Willy Brandt: Social Democrat and Nobel Peace Prize Winner
By Jason Sibert
Although he passed away in 1992, the life of Willy Brandt must be remembered as a life of struggle.
Brant was born in Lubeck, a city in the German Empire, in 1913. A single parent, his mother was a cashier for a department store and his father was a teacher. He joined the Social Democratic Party in 1929. However, he soon left the SDP to affiliate with the Socialist Workers Party in Germany and the Independent Labor Party in the United Kingdom. After graduating the German version of high school, he went to work, as a he became an apprentice at the shipbroker and ship’s agent F. H. Bertling. In 1933, using his connections with the port and its ships, he left Germany for Norway to escape Nazi persecution.
It was in Norway that he adopted the name Willy Brandt (his real name was Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm) to avoid Nazi agents. Brandt was in Germany from September to December 1936, disguised as a Norwegian student named Gunnar Gaasland. During the Spanish Civil War in 1937, he worked as a journalist in Spain. Germany revoked his citizenship in 1938, and he applied for citizenship in Norway. In 1940, the Germans arrested him, but they were unable to identify Brandt because he wore a German uniform.
He attained Norwegian citizenship in 1940 but escaped to neutral Sweden where he lectured on the problems social democrats had under Nazi rule in Germany. After the end of World War II in 1946, he returned to Berlin. From 3 October 1957 to 1966, Willy Brandt served as Governing Mayor of West Berlin, during a period of increasing tension in East-West relations that led to the construction of the Berlin Wall. Brandt was an outspoken critic of Soviet repression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and of Nikita Khrushchev’s 1958 proposal that Berlin receive the status of a free city.
At the start of 1961, U.S. President John F Kennedy saw Brandt as a figure destined for high office in West Germany and was hoping he would replace Konrad Adenauer as chancellor following elections later that year. Kennedy made this preference clear by inviting Brandt, the West German opposition leader, to an official meeting at the White House a month before meeting with Adenauer, the country’s leader. For the president, Brandt stood for Germany’s future and for overcoming traditional Cold War thinking.
Brandt was elected chancellor in 1969, the first Social Democrat in the position since the 1910’s. As chancellor, he made it a point to improve relations with East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. The policy was called the New Eastern Policy. He thought the policy would undermine Communism in the Eastern Bloc states. In 1971, Brandt won the Nobel Peace Prize for trying to work diplomatically with an adversary.
He continued as chancellor until 1974 and was the leader of the Social Democratic Party until 1987. Brandt passed away in 1992.
Jason Sibert is the Executive Director of the Peace Economy Project in St. Louis.
