Germany's Lesson in Politics

Michael Frayn’s Democracy is worth seeing, if only to find out whether or not you like it.

The play charts the association between Willy Brandt, Chancellor of West Germany from 1969 to 1974, and Günter Guillaume, Brandt’s right-hand-man and spy for East Germany. The play takes place over the course of those five years, with the action on stage reflecting the conversation in the wings between Guillaume and his East-German boss.

The comparison between playwright Frayn (Copenhagen) and Shakespeare is neither subtle nor shallow; both refuse to let any type of political agenda soil a work about people. Like those of Shakespeare, Frayn’s characters truly live.

The comparison between the two Englishmen has been recognized by several critics, including German newspaper Die Welt’s London journalist, Thomas Kielinger, who finds it “amazing that an English author should show Germans that way. It’s all talking heads, yet [Frayn] manages to pull it off like a Shakespearean history play.” Playbill’s C.F. Kane compares the love-hate relationship between Brandt and Guillaume to that of Othello and Iago.

Frayn has the unique ability to avoid supporting only one side of the story. All his characters are justified in their actions: Brandt, the chancellor and depressive-drunkard-womanizer; Guillaume, the sleeper agent, and Horst Ehmke, the Secret Service director who introduces disaster by giving Guillaume a job working for Brandt. The question of which bloc is “right” never steals the focus from the characters themselves. It is the characters’ competing self-interests—and not any bias on the part of the playwright—that produce each reprehensible action, immoral habit, and winless predicament.

Frayn himself acknowledged that the playwright should not take sides: “it’s not very interesting, because in life it’s not like that.” He attributes this emphasis on “transparency [of the author]” to the influences of both Friedrich Hebbel (“in a good play, everyone is right,”) and Anton Chekhov (many of whose works have been translated by Frayn)..

The comparison between the two playwrights fails in terms of dialogue. Unlike that of Shakespeare, Frayn’s dialogue—both the torturously abstract reports between the East German spy and spymaster and the way they are acted out—is often directed at the audience. Often, it seems forced and unnatural.

Frayn does expose a poetic element, however, through the dual motif running throughout the play. Brandt and Guillaume represent, respectively, the western and eastern halves of a divided Germany; there are two spies from each region. Brandt’s downfall is itself twofold, being comprised of the scandal surrounding Guillaume’s arrest and the internal stresses of his Social Democrat Party; those stresses, in turn, are caused by the treachery both of Guillaume and of a senior party affiliate. There are two railroad trips across Germany; in the first, Brandt’s campaigning is wildly successful, particularly his silent speeches (in which he merely looks at the crowd) and his silent visit to a World War II memorial. In the second trip, however, his silence is a hollow, depressed loss for words.

Further manifestation of the dual motif is expressed through internal conflicts. Brandt, for instance, cherishes traveling and happily recounts childhood memories of hiding in Norway from the Nazis. “This is where I feel at home: on the move,” he says, but he does not actually feel like he belongs anywhere. Likewise, Guillaume loves Brandt as fiercely as he loves Communism and East Germany, and he finds himself at constant odds with one camp or the other.

Even double-meaning may be included in this motif. On a vacation with Guillaume and their families, Brandt mentions espionage, causing Guillaume to wonder if Brandt is onto him.

None of the play’s 10 characters is female, yet as Brandt’s tragic plunge gains more immediacy, he and his advisors find themselves contemplating a list of Brandt’s love affairs. In one of the less realistic but more telling moments of dialogue, Brandt confides to Guillaume the reasons for his weakness for women: “... the way they look at you. The way they look straight into your eyes and you look straight into theirs. The way you can’t understand them. The way you can.”

So many were the faults and strengths of Democracy that it was hard to tell whether the play was good or not. It was interesting at times, funny at times, lifelike at times; it was tragic for both Brandt and Guillaume throughout. The acting was excellent. Ultimately, the play’s dualities contribute to an experience more intellectual than emotional in nature, some exceptional moments notwithstanding.