Willy Brandt's Challenge

...Hence, local SPD achievements, even in Berlin, could not be generalized into a national alternative as long as the party was crusading with dubious socialization formulas, a questionable defense policy and pronouncements about the uncertainty—even the immorality—of building an affluent society under a market economy...

...But even more impressive than the collapse of sentimental reservations under the impact of Fritz Erler's brilliant counter-attacks was the revelation of how much hard-headed and imaginative thinking about defense was being done in the SPD by young experts like Helmut Schmidt and Karl Wienand, the youngest members of the party Executive Committee...

...West Germany may now be ripe for such a change...

...It has been called a program to "do more of the same thing, only do it better...

...the 47-year-old reformer became a "natural" for the fall 1961 elections...

...Now he confessed candidly that Brandt's nomination was "paying a debt to Ernst Reuter...

...There were questions about Herbert Wehner, the ardent pipe-smoking sphinx and party whip, whose eyes rested on one delegate after another long enough to learn something useful about each man...

...afterward, as Chancellor...

...Although Brandt said he would never push the Federal Republic into the atom club and would favor the "division of labor" formula in NATO, his speech left no room for doubt that he would accept any reasonable defense role which Western security really required Germany to take...

...The question haunting some of Brandt's admirers when an SPD government's reliability suddenly faced the test of an open debate in Hanover was: What can moral leadership like his do with such a party...

...We all must try to heal the ruptures inside in order to master the external division of our country...

...After smoking out the doubters, one speaker after the other drove home these points: Freedom itself now depends on the military balance of power...

...Not that anyone favored atomic weapons for the Bundeswehr—not even Adenauer's avid Defense Minister had asked for them...

...Yet in the German Bundestag on June 30 it had been Wehner who appealed to the Government to work out a joint foreign policy with the SPD based on unequivocal loyalty to NATO...

...Some left-wingers were on strike and some "ghetto-minded" bosses were dragging their heels, but no one expected the small minority of die-hards among the delegates to make the convention dramatic...

...The Hanover Convention was called explicitly to present Brandt to the country as the SPD's candidate for Chancellor and head of its intended government...

...With SPD Chairman Erich Ollen-hauer striking a noncombustible balHAROLD HURWITZ has been reporting from Germany since World War II...

...The Bundeswehr must be armed and equipped effectively...

...We reject atomic armament of the Bund-eswehr...

...another question cried for immediate answer: How strong was Willy Brandt...

...But the reorientation of the tradition-bound...

...If democracy is to become rooted in the German people, he said, a new political style is necessary: with modesty instead of self-righteousness, candor instead of petty vilification, patience and respect for the views and values of others instead of so much arrogance...

...A former Communist and until recently the hope of atomic pacifists on the SPD left wing, Wehner was still the Christian Democratic party's (CDU) trump Burgerschreck...

...Such weapons had to be discarded for a plausible new conception—one that offered a capable but volatile people more security plus a sense of direction...

...it is normal to do so...

...But Brandt's criteria mean more than that—they constitute a democratic national challenge and a call for qualitative changes in the prevailing system of political values...

...During the next two days the candidate discovered he could count on a powerful team...

...The Godesberg program of 1959, which discarded cumbersome economic doctrines, and the unequivocal affirmation of the Western security alliance on June 30, 1960, were steps toward setting the SPD free in its own country...

...democratic mass party would have proceeded much more slowly during the last two years had it not been for the Berlin crisis and Mayor Brandt's sudden jump in prestige...

...Although Ernst Reuter opened the struggle—12 days before he died—with a critique on the party executive's failure in the 1953 elections, it took another four years for his supporters, under Willy Brandt, to capture control of the local Berlin party organization...

...Now the candidate could tell his party where they all wanted to go from there...

...This resolution intended to free the hands of a Social Democratic Chancellor for negotiating loyally with NATO partners on the basis of military-political realities: "Practical division of labor [in NATO] strengthens the effectiveness of the alliance and makes it possible not to increase the number of armies equipped with nuclear weapons...

...he wiped his eyes with a fist after reading the names of comrades who had died since Godesberg...

...These were rites that normally fall to the party Chairman, but Ollenhauer watched Wehner's performance from the sidelines, while candidate Brandt spent most of the day in his podium chair coolly doing a mayor's desk work...

...By 1957, John Kenneth Galbraith and John May-nard Keynes finally had more appeal than Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky for the SPD...

...Even worse, it sensationally repudiated a resolution which the party executive had drawn up with Ollen-hauer's agreement...

...He said things never said before in a German Social Democratic convention...

...as CDU propagandists were claiming—in varying versions—a duped idealist, a duping opportunist...

...Or was he...

...Whether or not Brandt leads the SPD to victory in 1961 may even become a matter of secondary importance now that a genuine democratic alternative exists...

...Similarly, in the field of economic policy, not left-wing but revisionist critics exercised the greatest influence...

...In a healthy, progressively developing democracy it is not unusual to take similar, even identical, positions on many matters...

...Ollenhauer's declaration dispelled all illusions about the convention being a "put-up job...

...Although an appalling lump of the German electorate still thinks that an Opposition party ought not to favor a different policy from that of the Government, one fundamental criterion for the working of democratic government has repeatedly been met in local and regional elections...

...After adding that conscription would have to continue under a Social Democratic government, no major difference apparently remained between his defense policy and Adenauer's...

...Less than 10 per cent of the delegates failed to support the crucial resolutions or to give Brandt their votes...

...He then demonstrated a quality of leadership and the contours of a program that lent new meaning to the convention and to his campaign...

...May the Chancellor then have the courage to ask for them...

...He appealed to the party for understanding that as Chancellor he would follow only his conscience and be obligated only to his office and the people...

...ance between "true believers" and party organization men, reforming the water-logged party was a laborious affair...

...He stormed up applause for the foreign guests...

...It can be most advantageous to have a leader who cares less for power than for responsibility when a party really wants power and knows how to get it...

...Admired in Germany by those who still suspect his party, trusted abroad by those who still distrust his country...

...WILLY BRANDT'S CHALLENGE The Hanover Conference solidifies a new kind of SPD By Harold Hurwitz WEST BERLIN GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC party (SPD) conventions were once fateful for the international labor movement but they never had an equivalent impact on Germany...

...SPD defense policy had to be realistic and believable, it had to be adaptable to military-technical developments and to the interests of Germany's NATO partners...

...and to sell it—to party workers first—required leadership, the personal alternative to Adenauer...

...Applause swept the hall, but Brandt, Wehner and defense expert Fritz Erler did not join in...

...Differences of political opinion become, more and more, questions of priority, method and emphasis...

...When Brandt returned from Berlin to conclude the security debate, the firmness and reliability of his following was already assured...

...The Federal Republic should not seek to effect an increase in the number of atomic powers and so give the Bundeswehr atomic weapons...

...For Konrad Adenauer's party may be forced to answer this challenge in Willy Brandt's own terms...

...In opening the convention, Wehner tried to inspire an optimism and energy in the assembly that the average delegates seemed to lack...

...Strong enough really to lead his party in the campaign and to control it...

...a "figurehead...

...However, when 350 delegates assembled before the Executive Committee's four-tier podium to open the convention, journalists, voters and many SPD party workers were expressing doubts...

...His speech on defense was masterly...

...With the issue out in the open...

...Everyone knew that this had been Brandt's position, but was it really Wehner's...

...Ollen-hauer had let that annoy him and now the applauding delegates seemed to he saying: We still prefer a kettle of self-righteous moral rapture in the "anti-atomic-death movement" than the hard-tack of political responsibility in the atomic age...

...National security considerations have held sway on the national stage...

...There, voters do alternate their choices between different democratic parties...

...So it came as a considerable surprise when Chairman Ollenhauer interrupted a boring speech to bring down the house simply by saying: "Since Godesberg nothing has occurred to change our position on this...

...As though he knew it was up to the convention—not the candidate—to give the first answer to this question, Brandt boarded a plane to deal with a pressing problem in Berlin...

...The Hanover Convention of October 1960 may have been a turning point...

...But to develop such a conception...

...Then, as if challenging Adenauer to prove there was a real difference, Brandt said: "If the present Government thinks the Federal Republic does need atomic weapons, it should say so...

...He reminded party workers that the history of their movement was only a part of the history of Germany, and had to be seen all in one piece, with Bebel and Bismarck, Ebert and Strese-mann, Heuss and Hitler as parts of it...

...But the CDU was charging the SPD with opposing NATO's atomic defense programs in principle...

...Brandt's program emphasizes the things the German people and their democratic parties share and want in common...