Guillaume And where are you, Arno? Vanished again before they arrest you. Melted into the crowd, like so many others.

Kretschmann - I stand among them and cheer with all the rest as Willy passes. Cheer with all my heart. A great man!

Brandt We're healed and whole. For a little while, at any rate. And for a little while everyone's glad.

Guillaume And wherever he goes, my shadow goes with him. Together still.

Darkness.

POSTSCRIPT

POSTSCRIPT

Nineteen seventy-two marked the high summer of Willy Brandt's brief but remarkable career as German Chancellor. It was also, as it happened, the year in which I made my first serious visit to Germany, and first became fascinated by it - particularly by its evolution since the Second World War. Perhaps this is why the complex and painful story of Brandt's downfall two years later captured my imagination at the time, and has been lurking at the back of my mind ever since.

Brandt was one of the most attractive public figures of the twentieth century, who won people's trust and love not only in Germany but all over the world. He first became a national and international celebrity in the 1950s, when he was Governing Mayor of West Berlin, and led the city's resistance to the efforts of the Soviet Union to undermine and intimidate it so that it could be absorbed into the East German state surrounding it. After his resignation from the Federal Chancellorship in 1974 he won himself a completely new reputation with yet another career as an internationalist and champion of the Third World. His greatest achievements, though, were in Federal politics. The first of them was to help reform his party, the SPD (the Social Democrats), so as to make it electable by the cautiously conservative German voters. The second was single-handedly to seize the chance, when it was at last offered by a modest improvement in the party's share of the vote in 1969, of forming an SPD-led coalition - the first left-of- centre coalition in Germany, with the first left-of-centre Chancellor, since Hider had crushed parliamentary democracy in the early thirties. His real triumph, though, was the use to which he put the power he had gained: to secure what had hitherto seemed a politically impossible goal - a reconciliation with Germany's former enemies in Eastern Europe.