Fifty years ago a scandal shook West Germany. Günter Guillaume, one of chancellor Willy Brandt’s closest aides, turned out to be an East German spy. Brandt had to resign, and for the next fifty years historians would argue over the Guillaume affair’s role in his downfall.
The Stasi that had sent Günter Guillaume and his wife Christel to West Germany is often depicted as an all-seeing, omnipotent force which controlled the lives of East Germans with inescapable efficiency. Naturally, West Germany was not ready to ascribe a similar or indeed any potency to the GDR’s spy agency when it came to its influence in West Germany.
So it was deemed best to fall back on the other strategy to deal with all things GDR: ridicule. Günter Guillaume was described as a ‘mediocre’ spy. His influence and insight in the chancellery were depicted as negligible. And hadn’t the GDR shot itself in the foot anyway for bringing down the first left-leaning chancellor of West Germany? Silly old Stasi.
It’s clearly still hard to disentangle contemporary Cold War animosities from writing about them today. Willy Brandt is now regarded as one of Germany’s most charismatic chancellors. With his staunch opposition to the Berlin Wall (he was the Governing Mayor of West Berlin at the time) and his modernisation of West Germany’s conservative social fabric, he has become a larger-than-life hero figure to many, a lynchpin of the West German post-war narrative of moral and social success.
But Willy Brandt was an incredibly complex man and more controversial at the time than he appears through the lens of hindsight. Some Germans were suspicious about the fact that Willy Brandt was not his birth name, for instance. It was an alias that he had acquired while in exile in Norway following Hitler’s rise to power. Once his German citizenship had been revoked by the Nazis, he became a Norwegian citizen. He only regained German citizenship after the war and made Willy Brandt (rather than his original name Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm) his legal name.
Brandt was also a notorious womaniser and drinker, and he suffered from severe bouts of depression. None of this takes away from the enormous impact he had as a politician, but to even mention the multi-faceted nature of Brandt as a man and a politician is still often perceived as an attack on the entire West German post-war system.
The same is true in reverse for the Guillaumes. They usually appear as nothing more than props in the Brandt story. In this framing, Günter got lucky but achieved nothing of significance. Christel, if mentioned at all, tags along as his wife. Neither are usually depicted as people but as mere agents of the GDR regime, interchangeable with any other faceless villains from the East.
Now a new film has come out in Germany, which attempts to tell the story of the Guillaumes and Willy Brandt in full and in a way that allows everyone to access and contemplate this important German post-war story. It’s called “WILLY ‧ Verrat am Kanzler” – “WILLY ‧ Betrayal of the Chancellor”, and I was very pleased to have contributed. We filmed in Guben, my birthplace on the German-Polish border, and I figured then, judging by the way the shoot unfolded, from the complex questions I was asked to the stylish light effects that were being used, that this was going to be both a visually appealing and a complex retelling of the story.
What happened fifty years ago was this: Günter Guillaume was arrested on 24 April 1974. At 6.30 in the morning, the 47-year-old opened the door of his apartment in Bonn, West Germany’s capital city. The uniformed policemen who had knocked explained that they would need to arrest him, his wife and his mother-in-law.
Still in his pyjamas and now gripped by panic, Guillaume blurted, ‘I am an officer of the National People’s Army of the GDR, and I work for the Ministry for State Security [Stasi]. Please respect my honour as an officer.’ And there it was: incriminating proof that one of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s closest aides was in fact an East German spy.
Guillaume and his wife were no amateurs who’d gotten lucky. They had both received special training from the Stasi since the 1950s and were tasked with settling in West Germany and moving up the political ranks. This would take years. Christel’s mother Erna Boom lived in Frankfurt am Main, and so her daughter and son-in-law ‘fled’ the GDR in 1956, ostensibly to be with her. Using the start-up capital of DM10,000 which they had received from the Stasi, they set up a coffee and tobacco shop. They waited a year before they joined the local branch of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).
Nobody suspected anything as Günter Guillaume quietly climbed the political ladder. By 1972 —16 years after he first arrived — he had reached the top. As Willy Brandt’s personal aide, he attended top-level meetings, had access to classified documents and gained insights into the chancellor’s private life. The two men developed a close personal relationship as Guillaume accompanied Brandt on his travels and on the campaign trail. He was even invited to join the chancellor’s family at their private home, attended garden parties and went on Sunday walks with them. Christel typed the chancellor's documents, sending copies back to the GDR. As a family, the Guillaumes accompanied the Brandts on holiday to Norway.
Brandt first found out about the double identity of his confidant when he returned from a trip to Cairo and Algiers. As his plane landed and he walked down the gangway, he was informed that Guillaume had been arrested that very morning. A mere twelve days later, Brandt resigned as West German Chancellor.
The Guillaumes spent years in prison before they were released back into the GDR in 1981 as part of a spy swap between the two Germanies. Back home, the couple were celebrated as heroes. Both received the Order of Karl Marx (the GDR’s highest honour with a prize of 20,000 marks) and high officer ranks within the Stasi. They held almost star-like status and were invited as VIPs to events and dinners.
A wrangling over the place of this episode in German post-war history began there and then. To the East, this infiltration and its consequences were an unmitigated triumph despite the fact that Brandt was more amenable to improving relations with the GDR than his predecessors. It is true that in 1973, under Brandt, East Germany’s diplomatic breakthrough was tolerated by Bonn. Both countries joined the UN that year and moved towards accepting one another’s existence. It was also Brandt who put an end to the so-called Hallstein Doctrine, which had hitherto threatened any country that recognised the GDR with being snubbed by the more powerful West Germany.
But Brandt’s fall didn’t put that genie back in the bottle. The zeitgeist had changed and many people on both sides were beginning to work towards co-existence and system competition rather than the intense hostility of the early post-war years. East German leader Erich Honecker later even worked with the conservative West German chancellor Helmut Kohl on improving diplomatic and economic relations.
To the West, the Guillaume affair was a scandal more for Brandt personally than for the country per se. His enemies had long made much of his left-wing leanings, the extra-marital affairs and his absence from Germany during the war. He was chancellor at a time of general conflict over politics. As the first Social Democrat at the top of West German politics, he frightened many in the older generation as a personification of the social change that was underway. His close relationship with an East German spy was portrayed by some as confirmation that he was betraying the country.
The truth, as ever, is far more complex. I for one, welcome WILLY’s cinematic contribution to the debate. Fifty years after the events, the film treats the people involved as more than heroes and villains. It takes all of them seriously as humans who acted in a particular historical context.
We hear and see footage that shows Brandt tired, sometimes with a glass of alcohol. The ex-chancellor said later that he was ‘exhausted for reasons which had nothing to do with the affair going on at the time.’ Showing him like this alongside scenes of the passionate speeches he was famous for is not an act of treason. It’s part of the story. Similarly, the film lets both the Guillaumes speak through interview footage, including scenes from East German TV.
Predictably, the response in Germany is intense. Nearly two million people have so far watched WILLY live on TV and on catch-up. Most reviews were positive, praising the engaging and artful story-telling as well as the many gems the makers have pulled from the archives. But there were critical voices too. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s prominent daily newspapers, complained about the supposedly trivialising style of the documentary and the fact that the Guillaumes were telling their side of the story ‘unimpeded’ through ‘GDR footage’.
It seems the fear that the public can’t be trusted to consume nuanced and non-moralising history is still rife in Germany. Fortunately, the filmmakers went ahead with their project, unimpressed by pressures to retell the same old story in the same old way. The result is an invitation to everyone to revisit this important part of German post-war history.
Very interesting. I do hope a UK broadcaster will show the documentary. I wonder how the security agencies became aware of Guillaume’s treachery? It would be interesting to see what plans the Stasi had for the couple? After all the election of Brandt could not be guaranteed. And whatever one thinks of the GDR, the Stasi, and Guillaume to remain in character, so to speak, for so long is remarkable. Does the documentary delve into how useful Guillaume actually was? Did he deliver much actionable intelligence I wonder?And as always the fuller picture is always more interesting than the simplistic story in the press.
Great piece 👏, complicated figure indeed , but what a life , so glad he was alive and well when the wall came down and he said a few words there too , there is the willy Brandt house in Lübeck which I plan to visit next month , the forum in Berlin I believe is still in temporary settings ? But that’s well worth a look , when you look back over his idea of „ Ostpolitik „ he really was ahead of his time , hopefully we will get a chance to watch that documentary about the spy affair 👏👏👍