THE STORY
West Germany, 1969. The charismatic Willy Brandt begins his brief but remarkable career as the first left-of-centre Chancellor in post-war German history. A young advisor, Günter Guillaume, joins the Chancellor's department. He eventually becomes Brandt's personal assistant, valet and indispensable advisor. But Guillaume is hiding a secret so explosive it has the power to destroy Brandt's political career and create dangerous waves on both sides of the iron curtain.

WHO WAS WILLY BRANDT?
Born in Lübeck, Germany, in 1913.
Educated in Lübeck and in Oslo after escaping Nazi persecution in Germany.
In 1940, after the German occupation of Norway, he was captured, but not identified. Released as a Norwegian, he fled to Sweden. Until 1945 he lived in Stockholm.
In 1948 he started his political career, holding various offices within the Social Democratic Party in Berlin. From 1957 to 1966 he was Mayor of Berlin.
1966-1969: Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor.
1969-1974: Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Brandt's greatest achievement as Federal Chancellor was persuading his fellow-countrymen to accept a reconciliation with Germany's former enemies in Eastern Europe. The consequences of this reached far beyond Germany. They changed the face of Europe, and of the world, by making possible the gradual scaling down of the Cold War - and thereby, eventually, an event that Brandt never foresaw: the collapse of the entire Soviet empire.

1971: Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Died of cancer in 1992.
More info: Brandt's multimedia online biography.
Listen to one of Brandt's speeches (scroll to bottom of page)

THE AUTHOR

Online biography of Michael Frayn

Democracy marks the eighth collaboration between author Michael Frayn and director Michael Blakemore. One of their previous achievements, the psychological thriller Copenhagen - also originally produced by the NT in the UK - was featured in the 2004 Season of the Sydney Theatre Company, with John Gaden in the lead role.

Michael Frayn interviewed by John Tusa on BBC Radio (scroll down the alphabetical list)

EXCERPTS from Frayn's postscript to the book
(Paperback edition published by Methuen)

About Willy Brandt:
Willy Brandt's greatest achievements were in Federal politics. The first of them was to help reform his party, the SPD (the Social Democrats), so as to make it electable by the cautiously conservative German voters. The second was single-handedly to seize the chance, when it was at last offered by a modest improvement in the party's share of the vote in 1969, of forming an SPD-led coalition - the first left-of-centre coalition in Germany, with the first left-of-centre Chancellor, since Hitler had crushed parliamentary democracy in the early thirties. His real triumph, though, was the use to which he put the power he had gained: to secure what had hitherto seemed a politically impossible goal - a reconciliation with Germany's former enemies in Eastern Europe.
(...)
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 deviant 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.

About the characters and the plot:
The characters are all shown as being alive, the events in which they are participating as unfolding in the present tense. Very few of the words that these characters speak, however, were ever actually spoken by their real counterparts.
The events themselves, and the world in which they take place, are hugely over-simplified. But, for anyone who is interested, this fiction takes its rise from the historical record. All the political events referred to are real ones (...) and the personalities of the protagonists are very much those attributed to their real counterparts by observers and historians.

Michael Blakemore & Michael Frayn (with the set of Democracy in the background)