Dreams of the Decades 
Liz Jobey
- Bill Brandt: A Life by Paul Delany
- Bill Brandt: A Centenary Retrospective Victoria & Albert Museum
In the summer of 1927, 23-year-old Willy Brandt underwent psychoanalysis in Vienna in an attempt to cure his tuberculosis. He had spent the previous two and a half years in Switzerland, at the Schweizerhof sanatorium in Davos, where, along with the prescribed exposure to sunshine, good food and fresh air, he had undergone surgery to artificially collapse one of his diseased lungs, in the belief that this would give it a better chance to heal. Before that he had spent 22 months at another sanatorium in Ticino, where many of the patients, like Brandt, were German. The spread of TB was one of the legacies of the First World War. As Paul Delany tells us, in Germany TB sufferers doubled in number in the last two years of the war, when ‘soap disappeared completely, and the streetcars were foul with the distinctive stench of famine.’ Rolf Brandt, Willy’s younger brother,
would later talk of having to rummage in dustbins for food and living for a week on one loaf of bread, baked with each day’s portion marked out. All his life he would gobble his meals and leave no scrap on his plate, a typical habit of people who have experienced starvation. Willy did not behave in this way; it seems by the time of the famine his mother was so fearful for his health that she kept up his strength by giving him an extra share from her own rations.
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Liz Jobey is the author of A Photographic History of the 20th Century.
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