He was right when it counted most. Brandt was a German who opposed Hitler from the very beginning, a socialist who rejected communism and a West Berliner who refused to adopt neutrality, a tempting compromise in the West’s most vulnerable outpost. His Ostpolitik was deplored by some Germans. They complained that his rapprochement with East Germany and its Soviet sponsors ratified the division of their country and the loss of its lands in the east after World War II. Brandt argued, correctly, that “the outcome of history had to be accepted, not in a spirit of mere resignation but so that we could jettison the ballast that prevented us from helping to bring about a peaceful change of the situation in Europe and in Germany.”
Brandt’s original name was Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm; born in 1913, he was the illegitimate son of a Lubeck shopgirl. In his newly published memoirs, My Life in Politics (498 pages. Viking. $35), he writes that his father was a Hamburg bookkeeper named John Moller, who lived until 1958 but never met his famous son. The youngman grew up in the labor movement and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), adopting the name Willy Brandt when he went underground in opposition to Hitler. He fled to Norway in 1933. Brandt candidly writes in his memoirs that he saw “neither a moral nor a national duty” to “stay and perhaps get killed.”
He became a Norwegian citizen but slipped back into Germany for six months in 1936 to work against Hitler. Then he went to Spain as an SPD observer in the civil war. When Norway was overrun by the Germans in World War II, Brandt was imprisoned for a month and released after his captors failed to identify him. He spent the war underground in Norway and aboveground in Sweden, finally returning to Germany in 1946 as a journalist covering the Nuremberg war-crimes trials for Scandinavian newspapers.
He regained his German citizenship, and by 1957, he was mayor of West Berlin. His first challenger was Nikita Khrushchev, who demanded that the city sever its ties to West Germany. Brandt refused. He also helped to move the SPD away from doctrinaire Marxism, accepting the principles of private property and a market economy. But when he became chancellor in 1969, he moved quickly to make peace with the communists. He normalized relations with the Soviet Union, Poland and East Germany. On a state visit to Warsaw, he laid a wreath at a memorial to the destroyed Jewish ghetto, sinking silently to his knees. It was an unplanned gesture, he wrote in his memoirs: “From the bottom of the abyss of German history, under the burden of millions of victims of murder, I did what human beings do when speech fails them.”
Ostpolitik led Franz-Josef Strauss, the Bavarian conservative, to condemn Brandt’s “humble, whining attitude toward the East.” Helmut Kohl, the Christian Democratic chancellor of a united Germany, recalled in a statement of condolence last week that Brandt “could inspire people, but he could also polarize them.” Some cold-warriors among his allies suspected Brandt of appeasement, fearful that he would weaken the West by Finlandizing his country in pursuit of detente with the Soviet bloc. “In retrospect, we can see that Ostpolitik had exactly the opposite effect,” historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote two years ago. “It hastened the demoralization of the communist empire and invigorated the forces of reason and reform within the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.”
But in 1974, Brandt became a victim of his own relaxed attitude toward the East. A close aide, Gunter Guillaume, was identified as an East German spy. At first, Brandt was unconcerned; he thought the security breach was “not … of any vast importance.” But the ensuing scandal drove him from office in despair. In semi-retirement, Brandt remained a very public person. (He had a messy private life, which he considered to be strictly his own business; his memoirs do not mention any of his three wives or four children by name.) For 13 years, he remained chairman of the SPD. And for 16 years, he served as president of the Socialist International, the umbrella group for Social Democratic parties.
In the 1980s he also chaired a blue-ribbon panel that came to be known as the Brandt Commission. It studied North-South relations and called for a more equitable distribution of the world’s wealth. The advice was widely praised and then largely ignored. The collapse of communism gave him hope for a more tangible legacy. Brandt did not expect Germany’s unification to be easy; in one of his last interviews, he warned that the process would be long and painful. But in a less promising era, he had shown how to solve big problems: an inch at a time. As he saw it, the genius of Ostpolitik was that it took “Small steps while it was impossible to take larger ones … And only now do we see the full importance of those tiny milestones.” Brandt’s “small steps” were an essential prelude to the giant leap of unification-in Germany and perhaps eventually in Europe.
