WEST GERMANY: Meeting the Whispers

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Last week, opening his campaign to become West Germany's next Chancellor, West Berlin's Socialist Mayor Willy Brandt, 46, decided to meet some ugly whispers head on. Enemies were saying he was born a bastard and, during World War II, "turned his back on Germany" to become "one of the enemy." To a Social Democratic Party congress in Hannover, Brandt said: "It is true. I have been called Willy Brandt for 'only' the past 28 years." He had adopted the name at 19, when he fled his native town of Lübeck to work with the anti-Nazi underground in Norway. When he returned to Germany in 1945, "little more than the memory of a not entirely easy childhood bound me to the name of my birth and the name of my then unmarried mother." He continued to call himself Willy Brandt because "I wanted expressly to keep the name which shows what I have done and what I have written."

Brandt went on: "Least of all do I need to justify the fact that, even in my youth, I was a consistent enemy of the [Nazi] regime that brought us terror and war and meant the worst national betrayal." In his twelve-year Scandinavian exile, he said, he had won "the knowledge of how a state based on law can be made into a true home for the people."

With the whisperers' charges met, Candidate Brandt launched into a rousing political attack on Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democrats. It would be an uphill struggle running against wily old Chancellor Adenauer, 84. Brandt showed he was ready to take some lessons from a man almost his own age, Jack Kennedy. If elected, Brandt promised that Germany would move forward to become a "model state" but not "a sleepy welfare state." Brandt has already thrown overboard most of the Marxist trappings of his party. In foreign policy, he said, Germany must stand firmly in the Western camp: "We do not wander between the fronts. We know where we belong." Brandt sat down to great cheers. Postwar Germany, until now dominated by Adenauer, is plainly in for its liveliest election yet.