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“... 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 ...”

“... 1922] by the proto-Nazi Freikorps,’ not least because he was a liberal-minded Jew. But it was Willy Brandt who took the first steps toward a reconciliation with Eastern Europe, and made these first steps toward a better Europe possible. With a mere 11 years to go, the last bit of Germany is moving into the 20th century, the century in which ordinary ...”

“... their own weaknesses. There was an entirely unofficial slogan in those days which did wonders for Willy Brandt: Scheisse – trotzdem, SPD!, which might be translated: ‘Oh, God, not again – but SPD in spite of it!’ Perhaps Grass thought it up. It shouldn’t be supposed, though, that Grass has made himself universally popular. There has always been ...”

“... was to win office. From 1969 to 1982, the liberals looked to the left, and the SPD, first under Willy Brandt, and later under Helmut Schmidt, dominated government. From 1982 onwards, the liberals looked to the right, installing Kohl as Chancellor, a position he was to retain until 1998. By then, however, a new element had been introduced into German ...”

“... something tremendously the matter with either a. your country or b. your circle of friends. When Willy Brandt put on the uniform of a country that was fighting his own – the action for which the German conservatives never forgave him – he was not thinking: ‘Pity about my friends, but I feel I have to betray my country.’ Nor, if he had elected to ...”

“... had these existed. The great architect of Ostpolitik and the German Basic Treaty was, of course, Willy Brandt – who was brought down when it was revealed in 1974 that one of his senior aides, Günter Guillaume, had been an East German agent since the Fifties. Wolf is aware of the painful historical irony (Brandt, of ...”

“... with the Soviet Union, such as leaving Nato in return for reunification. It was only in 1970 that Willy Brandt decided to lead his country out of the trap by recognising the territorial results of the war and the new boundaries. The expellees threatened to destroy him, but nothing happened. The Allies, who had grown fed up with their own hypocrisy, let ...”

“... Turkey for its religion, liberals can attack it for genocide denial. The odds on Erdogan doing a Willy Brandt and making public amends seem slim, especially since it is unlikely that such a gesture would actually tip the balance in favour of membership. (On the contrary, only the other day, Angela Merkel repeated her suggestion that Turkey should be ...”

“... the American war in Vietnam: the same complaint was addressed to other Labourite statesmen, like Willy Brandt in Germany. At the same time, Wilson had to face covert attacks from right-wingers: it was alleged (and still is) that the British Secret Service was conspiring to remove this prime minister. The most blatant ‘Fascist’ move in the Britain of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... political convergence – seemed at first to pay off. He established boozy good relations with Willy Brandt, as the West German chancellor set about recognising the frontiers left by the Second World War (when the Bundestag threatened to reject the new treaties, Brezhnev sent Brandt’s lieutenant Egon Bahr a ...”

“... comprehension had reached a fatal level. The bilingual text which includes a long interview with Willy Brandt is by Dr Fischer, the superb photographs of the Wall that take up most of the book are by Count Schulenburg. It is dedicated to Dr Fischer’s uncle, murdered in Auschwitz, to Count Schulenburg’s father, executed for his part in the plot ...”

“... rights and wrongs of membership of Nato; the nuclear energy programme; whether in the absence of Brandt, and given the too urgent candidature of Strauss, Schmidt ought to be voted for; the division of Germany? Decorum, or the sense of a diminished literary tradition, would probably inhibit the representative British novelist. The only way he could smuggle ...”

“... and fought bitterly against attempts at political accommodation, notably the Ostpolitik pursued by Willy Brandt at the beginning of the 1970s. And who has weighed in now, with expressions of regret that the subject was too long neglected, but Günter Grass, whose novella on the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff has become a bestseller in Germany. At first ...”

“... as he said, also ‘liable to bias’. The Queen at the wall in Ireland was not entirely unlike Willy Brandt at the Ghetto memorial. Whether ‘the ultimate reality must be anarchy’ who can presume to say? ‘Tradition is kindred’: perhaps that is true; perhaps a great cross-roaded mind has blundered: ‘nadir to nadir’, riches to rags; in ...”