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Person1913 – 1992

Willy Brandt

Mayor of West Berlin (1957–1966) and chancellor of West Germany (1969–1974) whose Ostpolitik sought reconciliation with the East; Nobel Peace Prize 1971

Born Herbert Frahm in Lübeck, he fled the Nazis to Norway and Sweden and worked in the resistance. As mayor of West Berlin (1957–1966) he lived through the crisis of the Wall, and in 1969 became the Federal Republic’s first Social Democratic chancellor. His Ostpolitik of “change through rapprochement” brought treaties with the Soviet Union and Poland and the Basic Treaty with East Germany, and in 1970 he knelt before the Warsaw Ghetto memorial. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 and resigned in 1974 when his aide Günter Guillaume was exposed as an East German spy. After the Wall fell he said, “Now what belongs together will grow together.”

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4 related events

  1. 1
    1963Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” Speechrelated figure

    Two years after the Wall went up, President Kennedy visited West Berlin and told hundreds of thousands gathered before Schöneberg Town Hall, “Ich bin ein Berliner”, pledging to stand by the city.

  2. 2
    1970Brandt’s Kneeling in Warsawkey figure

    West German Chancellor Willy Brandt suddenly knelt before the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a gesture of atonement for Nazi crimes; the same day he signed a treaty with Poland accepting its border.

  3. 3
    1972Ostpolitik and the Basic Treatykey figure

    As the culmination of Brandt’s Ostpolitik, the two German states signed the Basic Treaty, recognizing each other as equals and exchanging permanent missions — “change through rapprochement”.

  4. 4
    1973Both German States Join the United Nationsrelated figure

    Following the Basic Treaty, East and West Germany became the 133rd and 134th members of the United Nations on the same day. The two Koreas joined together in the same way in 1991.

People who appear alongside

  • Erich Honecker1912 – 1994

    Leader of East Germany (1971–1989) who had organized the building of the Berlin Wall and was ousted amid the protests of autumn 1989

  • John F. Kennedy1917 – 1963

    35th US president (1961–1963) who resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis and launched the Apollo programme; assassinated in Dallas in 1963

  • Konrad Adenauer1876 – 1967

    First chancellor of West Germany (1949–1963), who anchored it in the West, took it into NATO and championed European integration

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