Willy Brandt: the Life of a Statesman, Part 6 of 12
“No more experiments” was the mood, and it limited the progress that the SPD could make
“No more experiments” was the mood, and it limited the progress that the SPD could make. With the economy booming, and without a new program for a new democracy, the Social Democrats had nothing to offer. Except for a brief stretch in the 1970s, the era of innovation was dead by the late 1950s, and without any pressure to move Left, the various Western nations began to drift right. Especially lacking was any conversation about the structure of democracy, rather, the conversation rehashed old arguments about the class war, and otherwise the political moment would slowly grow increasingly stagnant. And yet, Germany and France would briefly engage in a mania for reform, from 1966 to 1982. But this would simply be a moment to implement ideas that had been discussed for a hundred years.
What is interesting is everything that was missing. The insights from political science, game theory, Machine Learning or modern statistics. The way we talk about politics nowadays is inflected with dialects of game theory and Machine Learning, but there wasn’t even a whisper of that back then. Instead the dialogue was still about issues of class conflict and resource allocation.
Willy Brandt
Life of a Statesman
By Hélène Miard-Delacroix, 2016
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Page 63
The economy grew so quickly, after the difficulties of the first postwar years, that West Germany’s sudden affluence was seen as a miracle. The SPD had little to offer beside a CDU government that most Germans credited with this remarkable recovery. Behind closed doors, it was clear that their sensible policies had been helped along by favorable circumstances. Their policies included structural reforms which, since 1948, had created an environment that was conducive to business and to the flourishing of a moderate market economy, and the CDU had also carried out crucial monetary reform.
After years of constant mobilization under the Nazis, it was unsurprising that many of Brandt’s compatriots shunned ideology and approved of the CDU’s slogan: ‘No more experiments!’ In the legislative elections of 1957, the conservatives’ posters showed the lined face of their octogenarian patriarch, the Catholic Adenauer, who had been head of the federal government for eight years. This time, the CDU acquired an absolute majority in the Bundestag.
The SPD were not making much headway on a national level, in part because their image as part of the labour movement deterred the largely anti-communist electorate. This was slightly unfair, considering the Social Democrats’ openly hostile attitude to the GDR regime, but it was one effect of the extreme polarization of this phase of the Cold War.
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In the summer of 1952 Neumann lost his mentor Schumacher, whose ravaged body finally gave up at 56 years old. Reuter’s and Brandt’s moderate wing hoped that the intransigence Schumacher had encouraged, which had been so damaging to the socialists’ image, would die with him. Schumacher had said no to everything, and especially to the suggestion that West Germany should cooperate with the Allies and their other European neighbors, on the pretext that the collective structures and integrative measures they proposed were a dangerous way of controlling Germany, of exploiting German resources and delivering them to the powers of capitalism, and of making the division of the country permanent. The uncompromising Schumacher had dismissed the Schuman Plan, published on 9 May 1950 as ‘capitalist, conservative, clerical and cartlised’.
By the late 1960s:
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It was certainly an unlikely partnership – between Brandt, the former exile, and Kurt Georg Kiesinger, the former Nazi Party member. Brandt compensated at some symbolic level for the new CDU chancellor’s delicate past. He saw the coalition as a multicoloured compromise, each party appointing ministers who would be difficult for the other party to deal with: if the CSU’s Franz Josef Strauss, whose image had been severely tarnished by the Spiegel affair, was minister of finance, then Brandt appointed the former communist Herbert Wehner as the SPD’s minister of all-German affairs, handling the problem of the division.
Compared to some of his more intransigent colleagues, Brandt was pragmatic when it came to his compatriot’ pasts, as long as they had not committed any crimes. Unlike Schmidt, he tended to prefer a conciliatory approach. He certainly did understand the people who cried foul, and who applauded the young Beate Klarsfeld when she publicly slapped Kiesinger on 7 November 1968, but he respected the way Adenauer had managed to reintegrate former Nazis into a parliamentary democracy. As the intellectual Eugen Kogon wrote in 1949, when the questions of reintegration and of amnesty for smaller crimes were being debated, either we have to reintegrate former Nazis, or kill them. And we can’t kill them.
In the name of reconciliation Brandt was willing to have his name next to that of Kiesinger, who had been, at worst, an averagely zealous functionary working under Ribbentrop in the Nazi Foreign Ministry, where his work between 1940 and 1945 had involved radio surveillance and propaganda. Next, the SPD appointed an unexpected candidate as federal minister of economic affairs: Karl Schiller, a former Nazi Party member who had become a Social Democrat and was professor of economy at Hamburg University. He followed Keynes in advocating a counter-cyclical policy of economic stabilisation. The wide range of backgrounds and political orientation in the government reflected the reality of the country as it was 20 years after the war.
Brandt seized the opportunity to win some political territory and to present the outside world with an image of a diverse and constantly changing Germany. He told the party members that the unlikely coalition between the SPD and CDU could only end up benefiting the SPD, even if only by proving that the party was capable of assuming the highest levels of responsibility. The Social Democrats already held power in many of the Länder, but the final test of federal government still awaited them: it was an opportunity not to be missed. It was still a difficult pill to swallow for a significant number of the militant wing of the party, especially for the younger members, who protested against what they saw as collaboration.
Those demonstrating in the streets saw themselves as the voice of opposition that the grand coalition had erased from parliament. Among them was the young Peter Brandt. He was now 18 years old and in his final year of school, and had stayed in Berlin when the rest of the Brandt family moved to Bonn. He had protested against American policies in Vietnam in 1966 and was now active among the Marxist youth who were critical of the SPD’s decision to form a coalition with the CDU.
He was close to Rudi Dutschke, figurehead and leader of the protesters in the West German version of the 1968 movement. Berlin was, along with Frankfurt, one of the most active centres of protest, especially since a confrontation with the police had taken a dramatic turn with the death of a student, murdered by a policeman in Berlin on 2 June 1967. Heinrich Albertz, who had succeeded Brandt as mayor of Berlin, resigned in September 1967 following revelations about police conduct; it was Brandt’s close friend and ally Klaus Schütz who took his place. The fact that the policeman responsible for the death of student Benno Ohnesorg had been an SED activist in East Germany was only discovered several decades later; at the time the young protesters were as convinced as those in the French 1968 movement that the police were just another method of repressive, inherently fascist state control.