GERMANY: DEMOCRACY IN TROUBLE:MCCARTHYISM AND THE GERMAN CIVIL SERVICE
Mankoff, Milton & Jacobs, Monica
For the past five years a variant of America's infamous McCarthyism has been unfolding in a country that recently has gained a measure of respectability on the world stage: West Germany. The...
...Despite the reinstatement of the person whose firing precipitated the ad, the petitioners were investigated because they had engaged in public protest...
...Originally, she was informed that there were no more job openings...
...Besides the teachers, all social workers, doctors employed by hospitals, postal and railway workers come under the auspices of the civil service...
...3) Charlotte Niess, a lawyer and member of the Social Democratic party, was denied a position as a judge in Bavaria because she belonged to a lawyer's organization in which a small minority of the membership were Communists...
...While those pursuing occupations not associated with the civil service are somewhat more secure in exercising their political rights, there is growing evidence that private employers are beginning to invoke their own BeruJsverbot policies...
...Perhaps it is time now to stop seeing merely the German "economic miracle," which has lost some of its power in recent years, and to begin attending to the darker side of life in the Federal Republic...
...In the United States it is common for young people to train for one career and pursue another, and socalled on-the-job training procedures predominate...
...In some cases membership in the Jusos, the youth wing of the Social Democratic party, has led to a denial of employment...
...When persons apply for civil-service positions their names are sent to the Ministry of the Interior where it is determined whether a dossier exists on the applicant...
...The government also argued, however, that many "graduates" of the university-based new left of the 1960s were gaining entrance into the civil service and consequently were in a position to undermine the security of the German state...
...The arbitrary nature of the Berufsverbot policy in West Germany today can be illustrated by mention of the cases of some of its most publicized victims: (1) Rudi Roder, a train conductor with the state railway for 12 years, was denied a promotion and dismissed because of his membership in the Communist party...
...Its development has coincided with and reinforced a rightward trend in West Germany...
...Few persons will deny the right of a truly democratic society to protect itself from those who would destroy it...
...Ironically, his father, also a locomotive conductor, suffered the same fate in 1933...
...Not surprisingly, this leads to wide variations in enforcing Berufsverbot...
...Other *Some defenders of Berufsverbot have drawn parallels between leftist civil servants in the 1970s and rightist civil servants of the period 1918-33 who undermined the Weimar Republic and helped pave the way for Nazism...
...The linchpin in the repressive apparatus has been BeruJsverbot or job ban, a policy that has resulted in the dismissal of 4,000 civil-service employees, investigations of up to 800,000 others who were applying for or holding civil-service jobs, and the political intimidation of a significant proportion of the West German population...
...One of the reasons for this action was the behavior of the anarchist sect that became 84 known as the "Baader-Meinhof gang," a politically isolated grouplet that combined rhetorical hyperbole and terrorism...
...Springer, of course, felt they were abusing freedom of speech and assembly to attack property rights that were also guaranteed by the Constitution...
...The alleged process of subversion would be long-term and more subtle than the tactics of BaaderMeinhof, but a Fifth Column in the civil service would provide fertile ground for the spread of "antidemocratic" ideas, the kind of ideas that ultimately lead to terrorism.* The language of the Hamburg decrees, in its vagueness and totalitarian concern with all aspects of the prospective or current civil-service employees' existence, has promoted violations of civil liberties and mushrooming paranoia...
...Point One stated that "only those persons may be appointed as public officials who can at all times guarantee support for the free basic democratic order according to the Constitution, and public officials are obliged to actively defend this basic order both in office and out of office...
...2) Gerda Tantau, a mathematics teaching applicant, was denied a job...
...Altogether, 15 percent of the labor force are civil servants...
...New leftists in the 1960s often argued that the inflammatory press lord Axel Springer should have his newspaper monopoly broken...
...or does not demonstrate "by his total behavior" endorsement of the free democratic basic order shall either not be employed by the civil service or be dismissed if already a member...
...University students and graduates are particularly reluctant to express their political convictions, even in the most innocuous 86 ways...
...If a hearing takes place, civil-service applicants are not entitled to know in advance the nature of the evidence that gives ground to question their loyalty nor is counsel available...
...The dossiers themselves are composed of reports supplied by local, state, and national intelligence operatives and by the police...
...A disciplinary hearing can be a first step in the Berufsverbot process...
...If a Weimar analogy is to be used, they argue that Berufsverbot is not so much an example of learning from mistakes of the past as repeating them...
...The government appealed a court ruling in her favor...
...Tantau's associations were not quite as they appeared...
...Tantau had left East Germany in 1960 after her loyalty to that state was questioned and she was denied admission to a preparatory school...
...Today the center is repressing the left, but if Weimar is relevant, the center itself may some day be hoisted by its own petard...
...LIKE MCCARTHYISM, Berufsverbot is a policy that is ostensibly aimed at far-left political sects but has its greatest impact in silencing the much larger leftliberal forces in the society...
...This was said to be inconsistent with the loyalty to supervisors expected of civil servants...
...If there is a dossier, the prospective employer can subtly refuse employment without a hearing or set up a hearing to decide the suitability of the applicant for civil-service employment...
...Experience indicates that formal affiliation with leftist political organizations, arrest, or known participation in demonstrations, signatures on petitions, association with political undesirables, and attending meetings of suspicious groups are all actions that could lead to Berufsverbot or at least to an inquiry...
...The burden of proving political loyalty falls solely upon the applicant...
...The ambiguity of the 1949 German Constitution adds to the difficulty...
...On questions of "internal security" its record increasingly resembles that of the traditionally authoritarian Christian Democrats with whom it competes in pursuit of the "law-and-order" vote...
...Analogous procedures occur in cases of persons suspected of disloyalty who are already civil servants...
...Berufsverbot, however, because of its tendency to treat dissenters as destroyers and persons who use constitutional freedoms of belief, speech, and association as subversives, is hardly a reasonable solution to the age-old problem of reconciling freedom and order...
...Moreover, "doubt" about an applicant's or civil servant's loyalty shall generally "justify rejection...
...BeruJsverbot began early in 1972, when the minister presidents of the II German states and the federal chancellor, then Willy Brandt, issued the so-called Hamburg decrees, which sought to purge the civil service of persons "antagonistic" to the Constitution...
...Guilt by association is, of course, a doctrine inimical to any civilized sense of justice, but it turned out that Ms...
...Two months later in court, she forced the authorities to disclose the real reasons for her rejection from the civil service: her husband and brother were considered disloyal radicals...
...The German state is being stabilized at the cost of undermining civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution...
...provisions of the new policy were that "an applicant who engages in anticonstitutional activities...
...Those who might desire West Germany to move toward democratic socialism as well as left 85 sectarians face exclusion from the civil service because they are alleged to be "antagonistic" to the Constitution...
...They may then forfeit those Basic Rights and, under the Berufsverbot policy, their livelihood as well...
...Today the Social Democratic party, like the Democratic party in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s, has gradually deemphasized its reformist stance...
...4) Twenty-nine teachers had to undergo disciplinary hearings after placing a petition in the form of an ad in a newspaper protesting the dismissal of a colleague...
...The bizarre quality f Ihese Berufsverbot cases, a consequence of the vagueness of the Hamburg decrees and the sweeping powers given to local authorities to interpret the meaning of anticonstitutional behavior, has had a chilling effect on the exercise of Basic Rights among large numbers of people...
...If one is barred from practicing one's chosen profession, the possibility of entering another occupational sphere is severely curtailed...
...How is one to determine whether political dissidents are acting within or outside the constitutional framework, when they and those they attack can legitimately claim constitutional support— depending upon which Basic Right they invoke to justify their actions...
...What kinds of intelligence data are likely to raise suspicions in the minds of civil-service employers about the character of job applicants or members of the civil service...
...Even when association with disloyal radicals proved to be without foundation, Ms...
...In Germany, the licensing of aspirants for even the most mundane occupations is far more frequent...
...For example, the Constitution guarantees the right to expropriate private property that is not being utilized in a manner consistent with the public interest...
...Social Democratic employers have been known to be concerned more with applicants' concrete behavior, while Christian Democrats tend to consider a dubious formal political association (e.g., membership in the Communist party) sufficient grounds to invoke Berufsverbot...
...The Constitution is extremely permissive in what it allows citizens to do and think politically and potentially repressive in its contention that persons who abuse "basic rights" to undermine a loosely conceived `free basic democratic order" are "antagonistic" to the Constitution...
...Her husband was not a member of the West Berlin Communist party as had been alleged...
...The logical connection between the existence of a few urban terrorists and the need to purify the 3.5 million-person civil-service of "anti-constitutional" elements has never been made sufficiently clear...
...Her brother was arrested for supporting terrorist organizations but was released and never charged with a crime...
...It does not take a vivid imagination to recognize that German citizens could be subject to forfeiture of Basic Rights and jobs if they used their freedom of speech, assembly, and political beliefs to attack constituted authority...
...Amidst a relatively high postwar unemployment rate, it is easy to see why young job-seekers are anxious to have a clean political bill of health...
...An ironic aspect of this case was that Ms...
...Willy Brandt, under whose leadership Berufsverbot was instituted, recently stated that introduction of the policy represented his most regrettable political decision in light of the repressive forces it unleashed...
...Although the Jusos are to the left of the parent party, it is demogogic to believe they are seeking to destroy the Constitution...
...The anxiety associated with Berufsverbot is perhaps best understood if one realizes that German society is characterized by a much greater association between formal training for an occupation and the possibilities of practicing it...
...Berufsverbot is most threatening if all positions in one's occupation require civil-service clearance...
...Once again, a government is bowing to right wing pressure and repressing leftism...
...Needless to say, the necessity to guarantee "at all times" by one's "total behavior" and "active" defense support of any principle places extraordinary burdens on a citizen...
...Their anti-Springer demonstrations seemed to them in harmony with the Constitution...
...or "belongs to an organization pursuing goals antagonistic to the Constitution...
...HOW THEN is Berufsverbot carried out...
...Applicants are sometimes offered the option of writing a letter that will dispel doubts about their loyalty to the Constitution...
...Berufsverbot is the expression of a one-sided interpretation of the Constitution in behalf of those who define "freedom" and "democracy" as being embodied in the present institutional structure of the Federal Republic...
...Because there is no national standard for evaluating political loyalty, each hiring agency can develop its own criteria...
...Terrorists, living underground and wanted by the police, are unlikely, after all, to be members of or to seek positions in the civil service...
...Tantau still was having difficulty finding employment as a teacher...
...In such matters, of course, the "right of interpretation" belongs to those who hold institutional power regardless of the merits of their debating points...
...Berutsverbot critics contend, however, that a policy of excluding leftists from the civil service will not insure the maintenance of democratic institutions in West Germany...
Vol. 25 • January 1978 • No. 1
