Willy Brandt (1913 - 1992) |
Willy Brandt (18. December 1913 - 8. October 1992) was a left German politician and
Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany
from 1969 to 1974. The social democrat received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 for
his work in improving relations with the
German Democratic Republic, Poland and the
Soviet Union, but is controversial in Germany and had to resign after an espionage
scandal.
Early life, the war
Brandt was born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm in Lübeck to a 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.
He 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 World War II.
Mayor of Berlin, Foreign Minister
In 1946 he returned to Berlin, working for the Norwegian government.
In 1948 he began his political career with the Social Democratic Party of
Germany (SPD) in Berlin. He became a German citizen again and formally
adopted his pseudonym as 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.
He 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.
He became chairman of the SPD in 1964 (a post he retained until 1987).
He 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.
Brandt as Chancellor
After the elections of 1969, again with Brandt as lead candidate, his SPD became
stronger and after three weeks of negotiation formed a coalition government with
the small liberal FDP. Brandt was elected Chancellor. Brandt's domestic reforms
were usually blunted by his coalition partners in the Bundestag or the resistance
of local governments (often CDU/CSU).
Willy Brandt at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial (1970) |
In foreign affairs Brandt had more scope to work his Ostpolitik and he was active
in creating a rapproachment, of a kind, with the
German Democratic Republic and
improving relations with the Soviet Union, Poland and other Eastern Bloc countries.
This policy was widely controversial, and several members of his coalition
switched sides. In May 1972, the opposition CDU hoped to have the majority
in the Bundestag and demanded a vote on a motion of no confidence (Mißtrauensvotum)
in the parliament to remove Brandt and elect a new Chancellor.
To everybody's
surprise, the vote failed by an extremely narrow margin; much later it was revealed
that two members of the CDU had been paid off by the Ministry for State Security
(Stasi) in the German Democratic Republic to vote for Brandt. Some Germans
considered Brandt's "Ostpolitik" illegal and high treason.
The politic of dialogue with the Communist countries however helped to break open
the siege mentality of the Eastern Bloc and to increase the awareness of the
contradictions in real-life communism/socialism, and - together with other events -
eventually led to its downfall.
To counter any notions about being sympathetic to communism, Brandt implemented a
tough legislation that barred "radicals" from public service ("Radikalenerlass").
Although that legislation theoretically applied to extremists from both the left
and right, it was almost exclusively applied to people considered to be left
extremists.
Guillaume Scandal and Resignation
Around 1973, German security organizations received information that one of
Brandt's personal assistants, Günter Guillaume, was a spy of the GDR. Brandt
was asked to continue work as usual, and he agreed, even taking a private
vacation with Guillaume. Guillaume was arrested on 24. April 1974.
At the
same time, some revelations about Brandt's private life appeared in newspapers.
Brandt contemplated suicide and even drafted a suicide note. But he lived on,
accepted responsibility and resigned on 7. May 1974.
Guillaume had been a spy for East Germany and was led by Markus Wolf, who later
said that the resignation of Brandt was never intended, and that the affair was
one of the biggest mistakes of the East German secret service.
Brandt was succeeded as Chancellor by the social democrat Helmut Schmidt.
For the rest of his life, Brandt remained suspicious that the fellow social
democrat and longtime rival Herbert Wehner had been scheming for his downfall,
but evidence for this seems scant.
Late life of Brandt
After his term as Chancellor, he remained head of his party SPD. Brandt was
head of the Socialist International from 1976 to 1992, working to enlarge that
organization beyond the borders of Europe. 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' newly legal socialist party in Spain after
Franco's death.
In late 1989, he 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.
Brandt was a member of the European Parliament from 1979--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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