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German Officialdom Revisited: Political Views and Attitudes of the West German Civil Service

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

John H. Herz
John H. Herz
Affiliation:
City CollegeNew York
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Extract

DEEP crises in the life of a nation sometimes lay bare with lightning clarity those basic social ties, loyalties, and commitments which render possible some maintenance of order and control when everything seems about to break down or disappear. In 1945, year of the deepest crisis that the German people have undergone in modern times, groups and organizations like the Junkers or the Nazi Party simply vanished; others, like the military, disappeared at least temporarily or, like the industrialists, were gravely weakened. It was the bureaucracy which became the bedrock, the irreducible minimum of social cohesion upon which, first locally, then in larger units, society was rebuilt. Subsequently, confirmed in its traditional position of control by the occupation powers (certain measures of attempted political purge and technical reorganization notwithstanding), its actual power was enhanced by the innumerable tasks of postwar reconstruction, from the building-up of entire new administrations (in the new Länder as well as on the bi-zonal and then federal levels of government) to the handling of what has been aptly called the “universe of claims” arising out of Nazi, war, and postwar conditions.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , October 1954 , pp. 63 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1954

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References

1 Kirchheimer, Otto, “Notes on the Political Scene in Western Germany,” World Politics, VI (April 1954), p. 311.Google Scholar

2 The following is based on a study prepared by the author for the RAND Corporation. Interviews were held with some fifty officials, selected so as to represent various West German regions (including West Berlin) as well as different levels and branches of the administration, including judges and other members of the judicial bureaucracy.

3 Cf. Herz, J. H., “The Fiasco of Denazification in Germany,” Political Science Quarterly, LXIII (1948), pp. 569ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Quite generally, the Bonn Republic strikes one as a more sober, pragmatic version of something déjà vu; good sense but little esprit; Weimar minus Tucholsky.

5 Although the term itself has assumed an almost pejorative connotation: the German attributes to “your (i.e., the Western countries’) democracy” almost anything that goes wrong or works badly, from party rivalries to traffic congestions.

6 As for countries such as China or Japan, the German usually forgets them; in their discussions of international affairs, Germans are entirely ego- (i.e., Germano or Europe) centered.

7 Meaning those in the East. Present German nationalism, or irredentism, does not comprise Alsace-Lorraine or Austria any more.