Word: brandts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...eyes puffy from lack of sleep, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt last week delivered his first state-of-the-nation address to the Bundestag. Just back from a two-week vacation in Tunisia, Brandt had taken one look at his aides' drafts of the speech a few days earlier and scrapped them all. They made him appear too pliable to Eastern European demands. The evening before his Bundestag appearance, he stayed up until nearly midnight honing and polishing a new version of his first major policy statement since last October's inaugural address...
...October speech, with its enunciation of his Ostpolitik, had touched off a flurry of diplomatic activity between Bonn and its Communist neighbors. Since then, Brandt had said little. So this time he felt it necessary to deal exclusively with foreign policy, for he is determined to break the enduring impasse in Central Europe. Most of the speech was directed at East Germany's spade-bearded Boss Walter Ulbricht, who fears that any improvement in Bonn's relations with Warsaw and Moscow will undermine his own bargaining position with West Germany. Last month Ulbricht sent Brandt a proposed treaty...
Security Gambit. As expected, Brandt said no to Ulbricht's demands, but he adroitly batted the ball back into the old Spitzbart's court. He refused to enter into talks on recognition on the grounds that while East Germany may be a separate state, it "can never be a foreign country for us." At the same time, Brandt offered to negotiate a renunciation-of-force treaty with East Germany, similar to one already being discussed by the Soviets and West Germans in Moscow. In Warsaw later this month, the Poles and West Germans will start talks...
...upper-echelon exhaustion has been to prompt Bonn to ask the Czechoslovaks to hold off for a while on their formal requests for talks. Since preliminary talks with the Poles are expected to begin in Warsaw later this month and Bonn may also start new probes with East Germany, Brandt simply does not want to have too many negotiations going at the same time...
...picture was much the same in Greece, where one-third of the population was officially estimated to be bedridden; the blight spread to Yugoslavia and Switzerland, Austria and West Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Germans' word of the week was Grip-pewelle (flu wave), and Chancellor Willy Brandt went to Tunisia to recuperate from his bout. The Viennese, devoted to hot lemon drinks as a palliative, bid up the price of lemons from their midwinter norm of seven schillings (28?) for ten lemons, to 20 schillings...