fluently, and retained a close relationship with Norway.
In late 1946, Brandt returned to Berlin, working for the Norwegian government. In 1948, he re-joined the SPD and became a German citizen again, formally adopting the pseudonym Willy Brandt as his legal name. In 2021, it became known that Brandt served as a paid informant for the US Counterintelligence Corps from 1948 to 1952. He supplied reports on circumstances in the GDR, including the situation of East German authorities and industries, as well as Soviet troops. According to Thomas Boghardt, Brandt and SPD man Hans E. Hirschfeld received 200,000 German Mark from the Americans in 1950 for promoting his political career, after both had met with the Americans at the German CIA headquarters in Frankfurt. Both were sworn to "secrecy". The Americans wanted to strengthen the SPD over the Communists in Berlin. Over the next two years, Hirschfeld received a further 106,000 Marks. Even after the end of his informant activities, he is said to have remained in contact with US intelligence.
Early political career
Brandt was elected to the West German Bundestag in the 1949 West German federal election as a SPD delegate from West Berlin, serving there until 1957. Concurrently, he was elected as an SPD representative to the Abgeordnetenhaus of West Berlin in the 1950 West Berlin state election, and served there through 1971. In the 1969 West German federal election he was again elected to the Bundestag, but as a delegate from North Rhine-Westphalia, and remained in the Bundestag as a delegate from that state until his death in 1992.In 1950, Brandt, while a member of the Bundestag and the editor-in-chief of the Berliner Stadtblatt, received a secret payment of about 170,000 Deutsche Mark from the U.S. government.
From October 1957 to 1966, Willy Brandt served as Governing Mayor of West Berlin, during a period of increasing tension in East–West relations that led to the construction of the Berlin Wall. In his first year as mayor of Berlin, he also served as the president of the Bundesrat in Bonn. He was an outspoken critic of Soviet repression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and of Nikita Khrushchev's 1958 proposal that Berlin receive the status of a "free city". He was supported by the influential publisher Axel Springer.
As mayor of West Berlin, Brandt accomplished much in the way of urban development. New hotels, office-blocks, and flats were constructed, while both Schloss Charlottenburg and the Reichstag building were restored. Sections of the "Stadtring" Bundesautobahn 100 inner city motorway were opened, while a major housing programme was carried out, with roughly 20,000 new dwellings built each year during his time in office.
At the start of 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy saw Brandt as a figure destined for high office in West Germany and was hoping he would replace Konrad Adenauer as chancellor following elections later that year. Kennedy made this preference clear by inviting Brandt, the West German opposition leader, to an official meeting at the White House a month before meeting with Adenauer, the country's leader. For the president, Brandt stood for Germany's future and for overcoming traditional Cold War thinking.
The diplomatic snub strained relations between Kennedy and Adenauer further during an especially tense time for Berlin. However, following the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, Brandt was disappointed and angry with Kennedy. Speaking in Berlin three days later, Brandt criticized Kennedy, asserting "Berlin expects more than words. It expects political action." He also wrote Kennedy a highly critical public letter in which he warned that the development was liable "to arouse doubts about the ability of the three Allied Powers to react and their determination" and he called the situation "a state of accomplished extortion". Kennedy was furious, but managed to defuse the tension by sending his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, to Berlin. In June 1963, Brandt figured prominently in the staging of Kennedy's triumphant visit to West Berlin.
Brandt became the chairman of the SPD in 1964, Brandt was the SPD candidate for the chancellorship in 1961, but he lost to Konrad Adenauer's conservative Christian Democratic Union of Germany. In 1965, Brandt ran again, but lost to the popular Ludwig Erhard. Erhard's government was short-lived, however, and in 1966 a grand coalition between the SPD and CDU was formed, with Brandt serving as foreign minister and as the 5th Vice Chancellor of Germany.
Chancellor
In the 1969 elections, again with Brandt as the leading candidate, the SPD became stronger. After three weeks of negotiations, the SPD and the smaller Free Democratic Party of Germany formed a coalition government. Their Members of the Bundestag elected Brandt Chancellor of Germany.Foreign policy
As chancellor, Brandt developed his Ostpolitik by stages. He was active in creating a degree of rapprochement with East Germany, and also in improving relations with the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Eastern Bloc countries.Brandt introduced his Ostpolitik gradually starting in 1967 with the establishment of diplomatic relations with Romania and making a trade agreement with Czechoslovakia. In 1968, he restored diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia.
However, the August 1968, Kremlin-controlled invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops ended the Prague Spring. It was a profound disappointment for Brandt. He condemned the invasion and put Ostpolitik on hold while he negotiated a coalition with the Free Democrats. In late 1969, he indicated his readiness to meet with East German leadership on the basis of equality, without preconditions. He also expressed an eagerness to meet with the USSR and Poland to resolve frontier questions that had remained unsettled since 1945.
Brandt and the East German premier Willi Stoph met in Erfurt on 19 March 1970 and in Kassel on 21 May 1970.
Brandt made a six-point proposal that would involve two separate German states that respected each other's territorial integrity and settle disputes peacefully. They would cooperate as neighbours and the rights of the Four Powers in Berlin would be respected by both of them, and finally, the situation around Berlin would be improved. No agreements were reached at first, but talks continued.
On 12 August 1970, he signed a treaty with the Soviet Union accepted the current boundaries, which had long been in dispute.
During a visit to a monument to the German occupation-era Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, he unexpectedly, and apparently spontaneously, knelt, honoring the victims.
This was met with a strong positive reaction worldwide but was highly controversial among the German public at the time.
The Berlin question was settled on 3 September 1971 to West Germany's satisfaction. The crowning step came with the Basic Treaty with East Germany. The status quo was legitimized, relations were formalized on the basis of equality, and both Germanies joined the United Nations in 1973.
Brandt became the first German chancellor to address the United Nations General Assembly.
Time magazine in the U.S. named Brandt as its Man of the Year for 1970, stating, "Willy Brandt is in effect seeking to end World War II by bringing about a fresh relationship between East and West. He is trying to accept the real situation in Europe, which has lasted for 25 years, but he is also trying to bring about a new reality in his bold approach to the Soviet Union and the East Bloc." President Richard Nixon also was pushing détente on behalf of the United States. The Nixon policies amounted to co-opting Brandt's Ostpolitik.
In 1971, Brandt received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in improving relations with East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Brandt negotiated a peace treaty with Poland, and agreements on the boundaries between the two countries, signifying the official and long-delayed end of World War II. Brandt negotiated parallel treaties and agreements with Czechoslovakia.
File:Meeting to discuss US-West German relations - NARA - 194507.tif|thumb|left|300px|Brandt with U.S. president Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, 2 May 1973
In West Germany, Brandt's Neue Ostpolitik was extremely controversial, dividing the populace into two camps. One camp embraced all of the conservative parties, and most notably those West German residents and their families who had been driven west by Stalinist ethnic cleansing from Historical Eastern Germany, especially the part that was given to Poland as a consequence of the end of the war; western Czechoslovakia ; and the rest of Eastern Europe, such as in Romania. These groups of displaced Germans and their descendants loudly voiced their opposition to Brandt's policy, calling it "illegal" and "high treason".
A different camp supported and encouraged Brandt's Neue Ostpolitik as aiming at "change through rapprochement", encouraging change through a policy of engagement with the Eastern Bloc, rather than trying to isolate these countries diplomatically and commercially. Brandt's supporters claim that the policy did help to break down the Eastern Bloc's "siege mentality" and also helped to increase its awareness of the contradictions in its brand of socialism/communism, which – together with other events – eventually led to the downfall of Eastern European communism.