📍Lubeck, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
1913 – 1992“I was born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm on the 18th of December 1913 in Lübeck, illegitimate, the son of a shop assistant. I took the name Willy Brandt as a young socialist activist to hide my identity from the Nazis, and it became my name permanently. I fled Germany in 1933, worked as a journalist and resistance operative in Norway and Sweden, and returned to a ruined country after the war. I became Mayor of West Berlin, then Foreign Minister, then Chancellor from 1969 to 1974. On the 7th of December 1970 I visited the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial and spontaneously knelt. I had not planned it. It was the gesture of a man who bore the weight of what Germany had done and could find no words adequate to that weight. Lübeck, the exile, the kneeling — these were the arc.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Sources: Binder, D. The Other German: Willy Brandt's Life and Times (1975), New Republic Books; Brandt, W. My Life in Politics (1992, translated Anthea Bell), Viking