Willy Brandt
Birnbaum, Norman
Willy Brandt grew up in the northern German city of Luebeck, immortalized in his fellow townsman Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. Brandt's Luebeck was much different, the Luebeck of the turbulence of...
...He was not surprised that many of the actors and agents of transformation appeared within the system itself...
...He had a tolerance for human weakness, a ready sympathy, a sense of the limits and joys of existence...
...He was surprised by the rapidity of the transformation of the Soviet system and by the decomposition of the entire Soviet bloc...
...WINTER • 1993 • 125 Brandt was a German, a European, a citizen of the world...
...His own role in that transformation was very great, since his policies created many of its preconditions by letting light through blackened ideological windows...
...He was forced out of office in 1974 by an espionage scandal, all the details of which are still not clear...
...Brandt encouraged it and sponsored many who are now the party's leaders...
...After the German occupation of Norway, he fled to Sweden and there made new connections to the Social Democrats—and the 1944 plotters against Hitler...
...He may have been too sanguine about its economic and social costs...
...It was there that he developed its major components...
...The outer stations of the life of Willy Brandt were extraordinary enough—from his working-class beginnings to the Nobel Peace Prize (1971) and recognition as a world statesman...
...He moved with inner sovereignty across all borders, his very own person...
...He was free because his life was governed by a large project...
...Brandt was mortal, and mortals err...
...He remained chairman of the party until 1987 and was president of the Socialist International from 1976 until 1992...
...The peace movement of the eighties evoked from him the observation that he could think of worse things in German history than demonstrations against armaments...
...He combined politics with an appreciation of human variety at once amused, generous, and skeptical...
...Chairman of the party from 1964, he was its chancellor candidate in 1961 and 1965...
...No doubt, there are things he could have done differently, like the decree on radicals in the German civil service...
...In 1933, he chose exile in Norway, worked in the small Socialist Workers party (which sought vainly to mediate between the Communists and Social Democrats), and visited Germany on underground missions...
...Brandt was an admirer of the openess and vitality of American culture and society...
...Brandt's Luebeck was much different, the Luebeck of the turbulence of the Weimar Republic and the coming of Nazism, of the old German working-class movement...
...Not only did he call for newer models of socialism, he did as much as anyone to develop them...
...He appreciated life's pleasures: he was no ascetic...
...For him, rootedness was the precondition of connectedness...
...He lived to see what he had not expected in his lifetime—the unification of Germany—and was convinced, rightly, that the processes of change through rapprochement he had pursued had prepared the way for the end of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe...
...Links Und Frei (Left And Free) was the title of one of his books...
...We are, in fact, witnessing a great test of his political legacy...
...He supported Chancellor Kohl fully on unification, considering that the historical chance had to be taken lest it not recur...
...At the Social Democratic Party Congress of 1979 in Berlin, he was good enough to ask me about one of my daughters, then a student in Berlin...
...He saw no contradiction between his German patriotism and his internationalism...
...He insisted that Germany had to face facts, among them that the eastern provinces were lost as a result of Germany's war...
...Brandt experienced the movement's divisions and sectarianism, its inability to recognize the threat of Nazism until it was too late—and, equally, its moral and pedagogic force...
...The future, he said, lay with integration in the European Community and the assumption of responsibility for economic development, human rights, and peaceful conflict resolution everywhere...
...None can claim to incarnate in person Brandt's combination of realism, a sense of the possible, with hope and vision...
...Brandt contributed to the development of an urbane public culture in postwar Germany...
...He felt at home among us...
...He fashioned a policy of détente and reconciliation with the USSR and the Central and East European states...
...Brandt knew that democratic politics, in the last analysis, was a form of education: let us see how well the Germans honor their great preceptor...
...He thought that Western socialism could be true to itself only by attacking the problems of global exploitation, famine, and poverty...
...The self-characterization was apt...
...In 1966 he led the party into the "Grand Coalition" with the Christian Democratic Union and was foreign minister until 1969...
...Few politicians can have met on such equal terms with the artists, writers, scholars, and thinkers he continually saw...
...Now Hitler has really lost the war," he said—and as chancellor he presided over large reforms in society and the extension of the welfare state...
...Sounds like my own son," he commented...
...A narrow electoral victory in that year enabled him to form a coalition with the liberal Free Democrats...
...Repeatedly and shamefully defamed in postwar Germany for his anti-Nazism, he exhibited considerable understanding of the complicity of ordinary Germans with Nazism in the years 1933 to 1945...
...He visited Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War and witnessed the depredations of Stalinism...
...On his last visit to Washington, I breakfasted with him at the Willard Hotel and remarked that it was an elegant place...
...He was often regaded with suspicion in the West, not least in Reagan's Washington...
...The image of Brandt, as chancellor, kneeling at the Warsaw Ghetto Monument did form the generation now facing its greatest test...
...She is outside, demonstrating against the SPD for a purer left...
...For this project he was reviled by the ex-Nazis, often parading in postwar West Germany as devoted defenders of the "Christian West...
...The respect accorded him by the cultural elites, dissidents, and publics in the former communist societies suggests that they were hardly as discountenanced by his policy as some of their (shrill and self-appointed) Western spokesmen...
...Brandt recognized that the Western welfare states were products not only of the struggles of the unions and the socialist movements but also of liberal ideas of citizenship and the social ethics of Catholicism and Protestantism...
...In a speech that caused astonishment at the time, he told the nation that it ought to try to obtain blue skies over the Ruhr— and so anticipated the subsequent environmental movement...
...NORMAN BIRNBAUM 126 • DISSENT...
...His project of rapprochement with the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and for tolerable relations with communist Germany, had its sources in his experiences as mayor of West Berlin...
...By 1957 he was mayor of West Berlin...
...The Germany of which he became chancellor was a prosperous and educated nation far different from the raw industrial colossus in which he was initially formed...
...He actually influenced John Kennedy and the Kennedyites, not only in his familiar anticommunist role as mayor of West Berlin but by his ideas on détente, echoed in Kennedy's American University speech of June 1963...
...He spoke good English and French, knew Spanish, too, and of course was fluent in Norwegian...
...He was also protagonist of the alliance with the United States and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) —and (much influenced by Scandinavian social democracy) of an economic and social policy rather different than his party's legacy of class conflict...
...He had no illusions about Stalinism and its successors, he said, but in a nuclear epoch the only thinkable conflict was the conflict of ideas...
...In 1980, the report of the North-South Commission he chaired set the (unachieved) agenda for more global justice...
...He was delighted with the critical attitude of the sixties generation...
...His Social Democratic party was the party of the old industrial and new white-collar working class, of the liberal intelligentsia, of integration of Germany into Western Europe...
...Brandt's political grandchildren (a term much used in Germany to describe the present leadership of the Social Democrats) face widespread xenophobia and the violence of the right...
...In Germany again as a Norwegian official, he reassumed German citizenship in 1948...
...He was on the left, in the tradition of the Enlightenment and two centuries of struggle for democracy and social justice...
...He moved from the world of socialist self-education of the twenties to the epoch of rock, from Thomas Mann to his friend Ginter Grass...
...His persistence and serenity in the midst of these trials were striking...
...It was under Brandt that a large number of liberal Protestants, many of them lay officials or pastors, joined the Social Democrats...
...Like President Richaerd von Weizsacker, whose own familial and social origins were vastly different, he held that the Germans had collective responsibility for their past but not collective guilt...
...He also initiated the opening and stabilization of relationships between the two Germanies...
...Brandt's smiling response: "I stayed in worse when running from the Gestapo...
...Leaving the chancellorship actually freed him for the role of patriarch of the democratic left around the world: Felipe Gonzales and Michael Harrington were among those he encouraged...
Vol. 40 • January 1993 • No. 1
