Willy Brandt

Early life and World War II

Willy Brandt was born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm in the Free City of Lübeck (now in Schleswig-Holstein) on 18 December 1913. His mother was Martha Luise Wilhelmine Frahm (née Ewert; 1894–1969), a single parent, who worked as a cashier for a department store. His father was a teacher from Hamburg named John Heinrich Möller (1887–1958), 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 (SPD) 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 (SAP) 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 the 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 World War II. In exile in Norway and Sweden, he learned Norwegian and Swedish. He spoke Norwegian fluently, and retained a close relationship with Norway.

Early political career

Brandt was elected to the West German Bundestag (the federal parliament) 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 (the state-level parliament) 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 (equivalent to €460,386 in 2021).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 criticised 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.

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 (FDP) formed a coalition government. Their Members of the Bundestag elected Brandt Chancellor of Germany.

Foreign policy

As chancellor, Brandt developed his (Neue) Ostpolitik ("new eastern policy") by stages. He was active in creating a degree of rapprochement with East Germany (governed by a regime under Erich Honecker), and also in improving relations with the Soviet Union, Poland (Polish People's Republic), Czechoslovakia, and other Eastern Bloc (communist) 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, in August 1968, the 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 (then under Walter Ulbricht) 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 (Erfurter Gipfeltreffen) and in Kassel on 21 May 1970 (Gipfeltreffen in Kassel).

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 (Treaty of Moscow, which recognised existing national boundaries and was supposed to normalise relations.) The treaty with Poland in December 1970 (Treaty of Warsaw) accepted the current boundaries (Oder–Neisse line), 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 (Kniefall von Warschau), honouring the victims.

This was met with a strong positive reaction worldwide but was highly controversial among the German public at the time.

Domestic policies

Brandt's predecessor as chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger (1904–1988), was almost ten years older than Brandt. He had gained his certificate as a lawyer in March 1933 and become a (largely inactive) member of the Nazi party, obviously to avoid professional disadvantages. He was an older-fashioned conservative-liberal intellectual. Brandt, having fought the Nazi regime and having faced down communist Eastern Germany during several crises while he was the mayor of Berlin, became a controversial, but credible, figure in several different factions. As the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Kiesinger's grand coalition cabinet, Brandt helped to gain further international approval for West Germany, and he laid the foundation stones for his future Neue Ostpolitik. There was a wide public-opinion gap between Kiesinger and Brandt in the West German polls.

Both men had come to their own terms with the new baby boomer lifestyles (see also Protests of 1968). Kiesinger considered them to be "a shameful crowd of long-haired drop-outs who needed a bath and someone to discipline them". On the other hand, Brandt needed a while to get into contact with, and to earn credibility among, the "Ausserparlamentarische Opposition" (APO) ("the extra-parliamentary opposition"). The students questioned West German society in general, seeking social, legal, and political reforms. The unrest led to a renaissance of right-wing parties in some of the Bundeslands' (German states under the Bundesrepublik) Parliaments.

Brandt, however, represented a figure of change, and he followed a course of social, legal, and political reforms. The West German federal election on 28 September 1969 brought the SPD 224 seats and FDP 30 seats. 249 seats were needed for a majority. SPD and FDP formed a coalition. In his first speech before the Bundestag as the chancellor, Brandt set forth his political course of reforms, ending the speech with his famous words, "Wir wollen mehr Demokratie wagen" (literally: "We want to dare more democracy", or more figuratively, "We want to take a chance on more Democracy"). This speech made Brandt, as well as the Social Democratic Party, popular among most of the students and other young West German baby-boomers who dreamed of a country that would be more open and more colourful than the frugal and still somewhat-authoritarian Bundesrepublik that had been built after World War II. However, Brandt's Neue Ostpolitik lost him a large part of the German refugee voters from East Germany, who had been significantly pro-SPD in the postwar years.

Chancellor of domestic reform

Although Brandt is perhaps best known for his achievements in foreign policy, his government oversaw the implementation of a broad range of social reforms, and was known as a "Kanzler der inneren Reformen" ("Chancellor of domestic reform"). According to the historian David Childs, "Brandt was anxious that his government should be a reforming administration and a number of reforms were embarked upon". Within a few years, the education budget rose from 16 billion to 50 billion DM, while one out of every three DM spent by the new government was devoted to welfare purposes. As noted by the journalist and historian Marion Dönhoff, "People were seized by a completely new feeling about life". A mania for large-scale reforms spread like wildfire, affecting schools, universities, the administration, and family legislation. In the autumn of 1970, Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski of the SPD declared "Every week more than three plans for reform come up for decision in cabinet and in the Assembly".

Federal spending rose significantly under Brandt; increasing by an average of 12% per year between 1970 and 1974, with most of the additional spending allocated to transport, education and welfare. During Brandt's time in office, social expenditure rose from one quarter to a third of GDP.

According to Helmut Schmidt, Willy Brandt's domestic reform programme had accomplished more than any previous programme for a comparable period. Levels of social expenditure were increased, with more funds allocated towards housing, transportation, schools, and communication, and substantial federal benefits were provided for farmers. Various measures were introduced to extend health care coverage, while federal aid to sports organisations was increased. A number of social reforms were instituted whilst the welfare state was significantly expanded (with total public spending on social programs nearly doubling between 1969 and 1975), with health, housing, and social welfare legislation bringing about welcome improvements, and by the end of the Brandt Chancellorship West Germany had one of the most advanced systems of welfare in the world.

Substantial increases were made in social security benefits such as injury and sickness benefits, pensions, unemployment benefits, housing allowances, basic subsistence aid allowances, and family allowances and living allowances. In the government's first budget, sickness benefits were increased by 9.3%, pensions for war widows by 25%, pensions for the war wounded by 16%, and retirement pensions by 5%. Numerically, pensions went up by 6.4% (1970), 5.5% (1971), 9.5% (1972), 11.4% (1973), and 11.2% (1974). Adjusted for changes in the annual price index, pensions went up in real terms by 3.1% (1970), 0.3% (1971), 3.9% (1972), 4.4% (1973), and 4.2% (1974). Between 1972 and 1974, the purchasing power of pensioners went up by 19%. In 1970, war pensions were increased by 16%. War victim's pensions went up by 5.5% in January 1971, and by 6.3% in January 1972. By 1972, war pensions for orphans and parents had gone up by around 40%, and for widows by around 50%. Between 1970 and 1972, the "Landabgaberente" (land transfer pension) went up by 55%. Between 1969 and 1974, the average real standard rate of income support rose (in 1991 prices) from around 300 DM to around 400 DM. Between 1970 and 1974, unemployment benefits rose from around 300 euros to around 400 euros per month, and unemployment assistance from just under 200 euros per month to just under 400 euros per month. In 2001 prices, the average standard social assistance benefit level rose from around 200 euros per month in 1969 to over 250 euros per month in 1974. During most of Brandt's years as chancellor, the majority of benefits increased as a percentage of average net earnings.

1972 crisis

Brandt's Ostpolitik led to a meltdown of the narrow majority Brandt's coalition enjoyed in the Bundestag. In October 1970, FDP deputies Erich Mende, Heinz Starke, and Siegfried Zoglmann crossed the floor to join the CDU. On 23 February 1972, SPD deputy Herbert Hupka, who was also leader of the Bund der Vertriebenen, joined the CDU in disagreement with Brandt's reconciliatory efforts towards the east. On 23 April 1972, Wilhelm Helms (FDP) left the coalition. The FDP politicians Knud von Kühlmann-Stumm and Gerhard Kienbaum also declared that they would vote against Brandt, completing the loss of Brandt's majority. On 24 April 1972, a constructive vote of no confidence was proposed, to be voted on three days later. In the event this motion passed, CDU leader Rainer Barzel would have replaced Brandt as chancellor.

On paper, the opposition now had 250 votes; just one over the 249 needed to oust Brandt. Even Brandt himself believed he was finished, and a number of unions went on strike in anticipation of Brandt's expected defeat on the floor of the Bundestag. To everyone's surprise, the motion failed: Barzel got only 247 votes out of 260 votes cast, two short of what he needed to become Chancellor. There were also 10 votes against the motion and three invalid ballots. Most SPD and FDP deputies abstained, which had the same effect as voting for Brandt.

New elections

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

However, the Willy-Wahl, Brandt's landslide win, was the beginning of the end, and Brandt's role in government started to decline. Many of his reforms met with resistance from state governments, dominated by CDU/CSU. The spirit of reformist optimism was cut short by the 1973 oil crisis and the major public services strike of 1974, which gave Germany's trade unions, led by Heinz Kluncker, a big wage increase but reduced Brandt's financial leeway for further reforms. Brandt was said to be more of a dreamer than a manager and was personally haunted by depression. 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).

Guillaume affair

Around 1973, West German security organisations received information that one of Brandt's personal assistants, Günter Guillaume, was a spy for the East German intelligence services. Brandt was asked to continue working as usual, and he agreed to do so, even taking a private vacation with Guillaume. Guillaume was arrested on 24 April 1974 and later sentenced to 13 years in prison for treason. Brandt resigned from his position as chancellor on 6 May 1974, but he remained a member of the Bundestag and chairman of the Social Democrats until 1987.

This espionage affair is widely considered to have been just the trigger for Brandt's resignation, not the fundamental cause. As Brandt himself later said, "I was exhausted, for reasons which had nothing to do with the affair [the Guillaume espionage scandal] going on at the time." Brandt was dogged by scandals about serial adultery and reportedly also struggled with alcohol and depression. There was also the economic fallout on West Germany of the 1973 oil crisis, which may seem to have given enough stress to finish off Brandt as the Chancellor.

Guillaume had been an espionage agent for East Germany, who was supervised by Markus Wolf, the head of the

Main Directorate for Reconnaissance (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung or HVA—the foreign intelligence service) 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 planting and handling of Guillaume had been one of the biggest mistakes of the East German secret services.

Brandt was succeeded as the Chancellor of the Bundesrepublik by his fellow Social Democrat, Helmut Schmidt. For the rest of his life, Brandt remained suspicious that his fellow Social Democrat (and longtime rival) Herbert Wehner had been scheming for Brandt's downfall. However, there is scant evidence to corroborate this suspicion.

Post-Chancellorship

After his term as the Chancellor, Brandt retained his seat in the Bundestag, and he remained the Chairman of the Social Democratic Party through 1987. Beginning in 1987, Brandt stepped down to become the Honorary Chairman of the party. Brandt was also a member of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1983.

Socialist International

For sixteen years (1976–1992), Brandt was the president of the Socialist International. During that period, the number of Socialist International's mainly European member parties grew until there were more than a hundred socialist, social democratic, and labour political parties around the world. For the first seven years, this growth in SI membership had been prompted by the efforts of the Socialist International's Secretary-General, the Swede Bernt Carlsson. However, in early 1983, a dispute arose about what Carlsson perceived as the SI president's authoritarian approach. Carlsson then rebuked Brandt, saying, "This is a Socialist International – not a German International".

Next, against some vocal opposition, Brandt decided to move the next Socialist International Congress from Sydney, Australia to Portugal. Following this Socialist Congress in April 1983, Brandt retaliated against Carlsson by forcing him to step down from his position. However, the Austrian Chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, argued on behalf of Brandt: "It is a question of whether it is better to be pure or to have greater numbers". Carlsson was succeeded by the Finn Pentti Väänänen as Secretary General of the Socialist International.

During Brandt's presidency, the SI developed activities and dialogue on a number of International issues. This concerned the East–West conflict and arms race, on which the SI held high-level consultations with the leaderships of the United States and the Soviet Union, and on Afghanistan after 1979. The SI met with President Jimmy Carter and Vice Presidents Walter Mondale and George Bush, and with the CPSU Secretaries General Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev and Soviet Head of State Andrei Gromyko. The SI also developed active contacts to promote dialogue concerning regional conflicts. Those included the Middle East, where they helped to build contacts between Israel and the PLO, and also in Southern Africa and Central America. In 1984, as the chairman of the SPD, Brandt initiated party dialogues with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), making SPD the first international party relationship CCP established outside of other communist parties.

Brandt Report

In 1977, Brandt was appointed as the chairman of the Independent Commission for International Developmental Issues. This produced a report in 1980, which called for drastic changes in the global attitude towards development in the Third World. This became known as the Brandt Report.

Reunification

In October 1979, Brandt met with the East German dissident, Rudolf Bahro, who had written The Alternative. Bahro and his supporters were attacked by the East German state security organisation Stasi, headed by Erich Mielke, for his writings, which had laid the theoretical foundation of a left-wing opposition to the ruling SED party and its dependent allies, and which promoted new and changed parties. All of this is now described as "change from within". Brandt had asked for Bahro's release, and Brandt welcomed Bahro's theories, which advanced the debate within his own Social Democratic Party.

On 11 September 1988, Brandt described the hope for German reunification as a delusion. In late 1989, Brandt became one of the first leftwing leaders in West Germany to publicly favor a quick reunification of Germany, instead of some sort of two-state federation or other kind of interim arrangement. Brandt's public statement, "Now grows together what belongs together", was widely quoted in those days.

Hostages in Iraq

One of Brandt's last public appearances was in flying to Baghdad, Iraq, to free Western hostages held by Saddam Hussein, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Brandt secured the release of a large number of them, and on 9 November 1990, his airplane landed with 174 freed hostages on board at Frankfurt Airport.

Death and legacy

Brandt died of colon cancer at his home in Unkel, a town on the River Rhine, on 8 October 1992, at the age of 78. He was given a state funeral and was buried at the cemetery at Zehlendorf in Berlin.

The Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation was established in 1994. It serves to honour the memory of Brandt's political accomplishments and his commitment to peace, freedom and democracy. The foundation runs two permanent exhibitions: one in Berlin and the other in Lübeck, where Brandt was born. Other works of the foundation include oversight of Brandt's papers, speeches and letters (the Berlin Edition), historical research, as well as organising lectures and international conferences.

In 1997, a park in Stockholm was named in Brandt's honour. It is close to where he lived during his exile in Sweden 1941–1945.

When the SPD moved its headquarters from Bonn back to Berlin in the mid-1990s, the new headquarters was named the "Willy Brandt Haus". One of the buildings of the European Parliament in Brussels was named after him in 2008.

On 6 December 2000, a memorial to Brandt and Warschauer Kniefall was unveiled in Warsaw, Poland.

German artist Johannes Heisig painted several portraits of Brandt, of which one was unveiled as part of an honouring event at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. on 18 March 2003. Spokesmen amongst others were former German Federal Minister Egon Bahr and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

In 2009, the Willy-Brandt-Memorial was opened up in Nuremberg at the Willy-Brandt Square. It was created by the artist Josef Tabachnyk.

In 2009, the University of Erfurt renamed its graduate school of public administration as the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy. A private German-language secondary school in Warsaw, Poland, is also named after Brandt.

Brandt's family

From 1941 until 1948, Brandt was married to Anna Carlotta Thorkildsen (the daughter of a Norwegian father and a German-American mother). They had a daughter, Ninja Frahm (born in 1940). After Brandt and Thorkildsen were divorced in 1948, Brandt married the Norwegian-born German writer Rut Hansen in the same year. Hansen and Brandt had three sons: Peter Brandt (born in 1948), Lars Brandt (born in 1951) and Matthias Brandt (born in 1961). After 32 years of marriage, Willy Brandt and Rut Hansen Brandt divorced in 1980, and from the day that they were divorced, they never saw each other again. On 9 December 1983, Brandt married Brigitte Seebacher (born in 1946).

Honours

Foreign honours

Malaysia: Honorary Grand Commander of the Order of Loyalty to the Crown of Malaysia (S.S.M.) (1969)

Selected works

1960 Mein Weg nach Berlin (My Path to Berlin), autobiography written with Leo Lania

1966 Draußen. Schriften während der Emigration. (Outside: Writings during the Emigration) ISBN 3-8012-1094-4

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

2002 Berliner Ausgabe, Werkauswahl, ed. for Bundeskanzler Willy Brandt Stiftung by Helga Grebing, Gregor Schöllgen and Heinrich August Winkler, 10 volumes, Dietz Verlag, Bonn 2002f, Collected Writings ISBN 3-8012-0305-0