Word: brandts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Brandt came from humble beginnings. He was born Herbert Frahm in Lubeck in 1913, the son of an unmarried shop clerk, and reared largely by his maternal grandfather, a truck driver, farm laborer and ardent socialist. The grandson took on the grandfather's political colors and, while still in his mid-teens, wrote for Der Volksbote (the People's Messenger), the local Social Democratic Party paper; in 1930, not yet 17, he joined the party. When Adolf Hitler outlawed leftist parties in 1933, Herbert Frahm took the nom de guerre Willy Brandt, a name common in his hometown. Later that...
...German troops occupied Norway, and Brandt fled again, this time to Sweden. He returned to Norway after the war and began a career in the Norwegian foreign service with a posting to Berlin as a military press attache. In 1947 he reapplied for the German citizenship the Nazis had stripped from him. "During my time 'outside,' I did not for one moment cease to regard myself as a German," Brandt later wrote. When his citizenship was restored in 1948, Brandt went to work as an aide to Ernst Reuter, the colorful mayor of West Berlin, and from that vantage point...
...Brandt's political career began in 1949 with his election to West Germany's first Bundestag. In 1957 he became mayor of West Berlin, a post he held during the most frigid days of the cold war. While mayor, he ran in 1961 and '65 as the Social Democrats' candidate for Chancellor, losing both times in brutal campaigns in which opponents sneered at his origins -- the mighty Konrad Adenauer called him "alias Herbert Frahm" -- and criticized him for fleeing Germany before the war. Pictures of Brandt wearing a Norwegian uniform were handed out by his Christian Democratic rivals...
With the formation in 1966 of a grand coalition between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, Brandt came back as West Germany's Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister. Three years later, he tried again for the chancellorship and won. By then, his view of East and West had been tempered by his belief that President John F. Kennedy had abandoned West Berlin in 1961 when East Germany erected the Wall. "Kennedy has cooked our goose!" an angry Brandt told friends. He decided that the fate of the two Germanys would be decided by Germans and that the key lay in improving...
...success of Brandt's Ostpolitik contrasted with disarray in domestic politics. The last straw was the 1974 arrest of a close aide, Gunter Guillaume, on charges of spying for East Germany. Brandt resigned under pressure, a decision he later regretted. "I blame myself for not banging my fist on the table and demanding a stop to all the nonsense," he wrote in his 1989 memoirs...