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The Young Falcon. Willy's moderate Socialism represents the Scandinavian strain in him—the most important influence in his life. He was born Herbert Karl Frahm, the illegitimate child of a shopgirl in the Baltic German port of Liibeck. The companionship he could not find at home he sought in the "Red Falcons," prewar Germany's Socialist youth movement. He got into his first slugging match with the Nazis at 17, was rarely out of trouble thereafter. By 19 he was writing for Socialist newspapers, serving as a functionary of the far-left Socialist Workers' Party, and was, an old acquaintance recalls, "as close to Red as you can get without actually being Red." In 1933. already in the Gestapo's black books, and disgusted with the German Socialists' collapse before Hitler, he fled to Norway under the pseudonym Willy Brandt—the name he has borne ever since.
In Norway Willy supported himself by newspapering. (In the 1957 German Who's Who he still listed himself a "journalist.") But his real profession was politics. He became the moving spirit of the German refugee colony in Oslo, won such esteem among Scandinavian Socialists that some of them still argue that he would in time have become Foreign Minister of Norway. Willy gained political maturity there, and a deep affection for Scandinavia that has never left him. Even today he speaks Norwegian at home, and most of the personal friends invited to the Brandts' five-room duplex in Berlin's Zehlendorf district are Scandinavian.
Fatherly Friend. When the Nazis invaded Norway in 1940, Willy found himself in personal danger. Up to his neck in anti-Nazi plots—he had even spent six months back in Nazi Germany using forged Norwegian papers—he was wanted by the Gestapo. At the urging of Norwegian friends, he donned Norwegian uniform, was flung into a P.W. camp along with the defeated Norwegian army, released as harmless after five weeks. At war's end, after almost five years in refuge in Sweden, he turned up in Germany again, first as a Norwegian correspondent, then as press attache to the Norwegian military mission in Berlin.
When he arrived in Berlin, a Norwegian citizen with the rank of major in the Norwegian army, Brandt had no intention of resettling in the land of his birth. Already he was planning marriage to Rut Hansen, lively blonde widow of a Norwegian journalist. (His first marriage, also to a Norwegian girl, ended in divorce in 1947.) His privileged status as a member of the Allied occupation forces assured him of a luxurious existence that no German could dream of matching. But under the influence of Ernst Reuter, whom he still emotionally recalls as his "fatherly friend," Willy's interest in German politics began to revive. In early 1948 he became a German citizen again. His explanation: "It is better to be the only democrat in Germany than one of many in Norway, where everyone understands democracy."