The story of Christel's meeting at the Casselsruhe restaurant, incidentally, is recounted in Guillaume's book. As in Wolfs version, her lunch companion realised she was being kept under observation, and found herself being tailed when she left the restaurant. Guillaume, who calls the woman not Anita but Thomin, purports to be much amused by his interrogators' suspicion later that she had been a courier. She thought, he says, that the watchers were private detectives employed by her husband because she was having an affair.

There are a number of other points of dispute in the record, where I have had to choose one version or another. According to Brandt's notes on the case (see the list of Brandt's writings), his bodyguard Ulrich Bauhaus came to him 'with tears in his eyes' and assured him that he had given his interrogators information about Brandt's women only under pressure; he was astonished at how much had already been collected. In a television interview much later, however, Karl Wienand says that Bauhaus went voluntarily to offer his evidence, because he and the other security people, as ordinary citizens in bowler hats and umbrellas, were genuinely shocked by the Chancellor's behaviour. Neither Wienand's record nor his appearance incline one to place much confidence in anything he says, but someone must have first brought up the question of the women, and of Guillaume's awarenesss of them, and I have followed Wienand's version.

I have also given expression to some of the many conspiracy theories that have been aired. Most of them have centred on the role played by Herbert Wehner, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Party of the SPD and its eminence grise. There is general agreement that Wehner was a Machiavellian figure, and relations between him and Brandt had always been difficult; even during the Grand Coalition they had been reduced to communicating through an intermediary. Brandt's single-handed 'cavalry charge' to the Chancellorship in 1969 was perhaps, among other things, a declaration of independence from Wehner, and in no way improved Wehner's low assessment of Brandt's suitability for the job. He thought Brandt a lightweight. The publisher Rudolf Augstein once overheard him saying that Brandt and Walter Scheel (the Foreign Minister and leader of the FDP, therefore Brandt's coalition partner - another central character missing from the play) were both gigolos - 6Sie können nicht regieren, sondern erigieren' ('Their forte is not so much government as erection'). Wehner went to quite extraordinary lengths to undermine Brandt during his second term, and to prepare the way for Helmut Schmidt to succeed him. But, only a few weeks before Brandt's resignation, when Schmidt at last made an open bid for the Chancellorship, Wehner seems to have had a sudden belated realisation of how much he needed Brandt's appeal to both voters and party members, and the two men had a bizarre rapprochement (which I reluctantly cut out of the play as one complication too many) - a long meeting at Brandt's home, with many pauses for thoughtful silence and the consumption of red wine, conspiring together against Schmidt.