Also missing is another confidant of Brandt's, the publisher Klaus Harpprecht, whom Brandt brought into his second government as a speechwriter, and whose diary supplies a lot of the atmosphere in the Palais Schaumburg during those last eighteen months. I also wish I could have found a way of introducing a most remarkable man who made a marginal appearance earlier in Copenhagen - Georg Duckwitz. In the 1940s, as the shipping specialist in the German Embassy in Copenhagen, he had warned the Danes exactly when the SS were to begin their round-up of the Jews, which enabled almost all of them to be saved. After the war he went back to Copenhagen as German Ambassador, and was greatly honoured by the Danes, before finishing his career as head of the Eastern Department in the Foreign Office. Brandt was a personal friend, and when he was still Foreign Minister in the Grand Coalition brought him back from retirement, then as Chancellor moved him to his personal staff to work on the Ostpolitik.

The oddest economy of all, one may think, is the exclusion of the entire female sex — particularly since it was Brandt's relations with women that undid him. German parliamentary politics at the time, though, was a man's world; the story of Brandt's government might have been rather different if it hadn't been so closed off from normal demographic reality. There were a few women in the Bundestag (and by the time Helmut Schmidt took office one of them was President of it), but only one in the Cabinet. In general, though, as was often noted, the only women whom German politicians saw during the course of the working week in Bonn were wives, secretaries and journalists, and there are no women at all who are recorded as playing any significant role in the arguments and struggles that form the background to the play.

Two remarkable women stand on the fringes of it, though, and there are other plays to be written about both of them. One of them is Brandt's wife, Rut. He had been married before during his time in Norway, and he married for a third time in his late sixties. But for almost the whole of his career his partner was Rut. She was a Norwegian who had been involved in distributing material for the Resistance during the German occupation, and he met her in Stockholm in 1943. She was as attractive and charming as her husband, the kind of wife that every traditional male politician must dream of having at his side, and she behaved with great dignity, generosity and humour throughout their trials in 1974, and in their later divorce. The account she gives in her memoirs of her escape as a girl from occupied Norway, through the mountains into Sweden, is compelling; so is her description of the devastation and misery that she found in Berlin when she arrived with Willy at the end of the war. By 1974 their marriage seems to have been reduced more or less to a social arrangement, and during the crisis she says that when Brandt was at home he went around 'like a stranger in the house'. He subsequently blamed her (along with Wehner) for his resignation, because she had agreed with him that he should take responsibility for the situation, and had made no attempt to dissuade him.