Background
Willy was born on December 18, 1913 in (as Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm), Liibeck. The son of Martha Frahm.
Willy was born on December 18, 1913 in (as Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm), Liibeck. The son of Martha Frahm.
Willy Brandt won a scholarship to a prestigious Lübeck gymnasium (secondary school), from which he graduated in 1932.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, he decided to change his name to Willy Brandt and flee from certain persecution. He therefore escaped the pursuit by secret police and the confinement in concentration camps which befell so many other SPD leaders. Brandt spent the rest of the 1930 in Norway and eventually became a Norwegian citizen. But in 1940 he was again forced to flee the Nazis, and he spent the remaining war years in neutral Sweden.
In the September 1961 national elections, Brandt, as leader of the Social Democratic Party, unsuccessfully opposed the incumbent Christian Democratic chancellor, Konrad Adenauer.
In October 1969 Brandt, heading a coalition with the Free Democrats, succeeded Kiesinger and became the first Social Democratic chancellor of West Germany. Brandt initiated a policy of Ostpolitik, or East-facing politics, to improve West German relations with the Communist states of Eastern Europe.
Brandt resigned as chancellor in May 1974 after an aide was revealed as a spy for East Germany. From 1976 to Sept. 14, 1992, he headed the Socialist International, an organization of most of the world's Socialist, Social Democratic, and Labor parties. In the early 1980 he chaired a worldwide panel known as the Brandt Commission.
Because of Brandt's efforts, the re-unification of Germany occurred, though more quickly than even Brandt ever imagined.
Reading, fishing, swimming.
From 1941 until 1948 Brandt was married to Anna Carlotta Thorkildsen (the daughter of a Norwegian father and a German-American mother). They had a daughter, Ninja Brandt (born in 1940). After Brandt and Thorkildsen were divorced in 1948, Brandt married to the Norwegian-born German writer Rut Hansen in the same year. Hansen and Brandt had three sons.
After 32 years of marriage, Willy Brandt and Rut Hansen Brand divorced in 1980, and from the day that they were divorced they never saw each other again. On 9 December 1983, Brandt married Brigitte Seebacher (born in 1946).