Willy Brandt

Born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm in Lubeck, Germany. He never knows his father. Raised by his grandfather, a truck driver and Social Democrat. He joins the Socialist Workers' Party at 16. When the Nazis come to power, he's 19.

Flees Nazi Germany for Norway, then Sweden. He adopts the name Willy Brandt to evade Gestapo detection. He works as a journalist, learns Norwegian and Swedish, and covers the Spanish Civil War from Barcelona. The Nazis strip him of German citizenship.

Elected mayor of West Berlin during the tensest years of the Cold War. He's in office when the Berlin Wall goes up in August 1961. He stands at the wall and confronts the crisis while the Western allies hesitate. It makes him a national figure.

Elected Chancellor of West Germany. First Social Democrat to hold the office since 1930. He launches Ostpolitik, normalizing relations with East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. It's a radical break from the Adenauer era's refusal to acknowledge the Eastern Bloc.

Falls to his knees at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during a state visit to Poland. It's unscripted. He kneels in the rain for 30 seconds. The photograph becomes one of the defining images of postwar reconciliation. He later says: "I did what human beings do when words fail."

Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his Ostpolitik and efforts to ease Cold War tensions. The treaties he signs with Moscow and Warsaw recognize postwar borders that West Germany had refused to acknowledge for 25 years.

Resigns as chancellor after his close aide Gunter Guillaume is exposed as an East German spy. Brandt takes personal responsibility. He'd been warned about Guillaume months earlier. The scandal ends his chancellorship but not his political career.

Dies of colon cancer at his home in Unkel, near Bonn. He's 78. He lived to see the Berlin Wall fall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990. He told a reporter that night in November: "Now what belongs together will grow together."