Willy Brandt, Groping toward Détente

Abstract

To scholars of the Cold War, détente in Germany is commonly associated with a brief, pregnant phrase coined by Egon Bahr in July 1963: Wandel durch Annäherung, “change through rapprochement.” Bahr's reasoning is so familiar that it can seem, in retrospect, utterly banal. Rather than brusquely rejecting all dealings with the East German regime, Western leaders should constructively engage their Eastern counterparts. Only after they ceased to fear the West as an existential threat would Communist functionaries feel comfortable introducing the kind of internal liberalization that might, in the long run, yield fundamental transformation.1 The counterintuitive, dialectic nature of Bahr's proposal—accepting the status quo in order to overcome it—greatly enhanced its intellectual appeal in the 1960s. But do Bahr's ideas really suffice as a shorthand version of West German ostpolitik? Was Willy Brandt merely the executor of Bahr's program? Arne Hofmann's insightful study reexamines the conceptual foundations of détente and restores primacy to Brandt himself as the motive force behind one of the most creative phases in postwar German diplomacy.