The Declining Star of Willy Brandt

Do you know that Willy has been kidnapped?” the cab driver asked me when I arrived in Munich. With a poker face, he added: “The kidnappers want a millon marks in cash, and if they don’t get it they threaten to return Willy to the Chancellory alive.” Telling jokes about Chancellor Willy Brandt is the latest and very popular fad in Germany these days. There must be several hundred by now, mostly depicting him as a tottering, helpless man; they often predict his early demise. Such a wave of hostile jokes would have been unthinkable a year ago when, following his and his party’s impressive victory at the polls, he was hailed as one who would triumphantly lead his people toward peace and progressive innovation. Any critical reflection on his towering stature then was dismissed as reactionary lèse majesté.

Today his halo is badly tarnished for those both in and out of the ranks of his former admirers. “Europe’s most overrated politician,” as he was recently called by the Swiss Neue Zϋrcher Zeitung, one of Europe’s best informed newspapers, now finds support only in those same foreign liberal media that did so much to build him up on the international scene. Thus the Washington Post, for instance, as late as February was informing its readers that “of all the Western democracies the only one that continues under vigorous and secure leadership is Germany.” This at the very moment when West Germans were demonstrating their disenchantment with Brandt and his government because of the very failure to provide that kind of vigorous and secure leadership.

NM

About the Author

Norbert Muhlen

Featured Tags

Do you know that Willy has been kidnapped?” the cab driver asked me when I arrived in Munich. With a poker face, he added: “The kidnappers want a millon marks in cash, and if they don’t get it they threaten to return Willy to the Chancellory alive.” Telling jokes about Chancellor Willy Brandt is the latest and very popular fad in Germany these days. There must be several hundred by now, mostly depicting him as a tottering, helpless man; they often predict his early demise. Such a wave of hostile jokes would have been unthinkable a year ago when, following his and his party’s impressive victory at the polls, he was hailed as one who would triumphantly lead his people toward peace and progressive innovation. Any critical reflection on his towering stature then was dismissed as reactionary lèse majesté.

Today his halo is badly tarnished for those both in and out of the ranks of his former admirers. “Europe’s most overrated politician,” as he was recently called by the Swiss Neue Zϋrcher Zeitung, one of Europe’s best informed newspapers, now finds support only in those same foreign liberal media that did so much to build him up on the international scene. Thus the Washington Post, for instance, as late as February was informing its readers that “of all the Western democracies the only one that continues under vigorous and secure leadership is Germany.” This at the very moment when West Germans were demonstrating their disenchantment with Brandt and his government because of the very failure to provide that kind of vigorous and secure leadership.