ABSTRACT
Brandt, Kennedy and their relationship were embedded in the Western Cold War discourse on East-West relations – an increasingly ‘transnational system of ideas’,2 in which the German and American strands remained distinct but interdependent. On its most fundamental level, this went back to the West German turn towards the West after 1945 and the concomitant socio-cultural orientation toward Western values and practices that has been described as the ‘Westernization’ or ‘Americanization’ of West German society and political culture. It is tempting but somewhat misleading to portray Brandt as a product of ‘Americanization’. The crucial impact on his political socialization occurred during his time in exile in Scandinavia where he absorbed Norwegian and Swedish Social Democracy, before the contact with the West in Berlin continued what had begun in the North.3 But, as the US diplomatic service observed in 1965, the result remained the same:
. . . Brandt’s origin and life have made him an ‘Atlantic man’ and an internationalist . . . Brandt came to feel completely at home in the Atlantic community of nations, learning their languages and absorbing their philosophies and traditions. He is, in short, a completely Westernoriented man for whom it is axiomatic that free Germany is and must remain basically a Western nation, whatever her future role vis-à-vis Eastern Europe.4
