Willy Brandt

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Willy Brandt
Chancellor of Germany
In office October 21, 1969 – May 7, 1974
Preceded by	Kurt Georg Kiesinger
Succeeded by	Helmut Schmidt
Born	December 18, 1913
Died	October 8, 1992
Political party	SPD

Willy Brandt, born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm (December 18, 1913 - October 8, 1992) was a German politician, Chancellor of West Germany 1969 – 1974, and leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) 1964 – 1987.

Because resistance from the opposition kept much of Brandt's domestic program from being implemented, his most important legacy is the Ostpolitik, a policy aimed at improving relations with East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. This policy caused considerable controversy in West Germany, but won Brandt the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971.

Brandt was forced to resign as Chancellor, in 1974, after it became known that one of his closest aides had been working for the East German secret service (Stasi). This became one of the biggest political scandals in West German post-war history.

Contents 1 Early life, the war 2 Mayor of West Berlin, Foreign Minister of West Germany 3 Chancellor of West Germany 4 Foreign policy 5 Domestic policies 5.1 Political and social changes of the 1960s which paved the way for Brandt's chancellorship 5.2 How Brandt was able to win over the students 5.3 Crisis in 1972 6 The Guillaume affair and Brandt's resignation 7 Later life 8 Family 8.1 Matthias as Günter Guillaume 8.2 Lars writing about his father 9 Brandt's first cabinet, 21 October 1969 - 14 December 1972 10 Works (selected) 11 Biographies 12 External links

[edit] Early life, the war

Willy Brandt was born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm in Lübeck, Germany to Martha Frahm, an unwed and single mother who worked as a cashier for a department store. His father was an accountant from Hamburg by the name of John Möller, whom Brandt never met.

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. Willy Brandt returned to Sweden to lecture on 1 December, 1940 at Bommersvik college about the problems experienced by the social democrats in Nazi Germany and the occupied countries at the start of World War II.

[edit] Mayor of West Berlin, Foreign Minister of West Germany

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, but 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.

[edit] Chancellor of West Germany

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.

[edit] Foreign policy

As chancellor, Brandt gained more scope to develop his Ostpolitik. He was active in creating a degree of rapprochement with East Germany 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 East Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union.

In West Germany, Brandt's Ostpolitik was extremely controversial, dividing the populace into two camps: one side, most notably the victims of Stalinist ethnic cleansing from Historical Eastern Germany and Eastern Europe, 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 rapprochement", i.e., encouraging change through a policy of engagement rather than isolation). Supporters of Brandt claim his Ostpolitik did help to break down the Eastern Bloc's siege mentality and increase the awareness of the contradictions in real-life communism/socialism, which - together with other events - eventually led to its downfall. The Ostpolitik was strongly opposed by the conservative parties, and many social democrats as well.

[edit] Domestic policies

[edit] Political and social changes of the 1960s which paved the way for Brandt's chancellorship

West Germany in the late 1960s was shaken by student disturbances and a general 'change of the times' which not all Germans 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. Sign of the times was that - much to their parents' horror - a lot of students started to share a flat, went to demonstrations (where they were often sprayed off the street by police water-cannons) advocated and practiced promiscuous behaviour, declared themselves radical left wing, wanted the Americans to withdraw from Vietnam and labelled Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara to be their favourite heroes.

[edit] How Brandt was able to win over the students

Brandt's predecessor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, had been a member of the Nazi party. Brandt had been a victim of Nazi terror; no wider a gap could have existed between the two chancellors. 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 (with a sizable number of intellectuals backing them up) turned their parents' values and virtues 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 West Germans who dreamt of a country quite different from the one their parents had built 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 West Germany's economic problems.

[edit] 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 everyone'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. 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 West 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").

[edit] The Guillaume affair and Brandt's resignation

Around 1973, West German security organizations received information that one of Brandt's personal assistants, Günter Guillaume, was a spy for the East German state. 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, and the West German government blamed Brandt for having a spy in his party. At the same time, some revelations about Brandt's private life (he had had some short-lived affairs with prostitutes) appeared in newspapers. Brandt contemplated suicide and even drafted a suicide note. He chose instead to accept responsibility for Guillaume, 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 Guillaume's conflict as his duty to Brandt's enemies clashes with his genuine love and admiration for the chancellor.

[edit] 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 1975, 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 favour 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. He died of cancer at his home in Unkel, a town on the Rhine, and was given the first German state funeral since 1929. He was buried at the cemetery at Zehlendorf in Berlin.

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".

As a somewhat remarkable memorial, The private German language secondary school in Warsaw is named after Willy Brandt.

[edit] 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, Nina (*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). Today 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 from the day they were divorced they never met again. On December 9, 1983, Brandt married Brigitte Seebacher (*1946). Rut Brandt died in Berlin on July 28, 2006.

[edit] Matthias as Günter Guillaume

In 2003, Matthias Brandt 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 that he would take the part of the man who betrayed his father and made him resign in 1974. Earlier that year - when the Brandts and the Guillaumes took a vacation to Norway together - it was Matthias, then twelve years old, who was the first to discover that Guillaume and his wife 'were typing mysterious things on type writers the whole night through'.

[edit] Lars writing about his father

In early 2006, Lars Brandt published a biography about his father called "Andenken" ("Remembrance"). The book has been the subject of some controversy. Some see it as a loving memory of a father-son-relationship. Others label the biography a ruthless statement of a son who still thinks he had never had a father who really loved him.

[edit] Brandt's first cabinet, 21 October 1969 - 14 December 1972

• Willy Brandt (SPD) - Chancellor
• Walter Scheel (FDP) - Vice Chancellor and Minister of Foreign Affairs
• Helmut Schmidt (SPD) - Minister of Defense
• Hans-Dietrich Genscher (FDP) - Minister of the Interior
• Alex Möller (SPD) - Minister of Finance
• Gerhard Jahn (SPD) - Minister of Justice
• Karl Schiller (SPD) - Minister of Economics
• Walter Arendt (SPD) - Minister of Labour and Social Affairs
• Josef Ertl (FDP) - Minister of Food, Agriculture, and Forestry
• Georg Leber (SPD) - Minister of Transport, Posts, and Communications
• Lauritz Lauritzen (SPD) - Minister of Construction
• Käte Strobel (SPD) - Minister of Youth, Family, and Health
• Hans Leussink - Minister of Education and Science
• Erhard Eppler (SPD) - Minister of Economic Cooperation
• Horst Ehmke (SPD) - Minister of Special Tasks
• Egon Franke (SPD) - Minister of Intra-German Relations

Changes

• 13 May 1971 - Karl Schiller (SPD) succeeds Möller as Minister of Finance, remaining also Minister of Economics
• 15 March 1972 - Klaus von Dohnanyi (SPD) succeeds Leussink as Minister of Education and Science.
• 7 July 1972 - Helmut Schmidt (SPD) succeeds Schiller as Minister of Finance and Economics. Georg Leber (SPD) succeeds Schmidt as Minister of Defense. Lauritz Lauritzen (SPD) succeeds Leber as Minister of Transport, Posts, and Communications, remaining also Minister of Construction.

[edit] 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

[edit] Biographies

• (German)Lars Brandt, Andenken (ISBN 3-446-20710-4)
• (German)Peter Merseburger, Willy Brandt (ISBN 3-421-05328-6)
• Barbara Marshall, Willy Brandt, A Political Biography (ISBN 0-312-16438-6)
• (Italian)Nestore di Meola, Willy Brandt raccontato da Klaus Lindenberg (ISBN 88-7284-712-5)

[edit] External links

• (German)Nobel Prize Lecture
• Biography of Willy Brandt
• Willy Brandt International Airport

Political offices
Preceded by Otto Suhr	Mayor of Berlin 1957-1966	Succeeded by Heinrich Albertz
Preceded by Erich Ollenhauer	Chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany 1964-1987	Succeeded by Hans-Jochen Vogel
Preceded by Gerhard Schröder	Minister of Foreign Affairs 1966-1969	Succeeded by Walter Scheel
Preceded by Kurt Georg Kiesinger	Chancellor of Germany 1969-1974	Succeeded by Helmut Schmidt
Preceded by Bruno Pittermann	President of the Socialist International 1976-1992	Succeeded by Pierre Mauroy

Chancellors of Germany
Bismarck, Caprivi, Hohenlohe, Bülow, Bethmann-Hollweg, Michaelis, Hertling, Baden, Ebert, Scheidemann, Bauer, Müller, Fehrenbach, Wirth, Cuno, Stresemann, Marx, Luther, Marx, Müller, Brüning, Papen, Schleicher, Hitler, Goebbels, Krosigk, Adenauer, Erhard, Kiesinger, Brandt, Schmidt, Kohl, Schröder, Merkel

Persondata
NAME	Brandt, Willy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm
SHORT DESCRIPTION	German politician, Chancellor of West Germany
DATE OF BIRTH	December 18, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH	Lübeck, Germany
DATE OF DEATH	October 8, 1992
PLACE OF DEATH	Unkel, Germany