The Decline of Tradition in the German Foreign Service

TENDENCY to concentrate on private rather than public concerns is a widely noted characteristic of postwar German society. In contrast to the ideological fanaticism of the Weimar Republic, the style of postwar West German politics has generally been pragmatic well symbolized by Adenauer's campaign slogan, "No experiments." Yet despite the priority which the electorate and the political parties have given to "bread-and-butter questions," public opinion surveys, as well as occasional national controversies like the Spiegel affair, suggest that fundamental differences over ideological questions have to some extent been carried over from the past. Otto Kirchheimer has suggested that these underlying cleavages, largely absent from party politics, manifest themselves in "quasi-political" feuds within the bureaucracy. "Cliques and coteries still play a significant role in a country where relations of mutual trust often depend upon experiences shared in a Third Reich office, the anti-Nazi underground, exile, or a prisoner-of-war, concentration, or denazification camp."1 Such cleavages, in which ideological differences find an outlet in "office politics," have occurred in the postwar Foreign Service. Remnants of political battles waged before 1945 and before 1933 intermingle with personal rivalries, professional jealousies, and differences of opinion over West German foreign policy, at times producing vigorous bureaucratic infighting. Karl Georg Pfleiderer, a former career diplomat serving as a parliamentary deputy of the Free Democratic party, complained to the Bundestag in 1951 that "a unified spirit and a unified will must be brought into this ministry."2 Four years later a journalist charged that "what takes place in the personnel affairs of the Foreign Office can only be called a war of all against all in the diplomats' jungle."3 In recent years, internal feuds appear to have decreased. Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroeder, in particular, has insisted on ministerial solidarity since he assumed office in 1961, and has provided the Foreign Office with the administrative direction which it sometimes lacked during the years of reconstruction. As postwar recruits take over an increasing number of responsible positions, as reinstated professional diplomats from the old Foreign Service retire, and as the unorthodox entry of those officials who joined the ministry laterally as adults after the war is forgotten, the Service again gains a measure of internal solidarity. Yet informed commentators insist that factional strife still tends, at times, to pull the ministry apart. The upheavals caused by nazism, war, defeat, and the rapid reconstruction after 1949, coincided with universal changes in the diplomatic profession, including bureaucra-