The difficulty was that this could be done only by at last recognising the painful realities created by the outcome of the war. One of these was the loss of nearly a quarter of Germany's territory in the East. The other was the existence within the remaining German lands of the second state that had grown out of the Soviet zone of occupation - the German Democratic Republic, alien in its political character, bound hand and foot to the Soviet instead of the Western power bloc, and sealed off behind closed frontiers that sundered all natural family and social connections. There was entrenched and embittered opposition to accepting either fact, particularly from those most directly involved - the 8 million Germans who had been expelled from the former German territories east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, which had now been divided up between the Soviet Union and Poland, plus the 4 million who had fled from East Germany, and the millions more who had relatives still trapped there. But Brandt succeeded in doing it, and succeeded totally. The consequences of this reconciliation reached far beyond Germany. They changed the face of Europe, and of the world, by making possible the gradual scaling down of the Cold War - and thereby, eventually, an event that Brandt never foresaw: the end of the very state whose existence he had recognised, followed by the collapse of the entire Soviet empire.

In the summer of 1972, when I arrived in Germany, Brandt's government was in the middle of this great work. In spite of the severe difficulties it was encountering at home because of its small and steadily vanishing majority in the Bundestag, it was already ratifying the treaties it had negotiated with the Soviet Union and Poland. I can't say that I paid very much attention to these triumphs at the time. Federal politics happened in Bonn, and Germany for me that summer was Berlin, the once-great city I had come to Germany to write about, now only notionally the capital, left marvellous but functionless deep inside East Germany, like a luxury liner that had somehow become beached in the sandy wastes of the Mark Brandenburg.