My Road to Berlin, by Willy Brandt (Doubleday, $4.50). If West Berlin’s Mayor Willy Brandt were not already deservedly famous, this book would hardly make him so. “As told to” roly-poly journeyman Leo Lania, this disappointingly thin autobiography takes its place among the spate of campaign success stories now flooding American book stores. But Brandt, perhaps alone among the preening crowd, is bigger and better than his biographer makes him. Much of the high adventure of his life story is retained even in this uninspired telling. Born poor and out of wedlock in 1913, he took his socialist viewpoint at the knee of his devoutly proletarian grandfather, was driven into exile in Norway by Hitler’s coming, saw and comprehended Communist treachery in Spain as a newspaperman, risked his life in the German underground, and in an act of conviction cast aside his Norwegian citizenship to be a German again in the rubble of postwar Berlin. In 1957 he was elected mayor, and immediately faced up to the enemy beyond the Brandenburg Gate. Only 47, he is one day likely to be Chancellor of West Germany, possibly the successor of venerable Konrad Adenauer. No one need fear concerning the anti-Communist zeal of this dedicated man of the Left, who declares: “One must
Box 101, New York 16, N.Y.




Comments