Frayn Plays: 4 by Michael Frayn

Author:Michael Frayn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Postscript

Nineteen seventy-two marked the high summer of Willy Brandt’s brief but remarkable career as German Chancellor. It was also, as it happened, the year in which I made my first serious visit to Germany, and first became fascinated by it – particularly by its evolution since the Second World War. Perhaps this is why the complex and painful story of Brandt’s downfall two years later captured my imagination at the time, and has been lurking at the back of my mind ever since.

Brandt was one of the most attractive public figures of the twentieth century, who won people’s trust and love not only in Germany but all over the world. He first became a national and international celebrity in the 1950s, when he was Governing Mayor of West Berlin, and led the city’s resistance to the efforts of the Soviet Union to undermine and intimidate it so that it could be absorbed into the East German state surrounding it. After his resignation from the Federal Chancellorship in 1974 he won himself a completely new reputation with yet another career as an internationalist and champion of the Third World. His greatest achievements, though, were in Federal politics. The first of them was to help reform his party, the SPD (the Social Democrats), so as to make it electable by the cautiously conservative German voters. The second was single-handedly to seize the chance, when it was at last offered by a modest improvement in the party’s share of the vote in 1969, of forming an SPD-led coalition – the first left-of-centre coalition in Germany, with the first left-of-centre Chancellor, since Hitler had crushed parliamentary democracy in the early thirties. His real triumph, though, was the use to which he put the power he had gained: to secure what had hitherto seemed a politically impossible goal – a reconciliation with Germany’s former enemies in Eastern Europe.

The difficulty was that this could be done only by at last recognising the painful realities created by the outcome of the war. One of these was the loss of nearly a quarter of Germany’s territory in the East. The other was the existence within the remaining German lands of the second state that had grown out of the Soviet zone of occupation – the German Democratic Republic, alien in its political character, bound hand and foot to the Soviet instead of the Western power bloc, and sealed off behind closed frontiers that sundered all natural family and social connections. There was entrenched and embittered opposition to accepting either fact, particularly from those most directly involved – the 8 million Germans who had been expelled from the former German territories east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, which had now been divided up between the Soviet Union and Poland, plus the 4 million who had fled from East Germany, and the millions more who had relatives still trapped there. But Brandt succeeded in doing it, and succeeded totally. The consequences of this reconciliation reached far beyond Germany. They

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