It was at 11:30am on the morning of 16th April 1973 that a plane carrying a West German delegation, led by Chancellor Willy Brandt, landed at Belgrade Airport. They were welcomed by a delegation of top representatives of the Yugoslav government, an honorary company of the Yugoslav People’s Army, together with a flag and a military band that performed the anthems of the two countries
Willy Brandt was the first chancellor of the then Federal Republic of Germany, aka West Germany, to pay an official visit to the Yugoslav capital, arriving in Belgrade 28 years after the end of World War II. The visit, including an official part that lasted four days, encompassed talks in Belgrade, followed by a stay in the Brioni islands, where meetings and talks were held with Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito. According to the recollections of Tito’s personal translator for German, Ivan Ivanji, Tito was “fond of that German”. According to the Memoirs of Willy Brandt himself, he appreciated the politics of the Yugoslav president, who was 20 years his senior.
This wasn’t Brandt’s first visit to Yugoslavia, nor was it his first meeting with its president. Over the preceding two and a half decades, Brandt had followed the development of Yugoslavia studiously. As a socialist and anti-fascist by political and ideological orientation, a man formed in a social democratic milieu, with the experience of having lived in exile in Scandinavia during the period of Nazi rule and residing in Spain at the height of the civil war with the aim of supporting the doomed republic, Brandt became interested in Yugoslavia as a socialist experiment after the 1948 Tito-Stalin split and the Informbiro period. As a representative of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in West Berlin after World War II and later mayor of West Berlin (1957–1966), Brandt was interested in the development of Yugoslavia as a potential model for the transformation of East German society. And so it was that Brandt first travelled to Yugoslavia in 1955, though the prevailing anti-communist sentiment in West Germany meant that the trip unfolded in almost total secrecy. During his stay in Yugoslavia, Brandt took an interest in the system of workers’ self-management, the “Yugoslav road to socialism” and the Yugoslav interpretation of Marxism. However, his subsequent trips to Yugoslavia, in the role of Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1968 and Federal Chancellor in 1973, had a different political weight and function.
The issue of German reunification had been a central political issue for both German states since their 1949 creation. The West German governments of Konrad Adenauer (1949–1963) and Ludwig Erhard (1963–1966), both representatives of the Christian Democratic Union, pursued a policy of gradual sovereignty through Western integration, in the belief that negotiations with the East could only be led from a position of strength. They led a policy of non-recognition of the East German state, doctrinally defined in the so-called Hallstein Doctrine. According to it, recognition of the German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany, by third countries would be considered by the Government in Bonn as a “hostile act”. And Yugoslavia, which since the early 1950s had only maintained diplomatic relations with the West German state, recognised East Berlin in 1957 and thus sacrificed its diplomatic relations with Bonn.
The new Bonn government demonstrated its readiness to accept the burden of responsibility for its own history, but also to lay foundations for the future. It was precisely in the context of the new Eastern policy that his 1973 visit to Yugoslavia was significant
Brandt wasn’t the only representative of political life in West Germany who was strongly opposed to this political doctrine. He believed that the policy of strength and isolation would only lead to detachment between the Germans living to the east and west of the Elbe, with this policy aimed at German reunification only leading down a blind alley. The construction of the Berlin Wall was merely the physical manifestation of this state of affairs. As an alternative, Brandt proposed “change through rapprochement” (Wandel durch Annährung). His “policy of small steps” (Politik der kleinen Schritte) was intended to render the Berlin Wall porous. He believed in the attractiveness of the West, that individual contacts – the “flow” of people and goods, and with them ideas – would inevitably influence internal change in the societies behind the “Iron Curtain”. It was in this context that Brandt also saw the development of Yugoslavia as an example of the transformation of a socialist society through contact with the West. Brandt received a chance to at least partially implement his policy in 1966, when he was appointed minister of foreign affairs in the coalition government formed with the Christian Democratic Union. The so-called “new eastern policy” (Neue Ostpolitik) also led to the restoring of diplomatic relations between West Germany and Yugoslavia in January 1968.
However, while previous years had seen Bonn take only timid tiptoe steps towards rapprochement with the East, Brandt’s 1969 arrival in the position of chancellor marked a complete turnaround in West German foreign policy and German policy. The key result on this front was the signing of the so-called Eastern treaties (Ostverträge) with Moscow, Warsaw, East Berlin and Prague, with which the Government in Bonn ruled out any use of force and recognised the de facto existence of the German Democratic Republic and the Polish-German border on the Oder-Neisse line. Dropping to his knees in front of the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw and the whole watching world in 1970, Brandt made a symbolic gesture of repentance on behalf of the German people for the crimes of the Nazi regime. At the same time, his treaties with Eastern European countries testified to his decisiveness to lead a policy of compromise and the easing of tensions. In other words, the new Bonn government demonstrated its readiness to accept the burden of responsibility for its own history, but also to lay foundations for the future. It was precisely in the context of the new Eastern policy that his 1973 visit to Yugoslavia was significant.
During his talks with Tito in Brioni, the West German chancellor himself raised the issue of compensation, stressing that it was an open problem that needed to be discussed openly
There was undisguised fondness for the new West German chancellor in Yugoslavia. Over the course of the two decades preceding Brandt’s arrival at the helm of the government in Bonn, Yugoslav representatives in West Germany had maintained close contacts with social democratic leaders. Although Yugoslav communists and German social democrats had no ideological affiliations, they still managed to find common ground on issues that were vital to the future of Germany, but also to the security of Yugoslavia. In Belgrade, Brandt was considered a man made of a different political cloth than Adenauer and his associates. It was noted that Brandt was an anti-fascist, which had special gravitas in the context of the complex negative legacy of Yugoslav-German relations and the ideological orientation of the Yugoslav authorities. Brandt’s arrival as head of West German diplomacy was welcomed with great optimism in Belgrade. This also explains Belgrade’s willingness to restore diplomatic relations with Bonn without any preconditions, in terms of demanding the resolving numerous bilateral issues accumulated over the preceding years. However, restoring relations was just the first step. Unresolved issues had yet to be remedied.
While Yugoslavia could serve as a model of socialist transformation for Brandt the socialist and mayor, for Brandt the statesman, visiting Yugoslavia meant getting to grips with the extremely difficult legacy of German-Yugoslav relations. The central issue burdening relations was that of compensation for Yugoslavia’s victims of Nazi persecution. This issue represented a crucial obstacle in the rapprochement of Belgrade and Bonn for more than a decade. It had both economic and moral dimensions. During his talks with Tito in Brioni, the West German chancellor himself raised the issue of compensation, stressing that it was an open problem that needed to be discussed openly. Brandt emphasised that West Germany could no longer return to the past, while at the same time it couldn’t simply ignore its history or “sweep it under the rug”. The West German side offered capital assistance in the form of a loan totalling one billion Deutschemarks, and the Yugoslav side accepted to consider the issue closed with this indirect solution – albeit without explicitly mentioning compensation, so as not to set a precedent for other Eastern European countries.
During his time in Yugoslavia, Brandt also visited the National Library in Belgrade. In presenting a gift to the Library in the form of a consignment of replacement books for those that had perished in the German bombing of 6th April, 1941, Brandt made a symbolic gesture of repentance on behalf of the German people for the devastation wrought during World War II. With the Brioni “Gentlemen’s Agreement” between Tito and Brandt, the two sides agreed to lay to rest open and painful problems from the past through a stake in the future, in the form of long-term arrangements to cooperate in various fields.
By Natalija Dimić Lompar, Photos: Museum of Yougoslavia