Willy Brandt

Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (1969-1974)

• Born: December 18, 1913
• Birthplace: Lübeck, Germany
• Died: October 8, 1992
• Place of death: Unkel, near Bonne, Germany

Brandt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 for his efforts in improving relations between West Germany and Eastern Europe. He was instrumental in creating a competitive political party system in West Germany. In 1985, he received the Albert Einstein Peace Prize and the Third World Prize.

Early Life

Willy Brandt (VEE-lee brandt), who never knew his father, was the son of an unwed salesclerk who gave him the name Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm. His maternal grandfather, Ludwig Frahm, on returning from service in World War I, became the principal influence in Brandt’s childhood. When he was five, Brandt went to live with his grandparents and subsequently saw his mother regularly but infrequently. As had his father, Ludwig had been a farm laborer. Dissatisfied with those working conditions, he took a factory job and, after the war, was a truck driver. Even before leaving farm work, he was a socialist, one who read widely the works of leading socialist thinkers. Young Brandt picked up this political orientation, which not only was unpopular then but also was considered to be subversive by many.

Unlike many socialists who denounce religion, the Frahms were Protestants who baptized their children but did not let them attend religious classes in public school. Brandt continued to follow the Christian ethos as an adult but rarely in a conventional fashion, as set out in a strict denominational way. A bright pupil, he won a scholarship to a prestigious Realgymnasium (college preparatory high school). There, he had a difficult time as one of the few students from a working-class family. This disparity was compounded by his outspoken political views and his occasional attire, the uniform of the socialist youth organization.

At this time, Brandt’s active career as a socialist began. First, he wrote pieces for the Lubeck Social Democratic newspaper. Its editor, Julius Leber, a Social Democratic Party (SPD) member of the Reichstag, offered encouragement and advice to the young man, who adopted the pen name Willy Brandt. Although the required age was eighteen, with Leber’s endorsement, Brandt became a member of the SPD in 1930 at the age of sixteen. The next year, the close tie between Leber and his protégé was severed. Considering the SPD insufficiently radical and indecisive toward the Nazi threat, Brandt joined the Socialist Workers Party (SAP), an offshoot of the SPD but one that pursued direct action, taking on the Nazis in street fights.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, leftist parties, such as the SPD and the SAP, prepared to go underground. SAP plans included establishing centers abroad in key cities. Brandt was sent to Oslo for this purpose when the man initially selected to head that activity was arrested by the Nazis. Thus, when only nineteen, Brandt was in a leadership post that permitted him to travel across Europe, in Belgium, in Berlin, and in Spain, covering the Civil War in 1937 as a correspondent for Scandinavian newspapers. He also briefly attended a Norwegian university. In 1941, he married a Norwegian socialist, Carlota Thorkildsen, whom he divorced in 1947, after a 1943 separation. He later married Rut Hansen, a member of the wartime resistance in Norway. They were divorced in 1980. The first marriage produced a daughter; the second, three sons.

Brandt had not yet been granted Norwegian citizenship when the Nazis invaded Norway in 1941. Wearing a friend’s army uniform, Brandt was captured with the friend’s unit. His fluent Norwegian enabled him to deceive the Nazis, who released him with other members of the unit. Then he went across the border to Sweden, a neutral nation where he spent the rest of the war, receiving his Norwegian citizenship and writing or coauthoring six books. His principal activity at that time was journalism.

As soon as hostilities ceased, he returned to Norway, before departing in October, 1945, to cover the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. In 1946, Brandt became press attaché with the Norwegian military mission in West Berlin.

Life’s Work

Now Brandt’s life came to a crossroads. At both Nuremberg and Berlin, he had met several figures who hoped to, and in many cases would, shape postwar Germany. After some hesitation, he decided to renounce his Norwegian citizenship and resumed that of Germany in 1947. At that time, he legally became Willy Brandt, the name that he had used for years.

On the recommendation of Kurt Schumacher, leader of the SPD, Brandt became a party official in Berlin, where he came under the tutelage of Mayor Ernst Reuter, whose aide he was during the dramatic airlift of 1948-1949. In addition to holding offices within the SPD, Brandt continued his journalistic career and was elected to local and national legislatures. He emerged as a national, perhaps international, figure in 1956, when he quelled an unruly Berlin rally protesting the use of Soviet troops to crush the Hungarian Revolution.

The next year, Brandt was elected mayor of Berlin, a post he held during two key events in postwar Germany: the 1959 Bad Godesberg SPD conference, at which he played a minor role in the party’s renunciation of three historic goals pacifism, anticlericalism, and nationalization of the economy and the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. He was disappointed by what he considered an inadequate U.S. response to the Berlin Wall, but international attention focused on Berlin thrust him into the spotlight: He emerged as the leading figure in the SPD, a role magnified by his fluent English.

Brandt was the SPD chancellor candidate in the September, 1961, 1965, and 1969 Bundestag elections. Although the SPD increased its share of the vote in each successive try, it did not become the largest Bundestag party until 1969, and even then it needed the support of the small Free Democratic Party (FDP) to form a government. The stage was set for this success in 1966, when the Grand Coalition was created. This arrangement between West Germany’s two largest parties was precipitated by the nation’s faltering economy and what was regarded as the weak leadership of Ludwig Erhard, who had led the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to its fifth successive headship of a coalition government in 1965. Following negotiations between the CDU and the SPD, Erhard resigned, and a CDU/SPD government, with Brandt as vice chancellor and foreign minister, took office.

With his foreign policy portfolio, Brandt first strengthened West Germany’s links with the Western Alliance, especially France. Then he turned to Eastern Europe, cautiously reinstating diplomatic ties with Romania and Yugoslavia. His efforts to create closer ties with Eastern Europe accelerated when he became chancellor and were supported by his foreign minister, Walter Scheel, head of the FDP. In a series of negotiations, Brandt pursued his Ostpolitik , or Eastern policy. In a relatively short period, treaties were signed with East European Communist nations, most importantly the Soviet Union, Poland, and East Germany. These treaties produced more normal relations with these nations; especially key were easier trade, relaxed travel restrictions on West Germans going to East Germany, and West Germany’s pledge not to use force to seek return of the Oder-Neisse territories, which were parts of pre-1939 Germany that had been placed under Russian and Polish “administration” in 1945.

Ostpolitik was the high point of Brandt’s career. His efforts to achieve modest domestic goals were frustrated: SPD radicals, seeking more purely socialist programs, diluted his support within the party; members of the FDP, opposing his economic policies or questioning his conciliatory overtures toward the communist bloc, defected from the governing coalition; and voters wanted more government services but no higher taxes to fund them. To compound the situation, the West German economy stagnated.

With the coalition’s majority down to one vote, Brandt used the unique “constructive vote of nonconfidence” of the Basic Law (constitution) to force a Bundestag election, the first in which the parliament had not lasted its maximum four-year term. In the November, 1972, election, the SPD, with a plurality of seats, formed another coalition with the FDP. Despite the coalition’s comfortable majority, Brandt faced more obstacles: public workers’ strikes, SPD losses in state elections, continued SPD factionalism, and communist governments that delayed implementing Ostpolitik.

In April, 1974, the final act of Brandt’s chancellorship began with the arrest of his close aide, Günter Guillaume, who was charged with being an East German spy over a period of eighteen years. Amid rumors about his personal life and doubts about his leadership, Brandt resigned on May 7, 1974. Brandt was involved with women before and after his first marriage, a practice not uncommon in Europe. The women with whom he was closely associated tended to be active in public life. Susanne Sievers, whom he met in Bonn in 1951 while he served in the Bundestag and she was a Bundestag employee, was said to be one reason for his 1974 resignation. Rumors purported that she was about to release details of their affair or had been paid a large sum of money not to reveal their former relationship.

This event did not end Brandt’s public career. He served in various capacities, often in the international arena, including an unsuccessful effort to mediate the 1984 election in Nicaragua. He was chair of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues (the Brandt Commission), a body of fifteen distinguished statesmen from across the globe. Appointed by Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank, the commission issued a lengthy document, the North-South, or Brandt, Report, in 1980 that called for extensive economic aid from the industrial nations to the developing world. Despite a generally favorable reception and its inclusion on the agenda of the 1981 Cancún (Mexico) economic summit conference, the report was not acted on. In 1983, he married his third wife, Brigitte Seebacher.

When he resigned as chancellor, Brandt retained his post as chair of the SPD, a position that he held while his successor, Helmut Schmidt, was chancellor. This position gave Brandt a platform from which he could speak out within and beyond the party. Often he seemed to be undercutting Schmidt. Brandt continued as party leader under the CDU chancellor, Helmut Kohl, until 1987, when he abruptly gave up the party leadership. Brandt’s resignation as SPD chair was also the result of his association with a woman. He stepped down amid the clamor over his intention to appoint Margarita Mathiapoulos, a friend of his wife, to be press spokesperson for the SPD. Critics of his decision noted that his choice was neither a German citizen nor an SPD member and was not familiar with the party organization. Moreover, her fiancé was a prominent CDU official. Yet, after the tumultuous events in the two Germanys in late 1989, Brandt once again rose to prominence and was even elected in February, 1990, honorary president of the East German Social Democratic Party.

Significance

Brandt’s personal and public lives cannot be separated. In the aftermath of defeats, and sometimes victories, within the SPD and in his public official roles, he frequently manifested an indifference or malaise, if not depression, that might occupy him for days or weeks. He was also criticized for being indecisive. Brandt, however, illustrated the complexities that may be found in the makeup of a prominent national and world leader: impressive qualities of command but also traits of weakness. Yet there was a persistent pattern in his life of seeking a better life for the oppressed and impoverished, whether victims of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, East Germany’s communist regime, or economic adversity in the developing world.

Bibliography

Barnet, Richard J. The Alliance: America-Europe-Japan, Makers of the Postwar World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. Chapter 7, “The Double Detente: Mr. Nixon and Herr Brandt Look East,” focuses on Brandt’s Ostpolitik in the context of general East-West relations.

Binder, David. The Other German: Willy Brandt’s Life and Times. Washington, D.C.: New Republic Books, 1975. Completed shortly after Brandt’s resignation as chancellor; one of the few works that comments on the Brandt-Sievers affair.

Brandt, Willy. Arms and Hunger. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Examines the issues and politics faced by the Brandt Commission.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. My Road to Berlin. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960. Brandt’s account of his life up to the time that he became mayor of Berlin.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. People and Politics: The Years 1960-1975. Translated by J. Maxwell Brownjohn. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. The second installment of Brandt’s memoirs, covering the zenith of his career. Includes an index.

Gress, David. “Whatever Happened to Willy Brandt?” Commentary 76 (July, 1983): 55-58. Unlike most biographical pieces on Brandt, this one focuses on his flaws.

Hoffmann, Arne. The Emergence of Détente in Europe: Brandt, Kennedy, and the Formation of “Ostpolitik.” New York: Routledge, 2007. Examines the relationship between Brandt and the administration of U.S. president John F. Kennedy.

Kellerman, Barbara. “Mentoring in Political Life: The Case of Willy Brandt.” American Political Science Review 72 (June, 1978): 422-433. Assesses the impact of three key mentors his grandfather, Julius Leber, and Ernst Reuter on Brandt’s life.

Prittie, Terence. Willy Brandt. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. The standard biography on Brandt. Finished before Brandt’s 1974 resignation, but a postscript comments on that. Contains an extensive bibliography in English and German.

Wechsberg, Joseph. “The Outsider.” New Yorker, January 14, 1974. This gives an impression of Brandt’s managerial style with civil servants, other politicians, and the public. Also offers observations on Ostpolitik.