1970: Willy Brandt

FROM THE TIME ARCHIVE

Jan. 4, 1971

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 rapprochement 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.

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