Willy Brandt: the Life of a Statesman, Part 9 of 12
To this day, the Ostpolitik of Brandt continues to influence the SPD, regarding Russia. This is why the current SPD government is slow to send aid to the Ukraine.
Over the last few weeks, Russia has mobilized for war in the Ukraine. The USA and Britain were slow to take this seriously, but are taking this seriously now. I’ve been surprised by the slow response of the new SPD government in Germany.
The SPD in Germany has a long history of seeking to smooth things over with the USSR. Ostpolitik has deep roots. What I find surprising is how deep those roots go. It’s as if nothing has changed in the last 60 years. The new SPD government seems influenced by Ostpolitik, as if Brandt was still running the SPD.
I might have thought that Germany would be alarmed by Russian aggression, but apparently that is an American way to see things. For the SPD, what Brandt was doing in 1971 is still a reasonable guide for dealing with Russia.
(Of course, some Germans feel the SPD is making a terrible mistake.)
But then, Brandt was granted the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, and it is possible the leaders of the SPD think they might also be rewarded if they can find a middle road to reconcile Russia and the West.
Willy Brandt
Life of a Statesman
By Hélène Miard-Delacroix, 2016
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Schmidt had to make way for Brandt, five years his senior and the more impressive of the two in terms of career and stature. And so it was Brandt’s smiling, weathered face which adorned the posters announcing that the SPD was going to build a modern Germany, and that it had the right man for the job. He had already proved himself in the outgoing coalition, making it harder for his rivals to question his competence. Above all, he had a large support base among artists, intellectuals and academics, who, to an even greater extent than during previous campaigns, launched ‘social democratic initiatives’ all over the country, flooding the public arena with favourable opinions and helping to write his speeches. The figurehead was, as always, the author of The Tin Drum, Günter Grass.
Election day, 28 September 1969, was full of surprises. The first estimates gave a clear majority to the Christian Democrats of the CDU and CSU, who together still formed the largest parliamentary group, but soon it was announced that the SPD had won 14 million votes, making up 42.7 percent of the electorate, and so had beaten their previous seemingly unassailable record of 40 percent. Wehner quickly made the case for renewing the grand coalition, but Brandt, whose memories of his cooperation with Kiesinger were not wholly positive, thought otherwise. He calculated that by adding the liberal FDP’s seats to those of the SPD, they would have a majority in the new Bundestag – a small one, but a majority nonetheless.
In the early years of the FRG, the liberal party had not been particularly progressive, and it had even been seen as a haunt of former Nazis. Wehner and Schmidt were, therefore, wary of its members. Brandt, though, felt that the FDP had changed a lot since then, and it had recently gained a more progressive wing centred on Ralf Dahrendorf and Hildegard Hamm-Brücher. Most importantly, he respected their leader, Walter Scheel, who had helped Heinemann win the presidential elections the previous spring.
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At the Chancellery
Willy Brandt did have experience of governing, but only on the much smaller scale of Berlin. Now he was the leader of the government in Federal Germany, and newly settled in the chancellor’s residence, the Palais Schaumburg. Bahr said, ‘Actually, it’s just a matter of reading, writing, listening and talking. The only differences between being chancellor and normal activities are the scale of the subject matter, the importance of the speakers, the time it takes up, and the merciless spotlight pointed right at you.’ Despite his experience in Berlin, Brandt was soon to realize the truth of his friend Bahr’s characteristically tongue-in-cheek description. On a daily basis, governing involved spending long hours crafting speeches and noting down ideas, always in green felt pen, and above all annotating and correcting the documents drafted by his team. In the Chancellery, his inner circle of state secretaries included Bahr, who dealt with matters relating to Ostpolitik, and the resolutely pro-European MP for Cologne, Katharina Focke, who handled European affairs and was the daughter of the intellectual Ernst Friedländer. Internal reforms were monitored by the chief of staff of the Chancellery, Horst Ehmke, a long-standing loyal friend; he brought with him his expertise as a professor of public law at the University of Freiburg, and an excellent work ethic.
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Normalizing, and Making Changes
The normalization of relations between the two German states was carried out in the same schizophrenic vein as the division. Somehow, West Germany needed to acknowledge that there was a second structure in Germany with the functions of an autonomous state, without recognizing that it was a state in the full sense of the word – the inconsistent character of the division would be preserved. The GDR, on the other hand, wanted complete recognition and a legitimate international existence. The FRG wanted to avoid the two populations becoming estranged, and wanted to maintain a feeling of shared identity and the desire for reunification. In these circumstances, what Brandt was doing amounted to a small revolution. He agreed to say the GDR’s name and even to talk to the other German authorities.
His first meeting with the head of the East German government, Willi Stoph, took place at Erfurt, in the GDR, on 19 March 1970. Erfurt was where the Social Democrats had developed their first Marxist programme in 1891 – a little reminder from the East German government to the Western reformers.
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Georges Pompidou, who had succeeded de Gaulle to the French presidency in 1969, was also displeased that Brandt had simply told him he was going to the Crimea, without asking his opinion. He feared Bonn’s contact with the East would lead to a ‘German shift’. There was plenty of friction between Brandt and Pompidou, but it would be simplistic to put all the blame for the tension on excessive French suspicion about Ostpolitik. Both men complained about each other’s ulterior motives. Brandt was cautious, because he was convinced the French still harboured their age-old ambitions to be the leader of Europe and the West. Moreover, he thought they had been suspicious of him on principle ever since the Germans had started discussions with the Russians. There was some truth in the idea of the “Rapallo syndrome” - the Western fear of an overly close relationship between Germany and the Soviet Union – but the Germans overestimated its importance and ended up starting a downward spiral of preventive measures.
Pompidou, on the other hand, did not approve of the fact that Brandt was thinking about the German question within the framework of a new security structure in Europe. He had told him as much in January 1970. He found it infuriating that Brandt’s Ostpolitik had ambitions to go beyond a simple contribution to détente, and his unilateral initiatives began to get on Pompidou’s nerves. It came down to a fundamental difference of opinion. Pompidou totally disagreed with Brandt on the need for concerted disarmament in Europe. Federal Germany had played an active role in Reykjavik in June 1968, when NATO had suggested opening talks on concerted, multilateral force reduction, which would be known as mutual balanced forces reduction (MBFR). France had refused to take part, to avoid French weapons of deterrence being included in the total count of Western forces. On the other hand, France was a strong supporter of the CSCE, while Federal Germany was more reticent. In Bonn the CSCE was seen predominantly as an instrument of the Soviet desire to confirm the status quo, including the division of Germany, and the Germans were not convinced by the idea that the CSCE would make it more difficult for Moscow to use force in its satellite states in Eastern Europe.
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The Nobel Prize...And the Threat of Overthrow
On 20 October 1971, Kai-Uwe von Hassel, the president of the Bundestag, interrupted parliamentary debate: he had just been told that the Nobel Committee had awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt. The MPs of the governing parties, the SPD and FDP, gave him a standing ovation, but very few others joined in. Almost all the CDU/CSU MPs refused to applaud. It was a telling example of the political climate in the early 1970s. Brandt must have been pleased at the thought that the last German to win the Peace Prize had been Carl von Ossietzky in 1936, in much more dramatic circumstances. He gladly received the honour of being placed on an equal footing with the first German Peace Prize holder, Gustav Stresemann, who had won it in 1926 jointly with Aristide Briand. He was pleased by the committee’s decision, even though he, like many other politicians, had actually nominated Jean Monnet.
He could not hide a smile of satisfaction at the ceremony in Oslo on 10 December 1971. Oslo! The president of the Nobel Committee announced that he had been awarded the prize because of his commitment to initiatives that supported détente and peace, both as foreign minister and chancellor. In his acceptance speech, Brandt paid tribute to those who had helped him and added how much it meant to him, ‘that it is my work “on behalf of the German people” which has been acknowledged; that it was granted me, after the unforgettable horrors of the past, to see the name of my country brought together with the will for peace.’ He later remarked that the Protestant Bishop of Berlin had told him the 20 October, the day the prize had been announced, was devoted to a verse from Samuel: ‘The Lord had given him rest from all his enemies about him’ (2 Samuel 7:1). Some of his listeners understood better than others whom he might have been referring to.