Willy Brandt Born: Architect of German Reconciliation

Willy Brandt was born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm on December 18, 1913, in Lubeck, Germany, the illegitimate son of a saleswoman. His grandfather, a truck driver and Social Democrat, raised him and instilled the political convictions that shaped his life. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the nineteen-year-old fled to Norway, adopted the pseudonym Willy Brandt to evade detection, and spent the next twelve years in Scandinavian exile. He took Norwegian citizenship, worked as a journalist, and helped organize resistance networks. He witnessed the German invasion of Norway in 1940 and was briefly captured by German soldiers who did not recognize him. After the war, he returned to Germany, reclaimed his citizenship, and began rebuilding democratic politics in Berlin. He became Mayor of West Berlin in 1957, a position that placed him at the center of the Cold War when the Berlin Wall was erected in August 1961. He stood at the wall while Kennedy was still in Washington, confronting the crisis while the world watched. He became Chancellor of West Germany in 1969 and launched Ostpolitik, a policy of normalizing relations with East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union that recognized the postwar borders as the starting point for peace rather than a grievance to avenge. His kneeling at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial in December 1970 became the single most powerful act of political contrition in the twentieth century. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971. He resigned in 1974 after his aide Gunter Guillaume was exposed as an East German spy. He died on October 8, 1992, at seventy-eight, two years after witnessing the fall of the Wall he had confronted for decades.