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. A Chancellor of the Federal Republic had broken through the Cold War barricades and visited the German Democratic Republic for the first time. He writes in these memoirs:

LRB 25 June 1992 | PDF Download