Up against the wall

Neal Ascherson

  • My Life in Politics by Willy Brandt
    Hamish Hamilton, 498 pp, £20.00, April 1992, ISBN 0 241 13073 5

On 19 March 1970, Willy Brandt went out on the balcony of a hotel at Erfurt and the East German crowd roared: ‘Willy, Willy!’ Some famous photographs show him looking down at them gravely, almost in meditation. This was one of the grand moments in postwar European politics, or so it then seemed. A Chancellor of the Federal Republic had broken through the Cold War barricades and visited the German Democratic Republic for the first time. He writes in these memoirs:

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