Peter Merseburger, Brandt's most recent biographer, mocks supporters of Brandt who detect treachery and see his fall as a kind of regicide. 'As if, in the respectable republican court at Bonn there had been Shakespearean dramas, opponents are demonised as Brutus-figures who carried daggers under their robes, even as dark Nibelung warriors who had nothing in mind but to assassinate the Chancellor's character.' Politics, as Merseburger says, is mostly 'terribly banal', and the events of 1974 were no exception. Among the banalities, nevertheless, were many strands of powerful personal feeling, of loyalty and jealousy, of courage and despair. It was really the sheer complexity of this mixture that finally decided me to write the play. Complexity is what the play is about: the complexity of human arrangements and of human beings themselves, and the difficulties that this creates in both shaping and understanding our actions.

The only part of German history that seems to arouse much interest in the British is the Nazi period. That brutal holiday from the moral restraints under which West European societies normally labour possesses a kind of corrupt glamour for even the most timid and law-abiding. The half-century that has followed Germany's awakening from the sick dream is thought to be a time of dull respectability, with the Federal Republic characterised by nothing much except material prosperity, and formed in the image of the peaceful and provincial Rhineland town which was the seat of its government for most of the period.

To me, I have to say, that material prosperity, that peacefulness, even that supposed dullness, represent an achievement at which I never cease to marvel or to be moved. It's difficult to think of parallels for such an unlikely political, economic and moral resurgence. What other nation, even Japan, has risen so swiftly from beginnings as abject as the physical ruin, moral degradation and political paralysis in which Germany found itself in 1945? Federal Germany began life as a graveyard in which almost every city had been reduced to rubble, and almost every institution and political resource contaminated by complicity in the crimes of National Socialism; yet from this utter desolation, without recourse to despotism or military means, its citizens constructed one of the most prosperous, stable, and decent states in Europe, the cornerstone of a peace which has endured now, at least in Western Europe, for nearly sixty years.