TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101992/1019020.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 6.1 KB | 128 lines

                                                                                GERMANY, Page 55

A Bold Peacemaker

Willy Brandt: 1913-1992


By JAMES O. JACKSON/BONN


    The history of Europe in the 20th century has been in
large measure the story of Germany: its aggressive wars, its
humiliating defeats, its miracle of postwar recovery. Willy
Brandt witnessed much of the worst of the century -- and was
responsible for much of the best. By the time he died last week
of cancer at 78, he had achieved the great goals of his life:
the end of the cold war and the restoration of a unified Germany
to the family of nations.

    It was an achievement symbolized by the somber drama of a
man on his knees: Brandt, on a freezing December day in Warsaw
in 1970, before Poland's memorial to victims of World War II.
Here was a German Chancellor making an act of atonement for his
country's wrongs, a gesture that electrified the world. Brandt
was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1971; he had been named
TIME's Man of the Year a year earlier.

    Behind the Warsaw gesture was Ostpolitik, the bold policy
initiated by Brandt to seek reconciliation with the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe, a stance that would be adopted by his
successors in the Chancellor's office in Bonn. When Brandt
became Chancellor in 1969, West Germany still refused to
recognize the postwar boundaries in Eastern Europe or admit that
Germany would remain divided for the foreseeable future. Brandt
swiftly changed much of that, signing nonaggression pacts with
the U.S.S.R. and Poland in 1970 and renouncing claims to 40,000
sq. mi. of former German territory incorporated into Poland. He
also signed a treaty in 1972 to normalize relations between West
and East Germany, reversing the Bonn government's immediate
postwar policy of ignoring and isolating its Communist rival to
achieve unification through attrition. In the end, Brandt's more
compassionate policy prevailed -- sooner than even he would have
dreamed possible.

    Brandt came from humble beginnings. He was born Herbert
Frahm in Lubeck in 1913, the son of an unmarried shop clerk, and
reared largely by his maternal grandfather, a truck driver, farm
laborer and ardent socialist. The grandson took on the
grandfather's political colors and, while still in his
mid-teens, wrote for Der Volksbote (the People's Messenger), the
local Social Democratic Party paper; in 1930, not yet 17, he
joined the party. When Adolf Hitler outlawed leftist parties in
1933, Herbert Frahm took the nom de guerre Willy Brandt, a name
common in his hometown. Later that year, he fled on a fishing
boat to Norway just as the Nazis were about to arrest him.

    In 1940 German troops occupied Norway, and Brandt fled
again, this time to Sweden. He returned to Norway after the war
and began a career in the Norwegian foreign service with a
posting to Berlin as a military press attache. In 1947 he
reapplied for the German citizenship the Nazis had stripped from
him. "During my time `outside,' I did not for one moment cease
to regard myself as a German," Brandt later wrote. When his
citizenship was restored in 1948, Brandt went to work as an aide
to Ernst Reuter, the colorful mayor of West Berlin, and from
that vantage point witnessed the 1948-49 Soviet blockade of the
city and the Berlin airlift that saved it.

    Brandt's political career began in 1949 with his election
to West Germany's first Bundestag. In 1957 he became mayor of
West Berlin, a post he held during the most frigid days of the
cold war. While mayor, he ran in 1961 and '65 as the Social
Democrats' candidate for Chancellor, losing both times in brutal
campaigns in which opponents sneered at his origins -- the
mighty Konrad Adenauer called him "alias Herbert Frahm" -- and
criticized him for fleeing Germany before the war. Pictures of
Brandt wearing a Norwegian uniform were handed out by his
Christian Democratic rivals, and at one stop in the 1965
campaign a heckler hoisted a sign reading WE SHALL NOT VOTE FOR
A TRAITOR. The harsh campaign and even more bitter second defeat
were too much, and for the next three years Brandt virtually
withdrew from public life.


    With the formation in 1966 of a grand coalition between
Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, Brandt came back as
West Germany's Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister. Three years
later, he tried again for the chancellorship and won. By then,
his view of East and West had been tempered by his belief that
President John F. Kennedy had abandoned West Berlin in 1961 when
East Germany erected the Wall. "Kennedy has cooked our goose!"
an angry Brandt told friends. He decided that the fate of the
two Germanys would be decided by Germans and that the key lay
in improving relations with the East, especially with the
U.S.S.R.

    The success of Brandt's Ostpolitik contrasted with
disarray in domestic politics. The last straw was the 1974
arrest of a close aide, Gunter Guillaume, on charges of spying
for East Germany. Brandt resigned under pressure, a decision he
later regretted. "I blame myself for not banging my fist on the
table and demanding a stop to all the nonsense," he wrote in his
1989 memoirs.

    In that spirit, he did not withdraw into bitterness, but
stayed on as chairman of the Social Democrats -- and as leader
of the Socialist International -- and evolved into an honored,
even beloved, elder statesman. One of the crowning moments of
his later years came after the fall of the Berlin Wall in
November 1989, when he delivered a ringing speech in Berlin that
ended with the motto of unification: "What belongs together will
now grow together."

    It grew together faster than he wanted. Brandt advocated
a gradual merger of the two Germanys, not the virtual annexation
of one by the other, and raised his voice to warn of the dangers
of haste and of hubris. "Nothing lasts forever," he said in his
last public statement, a speech read on his behalf to a Berlin
meeting of the Socialist International as he lay dying last
month. "Every era demands its own answers, and if one wants to
do good, one must be prepared for them." Willy Brandt was.