A complex of levels and spaces; of desks and chairs; of files and papers; also of characters, who mostly remain around the periphery of the action when not actually involved in it, listening or unobtrusively involved in their work.

Table of Contents

Contents

Act One

Act Two

POSTSCRIPT

Act One

Act One

Darkness. The expectant murmur of an audience, silenced by a handbell.

Voice Ladies and gendemen, I declare the result of the vote to be as follows. Those in favour: 251. Those against: 235.

Applause, excitement. Lights up on Brandt.

I therefore declare . . . I therefore declare, according to article 63 paragraph 2 of the Basic Law, that the proposed Member has received the votes of the majority of Members of the Bundestag. Herr Brandt, do you accept election as Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany?

Guillaume (with Brandt and Kretschmann) And for a moment time seemed to hold its breath. The world was about to change in front of our eyes. A Chancellor from the left again, after nearly forty years!

Kretschmann Twelve years of Hider. Four years of military government. Twenty years of conservatism and Cold War. And now a hope at last of ending the long stalemate in Europe.

Guillaume Eleven twenty-two a.m., on the twenty-first of October, 1969 . . .

Brandt Yes, Herr President. I accept the election.

Guillaume Congratulations, tears. Willy Brandt had finally done it!

Kretschmann And you were there in the Bundestag to see it.

Guillaume An ordinary party worker from a humble district office in Frankfurt, up in Bonn for the day with a spectator's ticket. I shed a tear myself, I have to confess.

Brandt I am grateful for the confidence that has been reposed in me. I am also a little proud. Almost forty years have passed since any member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany has held this office. Years during which this great party of ours, founded by a poor turner in Leipzig exactly a century ago to bring strength and hope to the oppressed, was brutally crushed by the Nazi state; years during which so many of our members underwent unspeakable sufferings in prisons and concentration camps, and so many of them met a violent death; years during which, after the end of the horror, we played our part, in city after city, in the resurrection of our nation from degradation and destruction, and in the miracle of its rebirth as a stable and decent society. No one can ever belittle what has been achieved in this country by people in all parties and of all persuasions. But on this day the war that Hider waged, against the peoples of Europe and against so many of our own people, has finally been lost. We have a chance at last to create the Germany glimpsed by that ordinary Leipzig working-man a hundred years ago - a fatherland of love and justice.