(10 of 12)
Born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm, the illegitimate son of a Liibeck shopgirl, he was raised by his grandfather to be a fervent blue-collar socialist. In 1933, to escape arrest by the Gestapo, he changed his name to Willy Brandt and fled to Scandinavia. In Norway and Sweden, his doctrinaire socialism was mellowed by experience of the more pragmatic Scandinavian brand.
After returning to Berlin as a press attache in the Norwegian mission, Brandt was persuaded by fellow Social Democrats to apply for reinstatement of his German citizenship, which had been lifted by the Nazis. Brandt, who is thin-sk'inned and sensitive, has often been called a "traitor" in West Germany for fleeing during the Nazi years. He argues that his background has helped Germany come to terms with itself. In the foreword of a forthcoming British edition of his early writings, Brandt declares: "I did not regard my fate as an exile as a blot on my copybook, but rather as a chance to serve that 'Other Germany,' which did not resign itself submissively to enslavement."
As an aide to Berlin's Governing Mayor Ernst Reuter, Brandt served in the front lines of the cold war. He was married on the eve of the blockade, and his first son was born by candlelight before the Russians caved in and reopened the city's land and water links. During the long struggle for Berlin. Brandt learned that there was no substitute for U.S. power in facing down the Russian bear. "Nowadays bridges are not built, but blown up," he said then. "It will be up to a later time to re-establish honest connections between the Eastern and Western parts of the world."
COOKED GOOSE. A few years after Brandt became mayor of West Berlin in 1957, however, he began to question the validity of much of the West's unbending cold war dogma and its unrealistic slogans about rolling back Communism. Journalist Egon Bahr, who was his press aide and more recently his chief foreign policy adviser, began to propound the thesis of Wandel durch Annaherung (change through rapprochement), which advanced the then revolutionary idea that West Germany could influence developments within East Germany by establishing closer contacts with it. It was a concept that subsequently was expanded to include the entire East bloc. The turning point in Brandt's own thinking came on that fateful weekend of Aug. 12-13, 1961, when the East Germans suddenly began to erect the Wall through the heart of Berlin to stem the outflow of East German refugees.
The Wall was a blatant violation of Big Four understandings about free movement throughout the city, but the Western allies waited a full 48 hours before lodging an ineffectual protest with the Soviets. "Kennedy cooked our goose," said Brandt, and he fired off a blistering reproach to the President. (He later mellowed toward Kennedy, however, after the young President delivered his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in West Berlin in 1963.) It was during the Berlin Wall period that Brandt decided that if anything was to be done to ease