I like a political museum and The Willy Brandt House in Lübeck occupies a restored patrician house at Königstraße 21. The idea of creating a memorial to Brandt in his home city was encouraged by Günter Grass, who has his own museum nearby and which I also visited. This building was given by the city and it had previously served the Zirkelgesellschaft of long-distance merchants, later housed the appeal court for the four free cities of Bremen, Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main and Lübeck, and was also used as the city archive and public library. In short, it’s been used for lots of different purposes and has no direct link to Brandt, which felt slightly sub-optimal.
I didn’t know much about Willy Brandt when I entered the museum, I just knew that he was a German statesman who served as Chancellor of West Germany from 1969 to 1974. He was a leading Social Democrat, a former mayor of West Berlin and one of the key figures in post-war European politics, but that was as far as my knowledge went. There’s no admission charge and there was a friendly welcome from the staff member and I was given a brief introduction and a media card so that I could access audio elements in English.
This is the typewriter owner by Martha Szperalski (1893-1964), born Martha Klinge, who was a Lübeck stenotypist and anti-Nazi resistance figure linked to the young Willy Brandt, then still Herbert Frahm. She worked as a shorthand typist, including recording sessions of the Lübeck Senate, and was active with her husband Johann Szperalski in the underground Socialist Workers’ Party, the SAP, after the Nazis came to power.
This is Willy Brandt’s Norwegian passport issued to him on 1 August 1940. On this matter, Willy Brandt was born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm. He changed his name because he went into anti-Nazi exile after Hitler came to power in 1933 and needed a safer political identity. “Willy Brandt” began as a pseudonym during his underground socialist resistance work and exile, especially while he was in Norway. He stuck with the name after the Second World War came to an end and then in 1949 he made it his legal name, but more on that in a moment.
This is an October 1944 political letter from German socialist exiles in Stockholm to the leadership of the SPD group there. It is dated from Stockholm, 9 October 1944, and addressed “An den Vorstand der SPD-Gruppe Stockholm” or “To the executive committee of the SPD group Stockholm”. The signatories are applying to be accepted into the local SPD organisation and this is significant as it is a formal political statement by exiles who want to join, or rejoin, the Social Democratic Party framework. The people signing the letter had belonged to the SAP, the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany. This was a left-socialist breakaway from the SPD, founded in the early 1930s.
The peace objectives of the democratic socialists, published on 1 May 1943.
And here’s the formal confirmation of his name change, issued on 11 August 1949.
This is Willy Brandt’s provisional mandate card for the first Bundestag of the Federal Republic of Germany. It dates from 1949, just as West Germany’s new democratic parliament was being created after the war, so it is a rather small piece of paper carrying a very large constitutional moment. West Berlin had a peculiar and in some ways sub-optimal status after the war. It found itself politically tied to West Germany, but because of the Allied occupation arrangements it was not a full federal state in the ordinary way. Berlin representatives could take part in the Bundestag, but they did not initially have the same full voting rights as directly elected members from the West German Länder. The Cold War certainly led to some awkward situations….
Anyway, more of this riveting (or something like that) account of the museum in the next post.