Willy-Brandt-Haus Lübeck

“Only partially a typical inhabitant of a German Hanse city” The fact that Willy Brandt is commemorated in an elegant patrician house in Lübeck is not without a certain irony. “My roots in Lübeck are definitely in the milieu of the workers’ movement and not in the tradition of the old families,” the Social Democrat emphasized in his 1989 memoirs. The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who was born on December 18, 1913, as an nonmarital son of a saleswoman in the workers’ district of St. Lorenz, called himself “only partially a typical inhabitant of a German Hanse city”. Shared political interests and a close friendship united Willy Brandt with another Nobel Prize winner, who lives near Lübeck – Günter Grass. It is due to this writer and convinced Social Democrat, who had supported Willy Brandt in several electoral campaigns, that the Brandt Foundation could install its exhibition in the house at Königstraße 21. By chance the garden of the Günter Grass House, which was opened in 2002, borders on the Königstraße 21 property. That same year Grass was able to win over then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to the idea of renovating the empty building in the center of the old city and dedicating it to Willy Brandt. There upon the Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation in Berlin and the city of Lübeck started to plan a memorial museum and educational center.