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Brandt's political career began in 1949 with his election to West Germany's first Bundestag. In 1957 he became mayor of West Berlin, a post he held during the most frigid days of the cold war. While mayor, he ran in 1961 and '65 as the Social Democrats' candidate for Chancellor, losing both times in brutal campaigns in which opponents sneered at his origins -- the mighty Konrad Adenauer called him "alias Herbert Frahm" -- and criticized him for fleeing Germany before the war. Pictures of Brandt wearing a Norwegian uniform were handed out by his Christian Democratic rivals, and at one stop in the 1965 campaign a heckler hoisted a sign reading WE SHALL NOT VOTE FOR A TRAITOR. The harsh campaign and even more bitter second defeat were too much, and for the next three years Brandt virtually withdrew from public life.
With the formation in 1966 of a grand coalition between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, Brandt came back as West Germany's Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister. Three years later, he tried again for the chancellorship and won. By then, his view of East and West had been tempered by his belief that President John F. Kennedy had abandoned West Berlin in 1961 when East Germany erected the Wall. "Kennedy has cooked our goose!" an angry Brandt told friends. He decided that the fate of the two Germanys would be decided by Germans and that the key lay in improving relations with the East, especially with the U.S.S.R.
The success of Brandt's Ostpolitik contrasted with disarray in domestic politics. The last straw was the 1974 arrest of a close aide, Gunter Guillaume, on charges of spying for East Germany. Brandt resigned under pressure, a decision he later regretted. "I blame myself for not banging my fist on the table and demanding a stop to all the nonsense," he wrote in his 1989 memoirs.
In that spirit, he did not withdraw into bitterness, but stayed on as chairman of the Social Democrats -- and as leader of the Socialist International -- and evolved into an honored, even beloved, elder statesman. One of the crowning moments of his later years came after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, when he delivered a ringing speech in Berlin that ended with the motto of unification: "What belongs together will now grow together."
It grew together faster than he wanted. Brandt advocated a gradual merger of the two Germanys, not the virtual annexation of one by the other, and raised his voice to warn of the dangers of haste and of hubris. "Nothing lasts forever," he said in his last public statement, a speech read on his behalf to a Berlin meeting of the Socialist International as he lay dying last month. "Every era demands its own answers, and if one wants to do good, one must be prepared for them." Willy Brandt was.