To Willy Brandt: A Note of Recollection

This may be the right time to remind you of the occasion when we first met. I guess it was sometime in the middle of 1929, when worried
young German Socialists convened a powwow to think of ways to save our party. We foresaw disaster. Our chancellor, Hermann Mueller, was then at the head of a “great coalition” whose survival depended on an odd assortment of republican, semi-republican, and poorly assimilated parties. His coalition partners put Mueller to one test after the other. Only a month after its formation, the government had to decide whether to build a battle cruiser, as the other parties demanded, or not to build it, as the Social Democrats had promised during the elections. God knows, we did not need a battle ...