Guillaume I'll help you, Uli. They won't get past us! Only one or two of the very prettiest ones, perhaps.

Bauhaus Supposing they were your daughters.

Guillaume We're public servants, Uli. We have to respect the voters' wishes.

Kretschmann — Don Quixote and Sancho Panza? Or Don Juan and Leporello?

Guillaume - You sound almost as sour as Uli.

Kretschmann - The free society, Günter. Enjoy it while you may.

Guillaume (with Brandt) - The softness of their skin. The light in their eyes. Or the warmth in their hearts. Something that got left behind in the mists of LÜbeck all those years ago . . . No? No, very well. Just a thought. Forget it. He's a bit of a lad, that's all. We're two lads together. Two fellows on the loose. Two travelling salesmen away from their wives. But what a product we have to sell! Willy Brandt, the saviour of Europe, the greatest statesman in the world, with the Nobel Peace Prize to certify it. The Moscow treaty - signed and ratified. The Warsaw treaty signed and ratified. Yes, and in Warsaw he achieved immortality. He left a single image in the memory of the world that no one will ever forget . . .

Ehmke - Another of his unspoken speeches, and the greatest of them all.

Guillaume - He lays his official wreath at the monument to the murdered Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. He steps back. And then . . .

Schmidt - Something else. He's going to do something else . . .

Guillaume - For a moment once again time seems to hold its breath. Once again the world is about to change in front of our eyes. And out of nowhere . . .

Brandt kneels.

Guillaume — For a moment I think, 'No, no, no! This time he's gone too far!' But I'm wrong, and he's right, because this is what the world remembers. That long moment when the German who has no cause to kneel went back down into the lowest depth of German history and knelt for all of us. The one unspoken word that said everything he longed to say. The one simple gesture that embodied everything he was loved for and everything he was loathed for.

Wehner - Something speaks in him, and he hears it.

Schmidt - Some small voice that speaks to him, and to none of the rest of us.

Guillaume - I wept, Arno.

Brandt rises.

Kretschmann - Perhaps at last the wounds are beginning to heal. Perhaps the irreconcilables are beginning to be reconciled.

Guillaume - Ten days before the election and they sign the treaty between the two Germanys. The keystone of the Eastern policy locked into place.

Kretschmann - Because you helped us to trust him.

Guillaume - And on election night, who is it who brings the good news to Willy? - (with Brandt, Wehner, Schmidt, Ehmke, Genscher, Wilke, Nollau and Bauhaus.) May I be the first to offer my congratulations, Chief? They're saying two hundred and seventy-one seats! They're saying a clear forty-six-seat majority!