1992: Former German Chancellor Willy Brandt dies

The first post-war Social Democratic federal chancellor died in Bonn on 8 October 1992. Willy Brandt, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1971, stood out for his rapprochement with Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm was born December 18, 1913 in Lübeck, northern Germany. At the age of 18 he joined the Socialist Labor Party (SAP). After the Nazis came to power in 1933, he emigrated to Norway and, for security reasons, adopted the code name Willy Brandt, which he officially assumed in 1949.

In Oslo he worked as a journalist and studied history. From 1936 until he was discovered and expatriated two years later, he lived clandestinely in Berlin, as a Norwegian university student, participating in the reorganization of his former party. He was involved in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 as a political observer and journalist.

When he obtained Norwegian citizenship in 1940, the invasion of Norway by German troops forced him to flee to Sweden. After the end of the Second World War he returned to Germany to write reports on the Nuremberg trials. From 1947 he worked as a press officer at the Norwegian representation in Berlin.

After regaining German citizenship in 1948, he resumed his political career in the Social Democratic Party (SPD), of which he assumed the vice-presidency in the city of West Berlin. Between 1949 and 1957 Willy Brandt was a member of the Bundestag, the German parliament. Also in 1957 he assumed the position of mayor of Berlin, a position he held until 1966. Between 1964 and 1987 he was president of the SPD and, subsequently, honorary president of the party.

Faced with the Soviet ultimatum in West Berlin in 1958 and the construction of the Wall in 1961, Brandt began to project himself onto the international political scene.

In 1966 he was Minister of Foreign Affairs in the coalition government with the Christian Democrats, led by Kurt Georg Kiesinger (1966-1969). Brandt’s goal was to improve relations with his Eastern European neighbors, isolated behind the Iron Curtain.

Approach to the East

In 1969 he was elected federal chancellor, becoming the fourth head of German government after the Second World War. With the support of his Foreign Minister, Walter Scheel, he pursued the “policy of change through rapprochement”. Kneeling in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 and visiting Israel in 1973, he moved the world.

In March and May 1970 he participated in two meetings between the German states, which served as the basis for the normalization of relations between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

The signing of the Treaties of Moscow and Warsaw followed in August and December of the same year, precursors to the agreements between the four powers of 1971; the fundamental agreement on relations between the two German states (1972); and the German-Czech Agreement of 1973. This conciliatory policy earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971.

In 1974, Willy Brandt resigned from his position following an espionage case. But he continued to be active in international politics: between 1979 and 1983 he was a member of the European Parliament; from 1976 to 1992, president of the Socialist International and, between 1977 and 1989, of the North-South Commission. He died on 8 October 1992 in Unkel, south of Bonn.

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Source: Terra

Rose

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