The movement produced a sympathetic shift to the left among many voters who were never part of it. A number of its most active and effective adherents, in any case, decided to pursue their battle within the framework of practical politics. They proclaimed 'the long march through the institutions', including the unions and the SPD, with the intention of bringing them under their control by constitutional means. All this helped to earn the party the small increase in its vote in 1969 (3.4 per cent) that put it within reach of real power. The pressures it produced inside the party, though, and the expectations that the party's success aroused in its new adherents, created great difficulties for Brandt. It also produced a backlash among voters, particularly since left extremists in the Baader-Meinhof group, now reconstituted as the Red Army Fraction, had taken to robbing banks and murdering judges. Brandt's proposal to encourage yet another manifestion of the left by offering concessions to Soviet Communism and by recognising its client regime in East Germany became even more alarming than it had been before. He had to find ways of reassuring people. One attempt was the. proclamation of the so-called 'Radicals Edict' of January 1972, more usually known abroad as the Berufsverbot (bar to the professions), designed to exclude radicals from teaching and other public services. If Brandt's greatest achievement was the Ostpolitik (and the Deutschlandpolitik, as the part of it relating to deutsch-deutsche relations was more properly called), then his greatest mistake - or so he said himself-was this reactionary domestic counterpoise to it.

All politics is necessarily complex, since its essence is the practical resolution of differences of interest and outlook which are in principle irreconcilable. All human beings, too, are complex - but Brandt (like German politics) was perhaps more complex than most. He was certainly more complex than he seemed. In public there was something engagingly open and straightforward about him, even when he was at his most devious - something recognisably decent and human, to which many people in many different parts of the world responded. Even the new leftists were charmed by him. Even the personal assistant who was spying on him. His associates, though, often complained about the weaknesses he showed in private: his indecisiveness, his avoidance of confrontation, his uncommunicativeness, his proneness to depression, and his vanity. He made many conquests, but had few real friends. He extended a personal intimacy to a hall full of people, but not to many individuals taken on their own.