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                                                                              ╚January 4, 1971 

Man of the Year 

Willy Brandt -- On the Road to a New Reality



     The setting: The Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, January 1871:
In the palace of the Bourbons, the rulers of Germany's 25
independent and quarrelsome states gather to savor the fruits
of their victory over France's armies. The Franco-Prussian War
has given the Germans something that eluded them for centuries
-- unity. As the architect of that unity, Count Otto von
Bismarck looks on, gripping the long spike of his Prussian
helmet, while Prussia's King Wilhelm proclaims the establishment
of the German Empire. Historian Thomas Carlyle hails the German
victory in a letter to the Times of London: "That noble,
patient, deep, pious and solid Germany should be at length
welded into a nation and become Queen of the Continent instead
of vaporing, vainglorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless
and oversensitive France seems to me the hopefullest public fact
that has occurred in my time."

     The setting: The Old Jewish Ghetto, Warsaw, December, 1970:
His broad, ruggedly handsome face etched with lines of concern,
West Germany's Chancellor Willy Brandt walks slowly to the
simple granite slab that memorializes the 500,000 Jews from the
city's ghetto who were massacred by the Germans during World War
II. For a moment he stands with bowed head, enveloped in silence
except for the soft hiss of two gas-fed candelabra. Then, as if
to atone for Germany's sins against its neighbors, Brandt falls
to his knees. "No people," as Willy Brandt has said, "can escape
from their history."

     Each tableau represents a turning point in the history of
Europe -- and of the world. Contrary to Carlyle's bright hopes,
a united and powerful Germany proved neither noble nor patient.
Twice Bismarck's heirs burst across their borders in cataclysmic
wars that ended with two new superpowers, the U.S. and the
Soviet Union, facing each other across a divided continent --
a division dramatically symbolized by the hideous masonry of the
Berlin Wall. A quarter of a century after World War II, no
European peace treaty has been written, and, in a very real
sense, the results of the war have not been resolved. Willy
Brandt is in effect seeking to end World War II by bringing
about a fresh relationship between East and West. He is trying
to accept the real situation in Europe, which has lasted for 25
years, but he is also trying to bring about a new reality in his
bold approach to the Soviet Union and the East bloc.

     In the East, the situation has been frozen by Communist
leaders who feared that contact with the West would undermine
their hold on their people. In the West, Bonn made detente
impossible by refusing to acknowledge the loss of a huge chuck
of its land to Poland and by stridently insisting that it would
absorb East Berlin's Communist regime in an eventual German
reunification. Willy Brandt is the first West German statesman
willing to accept the complete consequences of defeat: the lost
lands, the admission of moral responsibility, and
acknowledgement of Germany's participation. In the process, he
is also challenging the Communist countries to expand their
dealings with the West, and indirectly, to allow wider freedom
for their own people.

     While most political leaders in 1970 were reacting to
events rather than shaping them, Brandt stood out as an
innovator. He has projected the most exciting and hopeful vision
for Europe since the Iron Curtain crashed down. Using West
Germany's considerable strategic and economic leverage, he is
trying to bring about an enlarged and united Western Europe,
which would remain closely allied with the U.S. but would also
have sufficient self-confidence and independence to form close
ties with the Communist nations. It is a daring vision, full
of opportunity and danger, rekindling the dreams of unity that
have inspired Europeans from Charlemagne to Napoleon. It may
not be realized for a long time, if ever. But by holding it up
as a goal for all Europeans, Willy Brandt emerged as 1970's Man
of the Year.

     Although the U.S. has been preoccupied for nearly a decade
with Indochina and the Middle East, Europe is still the crucial
continent, the arena where the great dangers and opportunities
exist and where the ultimate balance between the U.S. and the
Soviet Union may well be decided. Neither Washington nor Moscow
could retain its pre-eminence in the world without maintaining
close ties with Europe. Despite Japan's soaring economic might
and China's waxing nuclear arsenal, Europe alone posses the
talented population, economic power, technological skills, and
geographic position to rank, along with the U.S. and Russia, in
the triad of world powers. Thus Willy Brandt's role in 1970
had great significance for America.

     Oddly Primitive. The year was the first of a new decade,
a cusp of the future. Yet in the U.S. in many ways, the future
seemed to have gone temporarily underground. Nineteen seventy
had a certain retrograde quality, nostalgic in its styles, oddly
primitive in its politics. Women's fashions reverted to an
elaboration of the late 40's, the U.S. presidency in some ways
to a modified edition of the '50's, and radicalism either to an
older silence or to a black-power Bakuninism of the 19th
century. The Woman's Liberation movement bloomed, ultimately
somewhat damaged by its own exaggerations and excesses.

     The political currents alternated between passion and
anticlimax. After President Nixon sent American troops into
Cambodia at the end of April, a spasm of outrage seized the
nation's college campuses, and emotion redoubled when the Ohio
National Guard killed four Kent State University students. Yet
a great many of the U.S. students who so passionately vowed to
change the system from within by working in political campaigns
never appeared in the fall.

     A small group of radicals in the U.S. made explosive
gestures that largely alienated them from the sizable force of
the nonviolent disaffected. A graffito observed at the
University of Wisconsin: Radicals Are Nothing More Than Excited
Moralists. Nine of the 16 portraits on the FBI's expanded Most
Wanted List were those of political radicals. The Weathermen
were in hiding. Angela Davis was captured at a Howard Johnson's
motel in Manhattan. Many leaders of the Black Panthers were on
trial, in Algerian exile -- or dead. Celebrants of Woodstock
became the survivors of Atlamont, the California rock festival
that ended in a knifing death, and the depredations of the drug
culture clouded Aquarian visions -- Janis Joplin and Jimi
Hendrix, both cultural heroes for the young, fatally overdosed
themselves with drugs. The hippie Camelot promised by Charles
Reich in The Greening of America seemed, if anything, to be
receding over the horizon.

     As Richard Nixon reduced the U.S. troop level in Viet Nam
to 339,200, the war cooled as an issue, to be revived only in
episodes like the raid on the North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war
camp at Son Tay, which called into question the intelligence
procedures of the U.S. military. Americans were much more
preoccupied with a recession-cum-inflation that raised the
unemployment rate to 5.8%, the highest level since 1963, and
firmly resisted Nixon's best monetary and fiscal prescriptions.

The consumer movement championed by Ralph Nader gathered
strength, often in alliance with the year's overriding cause,
ecology.

     In the off-year election campaigns, Nixon invested an
extraordinary amount of his prestige. He commissioned Vice
President Spiro Agnew, already a rhetorical event in American
politics, to go forth as the G.O.P.'s scourge. Agnew's
campaign, calculatedly outrageous, won headlines but not votes,
and ended by alienating and irritating many of the voters. The
Republicans suffered a net loss of 13 governorships and nine
seats in the House, and gained only a probable two seats in the
Senate, where the Democrats retained a commending lead. The
election was scarcely over when Nixon began tacking into more
conciliatory positions for 1972. After an impressive
election-eve television rebuttal of the President, and a healthy
61.8% majority in his own re-election campaigns, Maine's Senator
Edmund Muskie emerged as the man most likely to challenge Nixon
two years from now.

     As he came to the middle of his presidency, Nixon still
awaited major accomplishment. His welfare reforms and other
proposals were tangled in a truculent, disorganized Congress
dominated by the opposition. Desegregation of pubic institutions
in the South was statistically successful, but his racial
policies, North and South, remained unsatisfactory. On his own
terms, he had yet to "bring us together."

     Abroad, the death of Charles de Gaulle ended the era of
great wartime leaders. The death of Egypt's Nasser seemed of
more immediate importance; Golda Meir lost her worthiest
antagonist, her only equal in the Arab world. It is still open
to question whether Nasser's heirs will be strong enough not
simply to make peace but to make it stick. Apart from Viet Nam,
the Middle East preoccupied U.S. attention as Russia expanded
its influence by installing missiles along the Suez Canal.

     There were some stunning individual gestures. Palestinian
guerrillas hijacked three airliners in September and landed them
in the Jordanian desert. The Quebec Liberation Front seized two
hostages, murdering one of them. In other areas, Russia resumed
a dismaying assault on its restive intellectuals, with the
Soviet press damning Nobel Prizewinner Alexander Solzhenitsyn
who continued his lonely battle against tyranny. Chile's
Salvador Allende became Latin America's first democratically
elected Marxist president. China seemed to have recovered from
the violence of the Cultural Resolution. For the first time a
majority of the U.N. General Assembly voted to admit the Peking
government. It was not the required two-thirds majority, but
nevertheless indicated that the mainland cannot be excluded much
longer.

     For all that, no other event on the world scene is likely
to have the lasting importance of the reshaping of Europe.

     Communist Quandary. For both East and West, Willy Brandt's
road is potentially perilous. In the West, there are misgivings
that Brandt's initiatives may end with Bonn's accepting onerous
conditions from the Communists and getting little or nothing in
return. In the East, there is concern that Brandt's policies
will lead to more contact with the West than is either prudent
or safe.

     Poland is a case in point. The riots that toppled Wladyslaw
Gomulka are plainly attributable to a combination of badly timed
rises in food prices and public disgust over the country's
stagnating economy. Even so, hard-liners from East Berlin to
Moscow are certain to point to Warsaw's recent rapproachment
with Bonn as an important cause. That may well slow the momentum
of Brandt's diplomacy, but it is unlikely to stymie it
completely. Opposed to the hard-liners in practically every
politburo in the East bloc are pragmatists who see detente as
a lesser threat to their control than continued economic
difficulties. These men argue that the only way to avoid
Polish-style explosions is to secure more Western technological
and economic help in order to revitalize their sagging economies
and give their people a better life.

     Thus, Brandt has confronted the Communist leaders with a
quandary -- and they have convened no fewer than four summit
meetings in the past 13 months in an effort to solve it. He is
wagering that he can unfreeze relations in Central Europe
without compromising the integrity of West Berlin or future West
German governments. He believes that the Western system is
sufficiently superior and attractive to influence Communism
toward acquiring a less belligerent and rigid nature. Brandt may
be wrong in thinking that he can affect the evolution of
Communism. It is already clear, however, that he has set in
motion developments that are certain to have profound effects.
As Jean Monnet, Europe's Grand Old Man, told Brandt recently:
"I did not think that you would get so much done in so short a
time."

     Broad Design. He has no overwhelming mandate to act so fast
or so boldly. His election as West Germany's first Social
Democratic Chancellor in October 1969 was a marginal victory.
His party and its coalition partner, the tiny Free Democrats,
have a bare six-seat majority in the Bundestag. West Germans
still have decidedly mixed and suspicious feelings towards
Brandt, who regularly runs behind other Social Democrats in
opinion polls. With his husky (5 ft. 10 1/2 in., 200 lbs.) good
looks, he strikes many people as a friendly, shambling bear. But
he is a hard man to know, intensely moody and withdrawn. His
deeply-lined face and his nervous habit of snapping wooden
kitchen matches between his fingers testify to an inner tension
that he tries hard to keep from surfacing.

     Brandt made his reputation as a brave mayor in West Berlin
in the late 1950's, but in two successive campaigns in the
1960's, he was crushingly defeated as the Social Democrats'
candidate for Chancellor. He had too many strikes against him,
it seemed: his apparent political immaturity in contrast to the
father image of Konrad Adenauer, West Germany's first
Chancellor; his record as an exile who sat out the war years in
Scandinavian safety and returned to beaten Berlin in the uniform
of a Norwegian major; his illegitimate birth. After those two
defeats, Brandt went into a deep personal decline. He drank so
much that the old epithet, "Weinbrandt Willy," came back into
vogue. Close friends got the impression that he no longer cared
particularly whether he lived or died. But his friends and a
tough core of character helped pull him through. He decided that
he no longer had to be Chancellor, and he developed a measure
of detachment toward the idea.

     Germany was in the process of profound change, and by 1969,
many of Brandt's liabilities were converted into assets. Once
in office, he  swiftly began executing a broad diplomatic design
that has been ripening in his mind for years. Less than six
weeks after he became Chancellor, Brandt went to The Hague for
a meeting of the six heads of government of the Common Market
countries. Largely because of Charles de Gaulle's refusal to
allow the six to admit new members, the Common Market was
stagnating; there was feeling that it might fall apart unless
it regained momentum. "The German Parliament and public expect
me to return from this conference with concrete arrangements for
the Community's enlargement," Brandt told France's President
Georges Pompidou in open session. "Those who fear the economic
strength of West Germany," he shrewdly added, "should favor
expansion." Pompidou, who has come to regard London as a
necessary counterbalance to Bonn, reversed his predecessor's
policy and voted to reopen negotiations looking toward Britain's
admission.

     Once his Westpolitik was launched, Brandt began a complex
series of diplomatic maneuvers with the East. In Communist
capitals, West German diplomats became almost as ubiquitous as
West German businessmen. Working seven-day weeks and driving
his staff equally hard, Brandt began to negotiate renunciation-
of-force pacts with the Communist nations that in effect are de
facto peace treaties for ending World War II on the Eastern
front. In a risky, bold gamble, Brandt tied the ratification
of the treaties completely to the results of the current Big
Four talks on Berlin. Unless the Soviets agree to guarantee
civilian access by land from West Germany to West Berlin,
located 110 miles inside East Germany, all bets will be off;
Brandt stated on a recent visit to West Berlin: "The chance for
Europe to enter into a new period of easing tensions will either
be lost here or won here. Where the cold war was coldest, it
will be the most difficult."

     In other installments of his Ostpolitik, Brandt:

 --  Flew to the Soviet capital last August to sign the Treaty
of Moscow. The agreement in effect recognized the unpleasant
reality of Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe by accepting
present borders.

 --  Shattered one of Bonn's most sacred cold war shibboleths
by renouncing claims to 40,000 sq. mi. of former German lands,
including Silesia and most of East Prussia and Pomerania, that
were granted by the wartime victors to Poland after World War
II. The treaty that Brandt signed last most opens the way for
the establishments of normal diplomatic relations between Bonn
and Warsaw. Similar negotiations have begun with Prague, and
are expected to start soon with Budapest and Sofia.

 --  Met with East German Premier Willi Stoph last spring in the
first two summit meetings ever held between leaders of divided
Germany. In a complete break with Bonn's postwar policy, which
was to ignore and isolate East Germany, Brandt devised a fresh
formula: "Two German states within one German nation." But he
refused to agree to Party Leader Walter Ulbricht's demand for
full diplomatic recognition. Rather, he hopes to establish
relations on an equal basis between the two Germanys, neither
of which is fully sovereign under the war-won rights of the Big
Four. Says Brandt of his efforts toward some form of
conciliation: "The Germans must be at peace with themselves so
that the world can be at peace with Germany."

     Mad Race to Moscow. Through a clear majority of West
German adults support the general aim of the Ostpolitik
according to public opinion polls, Brandt's departures have
provoked some criticism from his West German countrymen. One
sampling showed that 48% of West Germans objected to Brandt's
kneeling in Warsaw as "exaggerated," while 41% felt it was
appropriate. The Springer press, West Germany's largest
newspaper chain, never misses an opportunity to berate Brandt.

     In Western Europe and the U.S., some skeptics fear that
Bonn will unknowingly do Moscow's work of sowing dissent in the
West. Other Western experts are struck by the irony that while
Brandt sees his policy as an instrument for gradually changing
the status quo, the Kremlin views the same policy as a means of
consolidating it. Reflecting the concern of some high U.S.
officials, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson recently
declared that Brandt should be "cooled-off" as part of an
American effort to halt "the mad rush to Moscow." Though the
U.S. embassy in Bonn has voiced no such complaints, the
Presidential Advisor Henry Kissinger protests that the West
Germans are not consulting closely enough with the Americans.
That is an ironic turnabout; it is precisely what the West
Germans were saying a few years ago when the U.S. was secretly
negotiating the nuclear nonproliferation treaty with the
Soviets.

     The Nixon Administration publicly supports Brandt's
Ostpolitik, and State Department spokesmen are continually
denying rumors of Washington-Bonn friction. Nonetheless, there
is a problem of a difference in perspective between Bonn and
Washington that inevitably causes some disagreements. U.S.
diplomats are only too keenly aware of the Soviet's duplicity
in the Middle East cease-fire, their covert buildup at the south
Cuban port of Cienfuegos and the determined thrust of Russia's
navies beyond the Mediterranean into the Indian Ocean. In
Washington's view, the Soviets are not behaving like a power
that wants detente. White House experts object that by ignoring
this global pattern and concentrating only on Europe, Brandt's
Ostpolitik enables the Soviets to secure their Western flank
without having to make any effort to come to terms in a broader
basis with the U.S.

     Brandt makes it clear that the Ostpolitik notwithstanding,
his orientation is still to the West. Soon after taking office,
he declared that West Germans would not be "wanderers between
two worlds" but would remain firmly moored in the West.
Moreover, he told TIME Correspondent Benjamin Cate: "Those who
were afraid that our policy of normalization vis-a-vis the East
would weaken the Western European community were wrong. The
facts point in the opposite direction"

     Brandt rejects accusations that he has given concessions
without gaining anything in return. "We are losing nothing with
this treaty that has not been gambled away long ago," he told
West Germans in a television address from Moscow at the signing
in August. As a longtime student of Communism, Brandt argues
that both Moscow and Warsaw have, in fact, given up a very great
deal in signing renunciation-of-force agreements with West
Germany. By so doing, the Communists tacitly acknowledged that
Bonn is a peaceful partner. For a quarter of a century, the
Communists had been blaming the "revenge-seeking" West Germans
for everything from crop failures to high military expenditures.
Warsaw Pact soldiers sent into Czechoslovakia in 1968 were told,
for example, that they were "marching to save our comrades from
subversion and invasion by the fascist West Germans."

     Accordingly, Brandt told Cate, "the Russians have had to
pay a price that for them is rather high. They have had, more
or less, to take out of play the anti-German card. Up until
now, the anti-German card was always the one they could play in
situations where it was difficult for the East bloc countries
to agree on something."

     Fears of Finlandization. Brandt concedes that a secure
flank in Western Europe would allow Moscow to concentrate on its
tense, 4,000-mile frontier with China. He is also aware that the
Soviets have not discarded their long-time goal of dislodging
the U.S. from Europe, driving a wedge between Washington and its
West European allies and supplanting the postwar Pax Americana
with a Pax Sovietica. The Soviets have insistently called for
a conference on European security that would include all
European countries, the U.S. and Canada. Some Western experts
suspect that Moscow's purpose is only to have the European
status quo formally recognized and create the illusion of peace.
That would increase pressure on the U.S. to get out of Western
Europe and dismantle NATO.

     Brandt has nevertheless supported the Soviet call for the
conference, as have several other nations and most of the
Continent's neutrals. But Brandt acknowledges the great danger
of Western Europe's possible "Finlandization" -- meaning that
without a U.S. military presence, Soviet influence could become
so strong the Moscow might dominate Western Europe as it
overshadows Finland, without an actual takeover. Therefore
Brandt insists that, as part of the negotiations, the Soviets
must agree to discuss "mutually balanced force reductions," so
that any U.S. withdrawals from Western Europe would be matched
by Soviet pullbacks from Eastern Europe. Before Poland erupted,
some officials in the West were hopeful that balanced
withdrawals could begin within two or three years. That estimate
is probably too optimistic now. Brandt also insists that the
security conference cannot be held unless the Russians, in
addition to making an accommodation on Berlin, show forward
movement at the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
(SALT).

     Greater Leverage. In linking his negotiations to other
issues that are beyond his control, Brandt has taken a definite
risk. It can be argued that if West Germany fails to ratify the
Treaty of Moscow, the situation will be worse than before.
There is no time limit on ratification by the Bundestag. If the
treaties of Moscow and Warsaw remain unratified for more than
a few months, however, Bonn's relations with the Soviets and
Poles are bound to deteriorate. Soviet diplomats have privately
warned that Moscow will "punish" the West Germans if they do
not follow through on the treaty. By punish, the Russians most
probably mean that they would put the old German card back into
play to block Bonn's overtures to other East bloc countries. But
Brandt is hoping that the Soviet impulse will be offset by
Moscow's hunger for West German technology. That may not be a
bad calculation. Notes Richard Lowenthal, an expert on Eastern
Europe at the Free University of Berlin: "Despite Moscow's
increasingly active global role, the Soviets are on the road
of decline -- not in the military- or political-power sense, but
in the economic and technological sense -- compared to the West.
They are falling behind, and they are beginning to notice it."

     It is especially noticeable when compared with the lusty
prosperity of the Common Market. The gap will widen if the
European Economic Community is enlarged to include Britain,
Denmark, Ireland and Norway. It will have a population of 250
million, somewhat larger than either the U.S. or the Soviet
Union. Its gross national product will be an estimated $650
billion v. $932 billion for the U.S. and as much as $600
billion for Russia. The Market will be the world's largest steel
producer, and it will outstrip even the U.S. in auto production.

     Brandt's Ostpolitik gives West Germany far greater leverage
within the Common Market than it had before. The Western
Europeans cannot afford to let West Germany slip in Western
moorings and drift to the East; accordingly they are
intensifying their efforts to tie Bonn more securely to the
Western European structure. That is precisely what Brandt wants.

     Despite recent polls showing that Britons are 66% against
even applying for membership, largely because food prices might
rise by as much as 26%. Prime Minister Edward Heath's
Conservative government is deeply committed to "joining Europe,"
and Tory leaders are convinced that they will carry the public
with them once an actual entry agreement has been worked out.
Also convinced is Jean Monnet. The Common Market's architect
told TIME Correspondent William Rademaekers: "Two fundamental
things have happened. First, England will join the Common
Market. Make no mistake about it; they will come in. Secondly,
we will have a monetary union. I am not saying that we will
have it by exactly 1980, but we will have it."

     Sicco Mansholt, the Dutch vice president of the EEC
Commission, noted that European big business slowly has created
an irreversible momentum toward integration. He explains: "The
European industries merged, one after another, and they grew
bigger and bigger. They escaped the control of their national
governments." Thus, he believes the Common Market will be
forced to provide the control, with technocrats in Brussels
wielding power over what is already the world's largest trading
area, with no barriers on the interchange of goods from the
Mediterranean to the Baltic. Last November, the foreign
ministers of the Six held their first formal meeting since 1962
to orchestrate common policy; they agreed to meet twice yearly
in the future.

     Economic Friction. Although European unity is a goal
endorsed and encouraged by all postwar U.S. Presidents,
Washington now has mixed feelings about it. While eliminating
internal tariffs, the Common Market has raised external tariffs
against some American exports -- one reason for the current,
dangerous revival of protectionism in the U.S. British admission
to the Common Market could seriously cut into U.S. farmers' $400
million-a-year market. On the other hand, an enlarged and
thriving Common Market would mean greater sales and larger
profits for American-owned industries in Europe. Moreover, the
prospect of a strong, united Western Europe with its moral,
military, economic and political forces firmly committed to the
non-communist West, is far more important than possible
disadvantages to U.S. trade.

     In the creation of a united Western Europe, the U.S. role
remains vital. Militarily, the 285,000 U.S. troops now in
Western Europe form a shield behind which the area can unite
and deal with the Russians without being intimidated. G.I.s
serve the purpose of providing a foreward defence against an
accidental or conventional attack. In case of all-out war,
their presence in substantial numbers is a guarantee to West
Europeans and a warning to the Soviets that the U.S. would
protect its allies with its nuclear might.

     Despite the importance of the American role, the Western
Europeans currently are experiencing a salutary surge of
independence, combined with deep disenchantment with the U.S.
For its part, Washington has lost its vision of what sort of
Europe it would like. Despite President Nixon's several
European trips, he has failed to put into effect a comprehensive
European policy. In part, that is only due to a realistic
recognition of the limits of U.S. influence. Kissinger,
recalling early U.S. failures at trying to get Britain into the
Common Market and crate a joint defense system, is convinced
that the U.S. is powerless to influence Europe in any way by
keeping its troops there at substantial levels.

     It will clearly take stronger presidential leadership to
curb a growing feeling in the U.S. that Europe is fat and
prosperous enough to protect itself. In the view of all Western
European leaders, a swift, major, unilateral U.S. troop cutback
-- anything under the present 185,000 G.I.s in West Germany is
often cited as the peril point -- would be immensely damaging.
Several Eastern European statesmen privately agree; they point
out that the Russians would be far harder to cope with in the
absence of  U.S. forces on the Continent. "On the road toward
a more stable system of security," Brandt told TIME, "the
necessity for a full American engagement in European affairs
will not decrease but will even increase. When I say engagement
I'm not speaking in the sense of Fliegenbeine -- flies' legs,
or the exact number of soldiers' legs. I'm speaking about
political engagement."

     Brandt's attempt to pursue Western European unity
simultaneously with eastern European rapprochement will require
astute diplomacy. By personality, background and experience,
however, he is uniquely equipped to deal with both East and
West. According to Klaus Harpprecht, editor of the intellectual
monthly Monat and a close fiend, Brandt possess "an Anglo-Saxon
sense of fairness, a respect for others and a very clear
sympathy for weaker persons." "Of all the politicians I have
known," says Monnet, "Brandt stands out for one great quality;
he is a generous man." Unlike so many of his generation, Brandt
has no brown stain on his past -- he was an active anti-Nazi.

     Born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm, the illegitimate son of a
Lubeck shopgirl, he was raised by his grandfather to be a
fervent blue-collar socialist. In 1933, to escape arrest by the
Gestapo, he changed his name to Willy Brandt and fled to
Scandinavia. In Norway and Sweden, his doctrinaire socialism
was mellowed by experience of the more pragmatic Scandinavian
brand.

     After returning to Berlin as a press attache in the
Norwegian mission, Brandt was persuaded by fellow Social
Democrats to apply for reinstatement of his German citizenship,
which had been lifted by the Nazis. Brandt, who is thin-skinned
and sensitive, has often been called a "traitor" in West Germany
for fleeing during the Nazi years. He argues that his background
has helped Germany come to terms with itself. In the foreword
of a forthcoming British edition of his early writings, Brandt
declares: "I did not regard my fate as an exile as a blot on
my copybook, but rather as a chance to serve the 'Other
Germany,' which did not resign itself submissively to
enslavement."

     As an aide to Berlin's Governing Mayor Ernst Reuter, Brandt
served in the front lines of the cold war. He was married on the
eve of the blockade, and his first son was born by candlelight
before the Russians caved in and reopened the city's land and
water links. During the long struggle for Berlin, Brandt learned
that there was no substitute for U.S. power in facing down the
Russian bear. "Nowadays bridges are not built, but blown up,"
he said then. "It will be up to a later time to reestablish
honest connections between the Eastern and Western parts of the
world."

     Cooked Goose. A few years after Brandt became mayor of
West Berlin in 1957, however, he began to question the validity
of much of the West's unbending cold war dogma and its
unrealistic slogans about rolling back Communism. Journalist
Egon Bahr, who was his press aide and more recently his chief
foreign policy advisor, began to propound the thesis of Wandel
durch Annaherung (change through rapproachment), which advanced
the revolutionary idea that West Germany could influence
developments within East Germany by establishing closer contacts
with it. It was a concept that subsequently was expanded to
include the entire East bloc. The turning point in Brandt's own
thinking came on that fateful weekend of Aug. 12-13, 1961, when
the East Germans suddenly began to erect the Wall through the
heart of Berlin to stem the outflow of East German refugees.

     The Wall was a blatant violation of Big Four understandings
about free movement throughout the city, but the Western allies
waited a full 48 hours before lodging an ineffectual protest
with the Soviets. "Kennedy cooked our goose," said Brandt, and
he fired off a blistering reproach to the President. (He later
mellowed toward Kennedy, however, after the young President
delivered his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in West Berlin in
1963.) It was during the Berlin Wall period that Brandt decided
that if anything was to be done to ease relations between Bonn
and East Berlin, the Germans would have to do it themselves.

     That was one of the themes of his unsuccessful 1965
campaign for the chancellorship. "There will never be any real
peace until we come to a settlement with our Eastern neighbors,"
Brandt said. In late 1966, when the grand coalition of Christian
Democrats and Social Democrats was organized as an emergency
measure to rescue West Germany from its first economic crisis,
Brandt became Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister. He and Bahr
began filing away thoughtful position papers for the future and
many of their ideas found their way into Brandt's 1968 book, A
Peace Policy for Europe. "The recognition is growing that the
nations of Europe must and will not simply come to terms with
being permanently divided by the conflict between East and
West," Brandt wrote. "Even fundamental differences of political
conviction and of social structure need not hold back the states
of Europe . . . from working together in areas of common
interest for the consolidation of an enduring peace."

     Brandt's accession to power in October 1969 coincided with
significant changes in West Germany's social order. The
Chancellor's own family was in the vanguard. His two older
sons, Peter, 22, and Lars, 19, with their mod styles and anti-
establishments rhetoric, are typical of West Germany's
rebellious youth. Now a student at West Berlin's Free
University, Peter was arrested twice for participation in
demonstrations and was fined $40 and $68. Brandt shrugs off his
sons' escapades. "Anyone who has not been a radical for a while
before he is 20," he muses, "will never make a good Social
Democrat." Since Brandt has become Chancellor, father and sons
have concluded a truce: they do not discuss one another's
politics in public.

     Rut Brandt, Willy's Norwegian wife, encourages her sons to
live their own lives. As for herself, Rut asserts: "I refuse to
allow myself to be placed in a cage." Rather than move downtown
to the official Chancellor's residence on the grounds of the
elegant Palais Schaumberg, Rut insisted on remaining in the
comfortable 14-room house on Bonn's residential Venusberg that
they occupied when Brandt was Foreign Minister. She can shop in
the neighborhood without anybody's taking notice; Matthais, 9,
the youngest son, can stay in the same public school and Lars,
who attends Bonn University, attracts less attention with his
hippie threads and budding goatee than he would on the
fenced-off grounds of the Chancellery.

     Amputated Country. As the younger Brandts indicate, youth
in West Germany is breaking through the rigid Teutonic barriers
of age and seniority. The head of West Berlin's Free University
is 32. In the universities, students are demanding -- and
getting -- a say not only in the selection of curriculum and
research subjects but also in the actual management and hiring
and firing of staff. On West Germany's leading newspapers,
magazines and television networks, journalists are demanding the
right to determine how their work is used and protect it from
twisting by editors. Even judges, historically the most
conservative element in German society, have overwhelmingly
demanded and won the right to publish dissenting opinions in
cases where their view is not shared by their colleagues.

     In a search for West Germany's cultural antecedents, the
young have seized upon the very artists and writers whom the
Nazis denigrated. Young Germans are drawn to the Abstract
Expressionists of the '20s, to the architects of the Bauhaus
school, and to such diverse writers as Bertolt Brecht, Thomas
Mann and Hermann Hesse.

     Perhaps the most significant aspect of West Germany's
social change is that it is coming about with a minimum of
tension and disruption. A quarter of a century of peace and
prosperity, combined with an absence of nationalistic frenzy,
has had a beneficial effect. For West Germans, moderation is the
watchword. The National Democrats, West Germany's only organized
far-right extremists, gained less than 3% of the vote in
November's state elections. The Communists fared even worse.
The main danger to Brandt's government foes not come from
extremists but from moderates who feel that he is neglecting
domestic concerns in favor of foreign policy; a nagging
inflation, for example, sent prices up 4% last year, which is
too high for the thrifty Germans.

     Ennobling Vision. Nonetheless, Brandts Ostpolitik has an
important impact on West Germany's process of finding itself.
Explains Theo Sommer, the deputy editor of the Hamburg weekly,
Die Zeit: "By pursuing reconciliation with the East, West
Germany is not only coming to terms with the Russians, the Poles
and the others, but is also coming to terms with its past, its
present and its future. Until now, Germany has presented itself
as an amputated country waiting for the retrieval of its last
provinces. The Moscow and Warsaw treaties have changed all that.
We are no longer and irredentist one-half of one nation. We are
now more naturally than before the whole of a state, which is
on German soil next to another German state."

     In a historical sense, Brandt regards his mission as an
expansion of the work that was begun by Konrad Adenauer, who
made West Germany a fully accepted member of the Western
community. Adenauer's rigidity toward the East was necessary
during the tense confrontation in the late 1940s and '50s, but
his policies became increasingly outmoded after the U.S. and
other Western nations, notably Charles de Gaulles's France,
began to seek eased relations with the Soviets. Brandt has set
himself a broader goal. "For centuries Germany was a bridge
between East and West," says Brandt. "We are striving to build
anew the shattered bridge, better, sturdier, and more reliable."
It is an ennobling vision for a country whose pivotal geographic
position and economic might have prompted it to play off East
and West against each other -- to the incalculable suffering of
mankind.

     Brandt's diplomacy may, of course, prove not only
unworkable but also dangerous. So far, however, as the theme
for a young decade, it offers immense promise for the peaceful
future of Europe. For a German statesman, that is a remarkable
achievement. It is also a measure of how long a road the Germans
have traveled in the quarter of a century since 1945, when their
defeated country lay in noisome rubble, and since the day in
1871 when at Versailles, modern Germany was born and amid boasts
of glory and hopes of greatness.