80th birthday of Willy Brandt - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1993 - 100 Pfennig

When Willy Brandt was honored in the Berlin Reichstag a few days after his death on 8 October 1992 by a state act, the honor was a German politician and intellectual world citizen, who has decisively shaped the German post-war history and enjoyed a worldwide integrity. On 18 December 1913 Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm was born in Lübeck. Even as a high school student, he joined the Socialist Workers Youth. He wrote for the »Lübecker Volksboten« edited by Julius Leber and was admitted to the SPD at the age of 16 on Leber's intercession. In 1931 he transferred from the SPD to the Socialist Workers Party of Germany and took over the leadership of their youth organization. Under the pseudonym "Willy Brandt" he fled in April 1933 from the Nazis on Copenhagen to Oslo. After the war, he returned to Germany and worked as a newspaper correspondent. After giving up his Norwegian citizenship, he was re-nationalized in 1947 in Schleswig-Holstein as Willy Brandt and again joined the SPD. Three years later, he was elected to the Berlin House of Representatives, whose chairmanship he held from 1955-1957. As governing mayor of Berlin (1957 - 1966) he gained international fame especially since the Berlin crisis of 1958. In the government of the Grand Coalition from 1966 to 1969 he was Foreign Minister, and when in 1969 the social-liberal coalition was formed, he was appointed Chancellor. Linked to this are fundamental social policy reforms, but above all the new German Ostpolitik as part of an active policy of detente supported by the Western allies. In 1971, Willy Brandt received the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1972 he sealed the "Basic Treaty" with the former GDR. Unforgotten is his kneeling at the ghetto memorial in Warsaw. In April 1972 he survived a constructive vote of no confidence in the CDU / CSU opposition against his Ostpolitik. The general election on 19 November 1972 confirmed the policy of the social-liberal coalition and the SPD. The discovery of the spy Günter Guillaume in the Federal Chancellery caused Brandt in May 1974 to resign from his post as Chancellor. Demonstratively, the SPD showed his confidence and confirmed him in 1975 as chairman. Brandt continued to be one of the first political contacts in the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1976 he was elected President of the Socialist International and in 1977 took over the chairmanship of the North-South Commission. As a leading candidate of the SPD he moved in 1979 in the European Parliament, but resigned his mandate on March 1, 1979 again. In 1980 he was again member of the Bundestag and at the same age president of the 10th German Bundestag. In March 1987 he resigned as chairman of his party. Willy Brandt was able to experience his dream of the reunification of Germany. It was also he who, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, gave the slogan in a rally in front of the Schöneberg town hall: "Now things are growing together, what belongs together." (Text: Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Archive of Social Democracy, Bonn)