Word: brandts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Gunter Grass, the German writer and active supporter of Willy Brandt, has described himself as a snail. His latest book, From the Diary of a Snail, has as its organizing motif metaphors about snails. When he is pressed by an interviewer's question Grass often answers with a disarming "ah yes but my party is a party of snails." Collecting snails--this is the hobby of the fictional personification of Doubt in Nazi Germany, a character, also called Hermann Ott, in Grass's book. Melancholia and the achievement of political "stasis in progress" are two of the themes which dignify...
Grass himself actively campaigned for Willy Brandt in 1969. "I learned my lesson from Weimar," Grass said...
...West Germany, the father of Ostpolitik, Chancellor Willy Brandt, expressed his "solidarity" with Sakharov and other dissidents "endangered because of their convictions." In ordinarily neutral Austria, Chancellor Bruno Kreisky called for a "democratic counterweight" to protect Russian libertarians like Sakharov. From Russia came a spirited defense of Sakharov by Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who has been the target of Soviet vituperation since he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970. Last week he nominated Sakharov for the Nobel Prize for peace...
Such bickering has exacerbated the strained relations between Pompidou and Brandt. It is an open secret in Paris that Pompidou distrusts Brandt's government. He worries that it is more concerned with its Ostpolitik policy of normalizing relations with the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe than with solving the problems of Western Europe. A Pompidou aide muses: "The EEC is confining for Germany. What would be the German reaction in five years if the Soviets offered them reunification?" The French answer their own question. The Germans "would pack up their dossier and return to Bonn," drop...
...Brandt's aides retort that the German government has no intention of turning neutral, nor could it economically afford to leave the EEC. The real culprit, they say, is Paris, whose obfuscations and petty legalisms have stalled progress in the EEC for so long that many West Germans have grown irritated and disillusioned...