WILLY BRANDT IN INTERVIEW WITH HORST SCHÄTTLE (ZDF), DECEMBER 1988
You will turn 75 in a few days.
As we heard, you do not see this as a reason to not continue your work.
Nonetheless, this is certainly a day
on which one can look back.
What would you say was your greatest personal success,
and what was your biggest mistake?
I'll let other people answer the latter part of the question.
My success ...
my real success was,
I think,
to have contributed to the fact that in the world we live in
the name of our country - Germany that is -
and the concept of peace
can be mentioned again in the same breath.
That was not self-evident
to the young man I was at the time
when I experienced the war
and returned to a destroyed Germany
in the year 1945.