1971 was, of course, in the era when Germany was split into the democratic West and the Communist East. The Nobel Peace Prize that year was won by the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who was selected because of his efforts at improving his country's relations with East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union.
Other Nobel laureates from '71 included Pablo Neruda for literature, Dennis Gabor for physics, and Simon Kuznets for economics. The Nobel Prizes were begun by Alfred Nobel, who had made a fortune off of the invention of the explosive dynamite and wanted to redeem himself in light of the destruction his creation had caused. The Nobel Prizes in literature, psychics, medicine, economics, chemistry, and peace were the result of that desire, with the peace prize serving as the most important as it recognized efforts to counteract the kind of warfare that Nobel's dynamite had made possible.
