Obituary: Willy Brandt

MY FIRST sighting of Willy Brandt was when we were both, among numerous others, having a pee in an autobahn layby in which the fleet of official Mercs and BMWs had stopped during the election campaign of 1969, writes Roger Berthoud. He was taller and bulkier than I expected. On the return journey by train to Bonn a couple of nights later, I contrived (as the freshly arrived Times correspondent) to sit with him - and was a bit shocked when he started to make advances to an American journalist of what seemed to me modest charms.

His human fallibility was massively outweighed by his political courage and vision. In the charged atmosphere of the times, it required courage of a high order to recognise the GDR as a separate German state - let alone to put a West German seal on the Oder-Neisse border with Poland. No less significant, if less palpable, was the manner in which his ideas, his record and his personality transformed the image of supposedly 'revanchist' West Germany in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

I was in the crowd in Erfurt, East Germany, during that first 'intra-German' summit with Willy Stoph, when the crowd went wild chanting 'Willy ans Fenster' ('Willy to the window'). His train route from Berlin had been lined with East Germans cheering and waving handkerchiefs. And I was a few feet from him when he dropped on his knees at the memorial to the Warsaw ghetto: an unforgettable gesture that created near-chaos among the assembled photographers as they scrambled for the best angle. It sprang from his heart, and what a big heart it was. No one did more to redeem the name of Germany.