No one knows exacdy what Brandt, Wehner and Schmidt said to each other the night before the Chancellor's decision to resign, and it notoriously happened not in Bonn but at a party conference in the resort of Münstereifel; the name has become part of SPD mythology, like Erfurt (where in 1891 the party adopted Marxism), and Bad Godesberg (where in 1959 it abandoned it). I have also shifted some actions from offstage characters to onstage ones. According to Guillaume's memoirs it was not Ehmke who gave Guillaume his promotion to be Peter Reuschenbach's replacement but Reuschenbach himself. Then again, Bauhaus didn't volunteer his information about Guillaume's knowledge of Brandt's womanising to Nollau personally but to his interrogators. The general absence of police and security men from the play is symptomatic of the staff shortages imposed by the economics of drama (both literal and metaphorical). Reed politics is a labour-intensive business, and the Bundestag should have been teeming with deputies, the Palais Schaumburg with Ministers, advisers and civil servants - not to mention Germany as a whole with Germans.

For similar reasons I have sacked even a number of the principal protagonists in the story. The dismissal I regret most is that of Egon Bahr. Bahr was Brandt's closest confidant, a former radio journalist who had become his press representative back in the Berlin days. He was Brandt's trusted representative in the gruelling process of negotiating all the Eastern treaties (fifty meetings with the Russians alone). Brandt joked that Bahr didn't even know where France was, but he had a fascination with power politics and a natural bent for secret negotiation. Guillaume called him 'the sly fox', others 'Tricky Egon' (in English, presumably by analogy with the Tricky Dicky who was forced out of the White House three months after Brandt was out of the Palais Schaumburg).

He was an engaging and somewhat eccentric figure, who began his career as a pianist, but who was unable to pursue it in the Nazi period because one of his grandmothers was Jewish. In his retirement he took up one of the oddest hobbies I've ever heard of- travelling around the world with his wife as the only passengers aboard container ships, from one grim depot to another. When Wehner stood up in front of the party leadership after Brandt's resignation and talked about his love for Brandt's person and politics, Bahr put his hands over his face and wept. (Though it has to be said that this was on camera, and Karl Wienand remarked coldly that he'd seen Bahr weep before.) The dramatic problem is that, while he was away negotiating, his role in Bonn was more or less duplicated by Brandt's other confidant, Horst Ehmke, who coaxed Brandt out of his depressions (and got sidelined for his pains), and who as Brandt's chief of staff was much more closely involved in the events surrounding Guillaume.