Paris, May 9th, 1950 Some fifty journalists chat as they wait in the Salon de l'Horloge at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d'Orsay in Paris. Robert Schuman enters and stuns the waiting journalists with his announcement that not only are the Germans and French reconciled just five years after the end of the deadliest war the world has ever known but that the two nations would be building a unified Europe by creating a common market around steel and coal (the ECSC). The announcement explodes like a bomb. Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet and a few others are pleased by the impact. They already know that they will be accused of a plot, even of betrayal, with the memories of collaboration still so fresh in everyone's mind. They know they are up against a lot of hostility, but they are to try any- and everything for reconciliation to triumph. Just afterwards Jürgen, a young correspondant of the big Stuttgart daily, The Stuttgart Bote, is in a Parisian brasserie having dinner with a few friends. They are being served by a young woman whose eyes accidentally meet those of Jürgen. Another "bomb" drops. Marie and he were lovers at the end of the war... when he was a German soldier, and she, the daughter of storekeepers in La Rochelle.
