Egon Bahr

Origins and early life

Egon Bahr was born in Treffurt, in Thuringia, on 18 March 1922, and raised a Protestant; his maternal grandmother was Jewish, which made his mother a 'half-Jew' and himself a 'Mischling of the second degree' under the Nuremberg laws — the Wehrmacht dismissed him in 1944 for having concealed his Jewish grandmother, an episode he later recounted to the historian Bryan Mark Rigg, and this fiche records his Jewish ancestry as exactly that, one grandparent, and no more.

Work and career

After the war he was a journalist in Berlin, chief commentator of the American radio station RIAS, and in 1960 became press spokesman and closest adviser to the governing mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt. In a speech at the Evangelical Academy of Tutzing on 15 July 1963 he set out the idea that would guide West German policy for three decades: Wandel durch Annäherung, change through rapprochement — the division of Germany would be overcome not by confrontation with the East but by contact, trade and small steps.

As state secretary in Brandt's chancellery from 1969, he negotiated the treaty with Moscow of 1970, the Berlin transit agreement of 1971 and the Basic Treaty with East Germany of 1972, the foundations of détente in Europe; he then served as minister for special tasks and for economic cooperation, and as general secretary of the Social Democratic Party from 1976 to 1981.

Later years

He directed the Institute for Peace Research at Hamburg from 1984 to 1994, lived to see the reunification his policy had prepared, and died in Berlin on 19 August 2015, at ninety-three.