"MAYOR OF FREE BERLIN"

The man whose nerves must remain steady if West Berlin's 2,200,000 people are to remain free is Mayor Willy Brandt, a youngish Socialist with a lifetime of adventure already behind him:

Early Life. Born with the name of Herbert Frahm, on Dec. 18, 1913, the son of an unskilled laborer in the German Baltic port of Luebeck. At 17 joined the Socialist Party, fought against Nazis in street brawls. In 1933 fled on a fishing smack to Norway (where he had distant relatives), one leap ahead of Hitler's Gestapo.

In Exile. Changing his name to Willy Brandt and posing with fake Norwegian papers as a "student," he slipped back into Germany in 1936, worked with the anti-Nazi underground for five months before returning to Norway. Studied history at the University of Oslo, went to Spain during the Civil War as a correspondent for Scandinavian newspapers and representative of Norwegian relief.

World War II. When the Germans invaded Norway in 1940, friends got Willy, by now a Norwegian citizen, into a Norwegian soldier's uniform, and although he spent five weeks in a P.W. camp, the Nazis never spotted the disguise. Released, he slipped across to Sweden, there wrote anti-Nazi propaganda until war's end.

Homecoming. Returning to Germany to cover the Nuernberg trials as a newspaperman, moved on to Berlin as press attache of the Norwegian military mission. Surveying divided Berlin, he decided: "It is better to be the only democrat in Germany, where democracy is unknown, than one of many in Norway, where everybody understands it." The late Socialist Mayor Ernst Reuter took Brandt under his wing. Soon Brandt, regaining his German citizenship, became a member of the West German Bundestag (Lower House) in Bonn, president of the West Berlin house of representatives (city parliament), and last year West Berlin's mayor. In 1956, after other leaders had failed, Brandt dissuaded an angry mob of 75,000 from marching into the Soviet sector to protest the Russian intervention in Hungary.

Personality & Family Life. A muscular, deep-voiced 185-pounder Brandt hates to get up in the morning, must be handled with care before breakfast, but then throws himself into his job until he switches out the lights in his modest two-family house at 3 a.m. (after an interlude of "reading and thinking alone"). Collects coins as a hobby, but now has little time for that or for his family--his glamorous Norwegian wife Rut and their two sons, Peter, 11, and Lars, 7. Brandt speaks Norwegian at home, is also fluent in English, made an excellent impression in the U.S. last winter.

Views. An avid advocate of German unity, but not at any price. Once considered "as Red as a non-Red can get," Brandt has long since tempered his socialism, pays tribute to free enterprise's role in rebuilding West Berlin. Having praised both NATO and German rearmament, he is out of favor with the doctrinaire and neutralist leaders of his party, but since he has the youth and vigor they lack, his admirers think Brandt may yet become Chancellor of Germany.

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