The center right in Germany really had it in for the politician with the alias Willi Brandt. After all there was the exile, the fighting for Norway against Germans, the abandonment of all the lost land, the loose living, the strange payments coming from both the CIA and the Stasi. How could you choose him to be the leader of West Germany? Well he had JFK and the 68ers on his side. They reveled in his differences, after all they were themselves different, and they were the future. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
The year before this stamp, as part of the same series of stamps on deceased German statesman, Germany did a stamp honoring political rival Konrad Adenauer, Brandt was portrayed as a younger man with intelligent eyes. Adenauer is cast as old, dark, and bitter. This gets into the generational shift. Brandt was himself too old to be a 68er but like JFK had a youthfulness they could identify with. When the 1960s political rivals are then remembered in the 1990s, Adenauer naturally gets the short end, His people and manner are just gone.
Todays stamp is issue A803, a 1 DM stamp issued by Germany on November 10th 1993. It was a single stamp for Brandt, but there were many similar stamps for dead German statesman. No not East Germans, but they had many stamps in their time and place. Interestingly most of their guys resembled Adenauer more than Brandt. The uprisings of the late 60s arose from the left. However the decrepit old left leadership in the East were not the type to harness it. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 90 cents used.
Herbert Frahm was born in Lubeck to a single mother, a store cashier in 1913. He was raised by his step grandparents. That does sound modern. From a young age he was an SPD party activist while working for a ships broker. With the Nazis coming into power, SPD activists were no longer welcome and Frahm invented the name Willi Brandt and went into exile in Norway. He worked as a journalist in Norway and kept contact with fellow SPD activists in Germany by posing as a Norwegian student under another alias and visiting. The Nazis in 1938 purged the roles of German citizens who left due to them including Frahm. Frahm then applied and received Norwegian citizenship under the Willy Brandt alias. He volunteered for service in the Norwegian army when Germany invaded and was captured and briefly a POW. Upon release he moved to neutral Sweden, At wars end he quickly went to Berlin employed as a Norwegian diplomat. Back in Germany, he rejoined the reformed SPD under the Willy Brandt name under which he reapplied and received German citizenship. He wrote for an SPD newspaper and quickly rose in politics. The occupying powers approved of him since he lacked Nazi connections. In 1950, the CIA paid him secretly 170,000DM which is now about 400,000 Euros.
He rose to be mayor of West Berlin and the head of the SPD party. When JFK became American President in 1961 he openly supported Brandt over aging long time Chancellor Adenauer. Brandt lost the election in 1961 but got a great deal of positive world publicity during the construction of the Berlin wall by the East in the early 1960s. As the administration of West Berlin was separate from West Germany, he changed his affiliation to a safe SPD seat in Rhineland to get into the Bundestag.
The SPD and Brandt finally had their day in 1969 with the first SPD government since 1930. Social spending increased while military draft terms shrank as one would expect of a left government. What was new was Ostpolitik, that sought closer relations with the East. A peace treaty was signed with Poland and the East German government was better recognized, To achieve this, Brandt gave up German claims to land that had been taken at the end of the war. This especially angered Germans who had been forced to move west from the end of war ethnic cleansing. In 1972, several members of his coalition thought he had gone too far on this and called a vote of no confidence. Most thought Brandt would lose but he won by three votes. It turned out the East German Stasi had paid a few Christian Democrats to vote for Brandt.
Speaking of Stasi there was a close aid of Brandt that turned out to be one. Gunter Guilliaume had crossed from East Germany in 1956 but was a Stasi plant. When this was discovered, Brandt resigned under pressure from more conservative factions of his own party. The Stasi came to realize what a blunder it was as Brandt was their friend. He remained in the Bundestag, and was a thorn in the side of the next SPD German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.
Well my drink is empty so I will await the 10th, Monday, when it will be my birthday and of course there will be another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.