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“... saying that there is no future in Europe for a social-market view of politics of a Neil Kinnock or Willy Brandt type. Such Social Democratic parties are in power in France and in Spain, and despite all Kohl’s efforts, the newly-founded East German SPD, led by Ibrahim Böhme, is likely to do well on 18 March. If it does, it will show that one form of ...”

“... and knowledgable; when he writes, for example, about his distress at the vilification of Willy Brandt, the chancellor who had kneeled at a monument commemorating the victims of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto; or observes that his great friend Marion Countess Dönhoff, the aristocratic publisher of Die Zeit, still longed for her ancestral ...”

“... his whining Saxon accent. He distrusted Ulbricht’s growing interest in cultivating contacts with Willy Brandt’s Social Democrats in West Germany, a turn sharply contrary to Soviet policy. But he got on famously with Honecker and an understanding grew between them that Ulbricht’s rigid self-certainty had become a liability. Ulbricht was finally ...”

“... great exhibition hall at Augsburg could have been the gigantic Westfalenhalle in Dortmund where Willy Brandt used to speak at the climax of his election tours. That harsh, hoarse, painful voice seemed to be powered by coal and iron from the Ruhr industries around him. And now, forty years on, the SPD still speaks with a steam-age accent. Peer ...”

“... this sense help if the Western package included a reiteration of the political commitments made by Willy Brandt when he launched his Ostpolitik in 1970. The Oder-Neisse line would again be recognised as the rightful western boundary of Poland. The division of Germany would not be contested, nor would the existence of Soviet military facilities in ...”

“... of suspects in the West became more and more outrageous. They included Harold Wilson, Olaf Palme, Willy Brandt, Armand Hammer, Averell Harriman, Lester Pearson and Henry Kissinger. They also included every Soviet defector who had come after him. These men had been sent, Golitsyn said, to discredit him because the KGB knew how dangerous he was to their ...”

“... all-purpose political conjuror and thug Trygve Lie. Yet there are honourable contrasts, such as Willy Brandt. In the whole of Brandt’s memoirs, the name Wilson is mentioned twice and then with a very pallid politeness. But when Wilson’s career began, it could still be said that British reformist socialism counted ...”

“... that tore the interwar SPD apart finally resolved. And it would be another ten years before Willy Brandt took office as chancellor. Rather than proceeding nation by nation, it would have been more revealing had Winkler treated the crisis of interwar democracy as a trans-continental phenomenon, with choices in one country conditioning those ...”

“... when it merged with the SED to form the party now known simply as Die Linke (‘The Left’).Under Willy Brandt, who became chancellor in 1969, and his successor, Helmut Schmidt, the BfV thrived. Its staff more than doubled from around one thousand in 1969 to more than two thousand in 1980. It expanded again during the war on terror, and then in the wake ...”

“... Thatcher, who gets a page about her character and background – much more than De Gaulle, Willy Brandt or Khrushchev. This is curious for several reasons. First of all, because Judt does not like Thatcher, giving further space to describing the moral and social devastation he considers she left behind her (if there is anyone whose achievement he ...”

“... courts. Unlike in Italy or France, Germany’s social democrats had no rivals on the left. When Willy Brandt took office in 1969 as the first postwar SPD chancellor, he did so in coalition with the liberal, free-market FDP. The coalition governments of Brandt and Helmut Schmidt changed the face of the Federal ...”

“... us? Social Democrats! Who was in the right? Karl Liebknecht!’)That was absurdity in 1968. Willy Brandt – nobody’s class traitor – was leading the SPD. But in 1918 and 1919? The revolutionaries wanted not only peace but a new kind of state in which the old ruling elites – the officer corps, the bureaucrats, the titled landowners and the ...”

“... the German economic miracle, and this allegiance was later strengthened by his friendship with Willy Brandt. When, in December 1970, Brandt as German Chancellor went to kneel before the monument to the victims of the Polish resistance in Warsaw (a gesture that appalled the troglodytes on the far Right), Grass was ...”

“... understandable, though still very striking. Many observers recalled the popular enthusiasm for Willy Brandt’s victory in 1972, which put the SPD in power for a decade. The paradox is that the recent electoral upheaval, which did not generate anything like the same excitement, was far greater. There are two ways of looking at this. One is to compare ...”

“... which denied Federal German recognition to states which had already recognised the GDR, to Brandt’s Ostpolitik. As Garton Ash writes, It was not just in 1988 but already in 1969 that Brandt said: ‘I must confess that I have stopped speaking about reunification.’ In the short term, this could be seen as ...”