Brigitte seebacher

Konrad adenauer
Ninja frahm
Helmut schmidt

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Biography

Willy Brandt is regarded as one of the outstanding statesmen of the 20^th century. Born into a working-class family in Lübeck, he made his way to Berlin and Bonn by way of Oslo and Stockholm and left behind an international political legacy. Whether as a social democrat, opponent of the Nazis, governing mayor of Berlin, foreign minister, federal chancellor, Nobel Peace Prize recipient or international statesman: Willy Brandt constantly devoted himself to freedom, peace, democracy and justice.

Youth in Lübeck and Exile in Scandinavia

Willy Brandt is born in 1913 into Lübeck’s working-class milieu. At the early age of sixteen he already joins the SPD (Social-Democratic Party of Germany). In 1933, when the national socialists put an abrupt end to democracy in Germany, Brandt flees to Norway. From there he continues to offer resistance to the NS regime, which revokes his citizenship in 1938. During the Second World War he finds asylum in Sweden where he continues his political struggle against Hitler’s dictatorship.

Politics in a Divided Berlin

In 1948, after his ret

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In August 1940 he became a Norwegian citizen, receiving his passport from the Norwegian embassy in Stockholm where he lived until the end of the war.

In 1946, Brandt returned to Berlin, working for the Norwegian government. In 1948, he began his political career with the SDP of Germany in Berlin and became a German citizen again. Outspoken against Soviet oppression during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and against Khrushchev's 1958 initiative to make Berlin into a "free city", Brandt was considered to belong to the right wing of his party, an assessment that would later change. He was supported by the powerful publisher Axel Springer. From 1957 to 1966, he was Mayor of West Berlin, a particularly stressful time for the city during the construction of the Berlin Wall and the intense political pressures of the Cold War. He became chairman of the SDP in 1964, a post he retained until 1987.

Brandt was the SDP candidate for Chancellor in 1961 and lost to Konrad Adenauer's conservative CDU. In 1965 he ran again, and lost to the popular Ludwig Erhard. But Erhard's government

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Willy Brandt biography
The Ostpolitik policy

We strongly recommend:

In relation to the European Revolutions of 1848 the historian Eric Hobsbawm has written:

"There have been plenty of greater revolutions in the history of the modern world, and certainly plenty of more successful ones. Yet there has been none which spread more rapidly and widely, running like a bushfire across frontiers, countries and even oceans."

In 1806 the Habsburg Emperor, who held the "Holy Roman" Imperial title and exercised direct dynastic authority over many lands stretching from Poland to the Mediterranean, was hard-pressed by the activities of Napoleon Bonaparte, and accepted the termination of the Holy Roman Empire (due to sweeping reforms instituted by Napoleon in western parts of Germanic Europe), and adopted the title of Emperor of Austria.

By late spring 1848, the Habsburg Empire looked like a hop