The Difference Willy Brandt Has Made

...And in all these startling and momentous events Willy Brandt has played a crucial role...

...Washington is even asking Germany to subdue its anti-militarist scruples and play a more active role in the Persian Gulf...

...Understandably, they may be responsive to this revisionist campaign...

...In the early years after the War, Germany appeared commendably prepared to face its past...

...It hastened the demoralization of the Communist empire and invigorated the forces of reason and reform within the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...

...The West German democratic system, as Willy Brandt has emphasized, "has proved its ability to weather crises...

...Willy Brandt survives as an example and as an inspiration to the generations that will mold the 21 st century...

...We sometimes forget how parlous the state of democracy was in the years after World War I. That War shattered old structures of order, old assumptions of rationality, and unleashed angry energies of revolution—not revolution for democracy, as in the 18th and 19th centuries, but revolution against democracy...

...While her husband, the famous aviator, predicted Nazi victory and opposed American aid to the democracies, the gentle Mrs...

...Democracy, having failed to produce peace, could not, it was said, produce prosperity either...

...Inveterate cold warriors in Washington condemned his conciliatory approach, charging that it was weakening the West and strengthening the East...

...A year ago Brandt said, "To have contributed to the situation in which the name of Germany, the idea of peace and the prospect of European freedom are thought of together, is the essential achievement of my life...

...It is not a strain well calculated to encourage self-criticism and self-restraint...

...These were the years when he became a national leader, and a second historic theme began to preoccupy him...

...Whether it wants it or not, a united Germany will have power thrust upon it...

...I would be less than candid if I did not say that forebodings over a resurgent Germany also arise in the minds of many Americans...

...New German generations growing up under robust constitutional leadership have new attitudes and new values...

...Indeed, his influence was already extending beyond West Berlin...

...The crimes of Hitler, these scholars argue, are not unique, nor are they distinctively German...

...And the commitment is more relevant than ever as people in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, understandably disgusted by the inefficiencies and lies of the command economy, imagine the free market to be the self-executing cure for all their troubles...

...Unlike such allies in his own party as Egon Bahr, unlike such friends and associates as Günter Grass, he has embraced German unity as a wholesome culmination...

...Lindbergh lamented "the beautiful things...

...At Bad Godesbergin 1959, with Brandt's enthusiastic support, the SPD affirmed its belief in democracy, the mixed economy, the social market, and the welfare state as constituting a middle way between the tyranny of communism and the careless cruelty of laissez-faire...

...Or is the will to dominate still alive in the German soul...

...it is too vulnerable geographically in the missile age to become a military threat...

...One may be pardoned for controlling one's enthusiasm over the recent German excursions in exculpatory history...

...Today, in this high noon of democratic triumph, it is hard to remember to what a low point the prestige of democracy had fallen half a century ago, ho w desperate the situation was for brave men who had fled dictatorships in their native lands to continue the fight from abroad...

...If the new Germany truly breathes the spirit of this man, the world need not worry about unification...

...And now we confront the unification of Germany...

...That great generation of European leaders who shaped postwar Europe—Churchill, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Spaak, Monnet, Macmillan—is gone...

...This article is adapted from his remarks made at a reception honoring Willy Brandt held at the Harvard Club in New York...

...The German Social Democratic Party had long felt in its bones that it was more important to be democratic than to be Socialist...

...The last years have been so crowded with unexpected events that we have become almost blasé in the face of the cascade of change...

...West German leaders like Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Richard von Weizsäcker, even in his paternalistic way Konrad Adenauer, have rightly earned the trust and admiration of the Western democracies...

...In 1966 Brandt became the Foreign Minister of a coalition government in Bonn, and after the SPD election victory in 1969 he became Chancellor...

...Born the year before Archduke Ferdinand went to Sarajevo, he became a man of democratic commitment almost as soon as he attained political consciousness...

...The new totalitarian gospel of solidarity, force and action appealed variously to the fears of the rich, to the frustrations of the lower middle class, to the yearnings and resentments of the workers, to the illusions of the intellectuals...

...The impact of the Great War was compounded by the impact of the Great Depression...

...As a historian, I may perhaps be excused for viewing the history that a nation's historians write as a clue to the way it sees itself...

...In 1945 the thousand-year Reich came to a dozen-year end...

...It is a federal structure internally, and it is increasingly committed to a federal structure externally...

...If the liberated countries revert to the uncontrolled marketplace of the 19th century, they will only revive Marxism, and the dismal cycle of reaction and revolution will repeat itself...

...How Germans read their own past may well cast light on how they will deploy their power in years to come...

...When Brandt went back to Germany following the War, he quickly discovered that the struggle for democratic rights, far from coming to an end, was only taking a new form...

...The Brandt Commission's reports on international development in 1980 and '83 helped to educate the affluent nations, to give them some comprehension of the appalling gap between their comfort and the wretchedness and ruin in which most of the planet's people live out their lives...

...In Norway he completed his education, began a career as a journalist and nurtured his contacts with the anti-Nazi underground in Germany...

...Economic collapse appeared to verify the Marxist prophecy that capitalism would perish of its internal contradictions...

...Forty years of working constitutional democracy in West Germany create a presumption in the German favor...

...This historic development expresses still another theme of Willy Brandt's eminent career...

...Classical Marxist socialism assumed an infallible body of dogma incarnated in an infallible party and an infallible leader...

...More recently, though, nationalism and self-pride have begun to reassert themselves...

...Ostpolitik never meant an abandonment of Western Europe...

...They continue to stand reproachfully before us—an urgent part of the agenda of the 21 st century...

...Nor has his vision been confined to Europe and the Atlantic community...

...It lies in the philosophy of Franklin Roosevelt and Willy Brandt...

...He has understood that in an age of instantaneous communications the Western industrialized nations cannot exist as islands of abundance in a world of poverty, hunger, disease, and misery, a world convulsed by anger, hate and despair...

...The SPD leaders were at last ready to confront the theoretical implications of that feeling...

...German historians accepted the crimes of Hitler as the country's particular responsibility and traced the political and intellectual roots of Nazism back into 19th century Germany...

...A democraticsystem, therefore, had to reject dogma and allow diversification of ownership...

...Many in the West, highminded people as well as scoundrels, felt there was no point to resistance...

...I venture these observations to explain the mistrustful reactions to German unification...

...He had left Germany to resist one brand of totalitarianism, and had no hesitation on his return to begin resisting another...

...His biography is virtually a distillation of the 20th century—a century glorious and damned, in which the idea of liberal democracy, rather like the perils of Pauline, escaped from one after another mortal threat to emerge at the end in triumph...

...But how could any of this be reconciled with democracy—a system founded on argument, choice and freedom of opposition...

...all Hitler was doing was imitating the genocidal policies of Stalin, substituting race for class...

...Democratic liberty, it was evident, required the legitimation of debate, and debate was possible only if an opposition had access to resources independent of the state...

...Capitalism has not triumphed over the Marxist prophecy by fidelity to the creed of laissez-faire...

...It is given to few men to embody the grand themes of their time with the force, dignity, integrity and unfailing good humor that he has shown across the long years...

...For unification is bound to make Germany the dominant force in Europe...

...The notorious Historikerstreit has revealed a strong impulse among some historians to throw off the burden of their national past...

...The infallible dogma stipulated total state ownership of the means of production and distribution...

...More than half of all Germans alive today were born after 1945, feel no personal involvement with Nazism, and are tired of hearing about the terrible things their fathers and grandfathers did...

...Germany," Brandt reminds us, "is already embedded in Europe not only through treaties, but also through the consciousness of its people...

...But Brandt recognizes that for its European neighbors "Germany's critical mass in Europe has again become a focus of preoccupation," and that the question inevitably arises, "Will the Germans deploy their economic and political weight in a sensible way...

...But countervailing factors that encourage more optimistic conclusions must not be overlooked...

...The German national tradition has always had an ominously mystical, portentous and self-aggrandizing strain...

...It has triumphed precisely because it rejected laissez-faire—because it summoned the democratic state to redress the injustices of the market, to humanize the industrial order, to combine individual opportunity with social responsibility...

...His have been noble contributions to statecraft, to peace, to democracy, and to the victory of humanity...

...History, it seemed, was pronouncing its decisive verdict on the experiment in popular government and individual rights...

...It need hardly be emphasized that, as Germany exerts economic and military influence, political and diplomatic power will not lag very far behind...

...The front line against the spread of communism was of course the divided city of Berlin...

...The first theme embodied in Brandt's life is his uncompromising belief in political freedom...

...But there remained alternative versions of the wave of the future...

...The paralysis of democratic regimes before mass unemployment appeared to verify the Fascist claim that parliamentarianism, political freedom, civil liberties, government by talk and consent, were impotent and bankrupt...

...They saw totalitarianism, to borrow the title of the little book Anne Morrow Lindbergh published in 1940, as the Wave of the Future...

...After Hitler invaded Norway, he continued the anti-Nazi fight from Sweden...

...When I hear the paeans to the unregulated market that issue these days from Eastern Europe, I sometimes think that Barbarians at the Gate, Bryan Burrough and John Heylar's best-seller about the battle for RJR Nabisco, and The Greatest Ever Bank Robbery, Martin Mayer's new book on the savings and loan scandals, should be translated into Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and Russian and distributed throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union...

...As Michael Stuermer has written, "In a country without history, he who fills the memory, defines the concepts and interprets the past, wins the future...

...Whatever the intentions of a Berlin government, its economic and political influence is sure to flow into those vacuums...

...That commitment to a middle way appealed enormously to Americans of my generation, for it had been precisely the point of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal...

...Yet the unification of Germany along with the movement toward European unity, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the transformation of the Soviet Union, the evaporation of the Cold War, the renaissance of liberal democracy, the awakening of the Third World —surely these developments mark the start of a new epoch in Western history...

...Having fought Nazism, resisted communism and reformed democratic socialism, he now turned his attention to reducing the tensions of the Cold War and ending the division of Europe—a third grand theme of the 20th century and of Willy Brandt's life...

...In fact, the countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself are counting on German investment and tutelage, and Western governments want Germany to assume the lead in rebuilding Eastern Europe...

...It is odd to see how this unassuming fellow from Lubeck has managed to incorporate in one life so many of the great themes of this turbulent time...

...The withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe, however, has created economic and political vacuums...

...In retrospect, we can see that Ostpolitik had exactly the opposite effect...

...Willy Brandt was properly rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize...

...Twenty years later, people forget the doubt and, in some circles, the consternation initially provoked by Brandt's Ostpolitik...

...Moreover, as he further points out, the new Germany is no longer "a national state of the old kind...

...Like Ernst Reuter before him, Willy Brandt had those necessary qualities...

...October 3, he has said, was "a date of great relief, a time of joy...

...Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, Fascists in Italy, Nazis in Germany—all despised, denounced and, wherever possible, destroyed the processes of self-government and individual rights...

...Brandt was never under the illusion that communism and democracy had anything in common, either as to means or as to ends...

...He has always been a firm and steadfast supporter of full German participation in European integration—thereby incorporating another grand theme into his life...

...In the meantime, as president of the Socialist International, Brandt has been working to spread the principles and practices of social democracy among political leaders and parties throughout the Third World...

...The market is unexcelled as an engine of production, but, unless intelligently controlled, it can become an engine of exploitation and corruption, of economic insecurity and social inequality...

...As Mayor of the western half froml957tol966,he lived through tense days, especiallyin 1959andagainin 1961—days callingfor cool judgment, iron nerves and sturdy determination, calling for leadership that inspired confidence and hope...

...The salvation of the countries valiantly groping their way toward democracy does not lie in the philosophy of Herbert Hoover and Milton Friedman...

...He adds characteristically, "I find nothing strange about questions of this kind...

...The West has yet to act effectively on most of the Commission's recommendations...

...He was 17 years old whenhe joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1930, and was so militant an opponent of the Nazis that he had to depart for Norway once Hitler came to power in 1933...

...Will it deploy that power sensibly and with moderation...

...Willy Brandt thought differently...

...lost in the dying of an age," accepted totalitarianism as freesociety's predestined successor, discounted the evils of Hitlerism and Stalinism as merely "scum on the wave of the future," and concluded that "the wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it...

...Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a longtime New Leader contributor, is Albert Sch weitzer Professor of the Humanities at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York...

...Certainly it will not again be a source of military aggression...

...As Foreign Minister and as Chancellor, Brandt thoroughly understood, as had his Christian Democratic predecessors, that Franco-German rapprochement was essential to the future of Europe, and that Europeanization was essential to the future of Germany...