INTRODUCTION

In the broadest sense the story of the origins of West German Ostpolitik – and the role that the relationship between Willy Brandt and John F. Kennedy was to play in that story – began with the problem that Ostpolitik would eventually address: the division of Germany and the division of Berlin. After the Second World War, the defeated Germany was divided in occupation zones, which in the early years of the Cold War quickly solidified into two German states: while the Western zones merged and became the liberal-democratic Federal Republic of Germany, the Soviet occupied Eastern zone became the Communist German Democratic Republic (GDR). Unlike the opposition Social Democrats, which throughout the 1950s remained attracted to the notion of achieving reunification through neutrality, West Germany’s Christian Democratic founding Chancellor Konrad Adenauer prioritized the firm anchoring of his new state in the West over the pursuit of reunification. By 1955 the Federal Republic had become a NATO member, the Eastern side followed suit by turning the GDR into a Warsaw Pact member, and the ‘German question’ of reunification remained unresolved.