Curt Garner, research associate at Berlin Technical University's Historical Institute, has published a number of articles on the (West) German civil service (Berufsbeamtentum) recently, which have been based on an unprecedented depth of research and analysis of this subject. He has looked beyond the civil service per se to reflect on the continuity of German history across the 1945 divide and to identify some of the sources of the ultimately successful democratization and modernization of West Germany. This newest contribution is an expanded version of the author's earlier chapter on the 1950s West German professional civil service in Axel Schildt/Arnold Sywottek, Modernisierung im Wiederaufbau: Die westdeutsche Gesellschaft der fünfziger Jahre (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., 1993). That volume had been part of a major research venture to explore the degree to which the deeply conservative 1950s laid the foundations for West German modernization in the following decades. Garner also begins this essay with that question. He finds the 1950s at first powerfully overshadowed by the continuity of pre-1945 German history until the economic miracle begins to crack open even the refrozen structures of the Beamtentum, pointing toward the post-1960 modernization.
Garner focuses on four underlying issues: (1) the civil service as a classic case of West German restoration, with the return of the old personnel and privilege; (2) the particular continuity with the Nazi period; (3) the changes (initially retrogressive) in the social composition of the civil service, defined here almost exclusively in gender rather than class terms; and (4) eventual traces of modernization in the public service. He addresses these issues through a detailed examination of four key political decisions: (1) the Adenauer government's dogged rejection of primarily Allied reform proposals; (2) Adenauer's by now well known reliance on former government officials from the Weimar and Nazi years for the top administrative jobs; (3) the parliamentary decision to reserve 20% of all professional civil service positions for former officials (including army officers and specifically Nazi agencies); and (4) the decision to reduce the percentage of especially married women in the public service from the high proportions of female civil servants in the early postwar years.
The German Beamten caste's stubborn resistance against postwar Allied and German reform efforts, and Adenauer's determined restoration of the old public service personnel are well known; and Garner can only confirm these overall conclusions. Textbooks will not have to be rewritten. Yet, even though readers may tire of the all-too-frequent reminders that they are getting fresh bits of research and analysis here that no-one had discovered before, Garner adds important insights and modifications to our understanding of the postwar public service, which, as he reminds us, made up fully one-seventh of the employed work force in 1950. He makes, first of all, an even stronger case that the proportion of Nazi-era officials in the public service of the early 1950s was great and growing rapidly. He documents some particularly disturbing cases among them, such as the loyal, highly decorated Nazi Major General Kreipe who served in top positions both in the Transportation Ministry and eventually on the board of directors of Lufthansa Airlines. Garner might have pointed out here that the Minister of Transportation in those years was Hans-Christoph Seebohm, top leader of the right-wing German Party (Deutsche Partei) and leader of the Sudeten German organization, who was a key factor in Adenauer's domestication and integration of the nationalist right into the democratic system. More troubling was the whole-scale return of Nazi foreign office personnel under Adenauer; and this led to considerable public uproar.
Without underplaying the political-moral issues involved, Garner effectively puts this apparent "renazification" of West German democracy into a broader historical context. He is not the first to show that most of the officials taken over from the Nazi era had already served during the Weimar Republic and had simply adapted once more with dumbfounding "flexibility" to a new system. Adenauer saw these men as experienced, efficient, and above all as especially loyal administrators to replace the many Social Democrats of the Bizonal administration, whom he did not trust. His close advisor and federal chancellery head, Hans Globke, who had previously served in the Prussian ministry in the 1920s, was just one, if an outstanding, case in point. Garner argues rather originally and convincingly that here Adenauer was practicing modern party politics as much as stubborn German authoritarianism. Moreover, Garner points out that the rehiring of pre-1945 public officials enjoyed broad support, including from the Social Democratic and Communist parliamentary leaderships. In contrast to 1970s revisionists like Eberhard Schmidt, who regarded this support of traditional structures and personnel by Social Democratic and labor union leaders as sheer traditionalism and collusion by old men seeking the most comfortable solution, Garner ascribes it to the SPD's and KPD's genuine wish for greatest efficiency in the reconstruction effort and to their hope to gain support among the considerable bloc of voters the civil servants represented. He might have added the Social Democrats' desire to draw the professional public servants' organization, the Beamtenbund, closer to the labor camp, especially to the ÖTV, on which Garner himself is working. In much of the population these rehirings of prominent public officials, who had vociferously supported and benefited from the Nazis, caused more grumbling than Garner seems to believe, but 1950s Germans did not oppose authority; they just grumbled quietly as in the popular song of the 1950s: "The biggest animals (i.e. the big shots) always get the sweetest cherries." The law guaranteeing 20% of the professional public service jobs to former officials continued to award positions to former Nazi Beamte, at the expense of women in particular, until the growing prosperity lured many of them away to the private economy, Garner points out.
As in other crisis times, women were most adversely affected by these restorative policies. There was broad support across all the parties for legislation to replace married women in professional civil service positions with men, ultimately to make room for veterans and crippled fathers. The main arguments were that women were more expensive because they took more sick days, and that mothers should stay home to bring up healthy children whenever possible. The latter argument was made with particular eloquence by leading women from Catholic associations, like the head of the Catholic social workers' association, Helene Weber. Garner argues quite persuasively that this anti-feminist position was taken by unmarried women, while prominent married women and mothers (including Christian Democrats) argued against the exclusionary legislation against women; and the parliamentary majority, cognizant of the questionable constitutionality of the law and concerned about the female majority of voters, rejected the bill. Given the very small number of female deputies in the Bundestag, however, it may be problematic to draw such a clear line of confrontation between married and unmarried women. For one, Helene Weber and her partisans were arguing in line with Catholic social doctrine. More importantly, many German women still defined their place in society, their social identity, much more in terms of family and community than in the modern sense of individual autonomy. There has been more of a fundamental mentality shift in this respect since the postwar years than contemporary historians generally admit. The sense of facing a common gigantic task for reconstruction was felt intensely, and most women (like organized labor) were genuinely ready to make individual sacrifices to heal society. Perhaps such feelings had been reinforced by Nazi maternalism, but many mothers still secretly treasured their mother crosses from the Nazi era well into the 1950s and 1960s without any attachment to Nazis per se. Elly Heuss-Knapp's Müttergenesungswerk celebrated those same values.
At the end of the article, Garner returns to the initial observation that the first signs of modernization already became visible in the 1950s. Even the social composition of the civil service was changing, as the percentage of women was again rising, first on the local and regional levels and then in the federal bureaucracy. But Garner never relates this modernization to the conservative restoration in the public service. The theoretical discussion that the modernization began in the 1950s remains unrelated to the core of the essay, which tells the story of an unmitigated restoration. After the promising beginning of the essay, I was disappointed that he never confronts the question to what extent the conservative restoration per se laid the foundations for modernization, perhaps by providing social stability and efficiency of reconstruction. Instead, the public service was eventually transformed by an external force, namely the rapid economic growth, to which Beamte apparently did not contribute significantly.
The article is slated to be reprinted in a reader edited by Robert G. Moeller, West Germany Under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era.
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