Whose Servants?

The state calls its people servants, and its citizens call their heads of government princes. Neither is an accident.

I. The Princes of the Länder

No newspaper notices it any more: the minister-presidents of the German Länder are routinely called “Landesfürsten”, princes of the land. It is meant half mockingly, half admiringly, and many of them wear the title with pleasure. They award medals, host state receptions, march at the head of parades and have themselves celebrated at the opening of roads and bridges built with the citizens’ money. Nobody is surprised. That a democracy describes its elected representatives with a word from the age of princely rule, without anyone minding, says more about this democracy than any speech on the constitution.

The language of the state fits. The word minister is Latin for servant. The German civil servant is a “Staatsdiener”, a servant of the state; his employer is still called the “Dienstherr”, the master he serves, in the law today; he owes him “loyalty”, and he is not paid but “alimentiert”, that is, maintained in a manner befitting his rank. Article 33 of the Basic Law expressly requires that the “traditional principles of the professional civil service” be taken into account. Traditional means: handed down from the service of princes.

A servant serves his master. In the princely state it was clear who that was. In a democracy it is supposed to be the citizen. But the language has stayed with the master, and with it a good part of the order.

II. What Habermas Saw

In 1962, in his “Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere”, Jürgen Habermas coined a term that has lost none of its edge: the refeudalisation of the public sphere. In the eighteenth century something new had arisen in the coffee houses, salons and newspapers. Citizens met as equals, argued about politics and forced power to justify itself before them. That was the bourgeois public sphere.

Habermas described how it fell apart again from the late nineteenth century onwards. Newspapers became mass media living on advertising, parties and associations pushed themselves between citizen and state, and advertising brought public relations in its wake. The public sphere became once more a court before which the powerful display their prestige instead of justifying themselves, just as the prince once showed himself to his subjects. A public that argued about culture and politics turned into one that consumes them. Habermas did not mean a relapse after the war but a long process that had taken hold of all Western mass democracies, the young Federal Republic included. It had not invented the process; it had inherited it.

Since he wrote that, the development has gone much further. Politics today takes place in talk shows, at press conferences and in carefully staged images. Whole staffs work on how a politician comes across, and hardly at all on what he can justify. Many journalists are closer to the apparatus they report on than to the public they write for. In 2010 the sociologist Sighard Neckel applied the term to the economy: there too, income and standing once again depend more on origin and position than on achievement. The court is back; it just goes by another name.

III. The Subject Adapts

What is astonishing is not that the powerful behave this way. What is astonishing is that the media and the citizens accept it. People adapt. Nobody wants to suffer for being troublesome, not at the tax office, not with the building permit, not with the employer, not in the newsroom. One writes the polite letter instead of the plain one, one would rather pay than object, and one laughs at what one believes cannot be changed.

Haven’t we been here before? In 1914 Heinrich Mann described this man in his novel “Der Untertan” (The Loyal Subject): Diederich Heßling, who bows to those above and kicks those below. We are friendlier, better educated and more prosperous than Heßling. But the reflex of making oneself small before authority so that it leaves one alone has remained.

Even mockery has its fixed place. For years, satire programmes such as “extra 3” have shown in their segment “Realer Irrsinn” (Real Madness) how authorities treat citizens: absurd notices, pointless regulations, offices that block one another. The audience laughs, and the next day nothing changes. This too has a model at court. The court jester was allowed to tell the king the truth as long as everyone laughed. He was the valve that lets off the pressure so that nothing has to move.

IV. The Master Without a Face

Today’s servant no longer serves a master one could look in the face. He serves an apparatus: regulations, responsibilities, procedures, official channels. Nobody in this apparatus decided anything; everyone merely carried out his part. The prince at least had a face; one could step before him, plead with him, curse him. The apparatus has none. Max Weber called this the “iron cage of bondage” a hundred years ago; we took the idea further in “The Iron Cage”.

Franz Kafka described this condition before it became the rule. “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning.” So begins “The Trial”. Josef K. never learns who accuses him or why. He goes from office to office, and each is responsible for only one part. In “The Castle” the land surveyor K. tries to reach an authority that summoned him and that he never reaches. Kafka was himself an official, at an insurance institute in Prague. He knew what he was writing about. How an entire country can work according to this pattern we described in “Colombia — the Kafkaesque Playground of the Megamachine”.

What this feels like today, one of us, Hans Ley, experienced in January 2025. At seven in the morning two detectives, a public prosecutor and several foreign officers stood at his door. The flat was searched, all computers and phones taken away for weeks, and he himself questioned for hours at police headquarters. He was a witness; he was accused of nothing. To this day he has to obtain the record of his own interrogation himself. We pass no judgement here on the investigation. We mention it only because the case shows what this is about: a citizen faces an overwhelming power that owes him no account and from which he must wrest one after the fact. That is no longer the prince. That is Kafka.

V. The Direction of Accountability

One has to be fair. The professional civil service was originally meant to make the official independent: of the changing minister, of bribery, of the arbitrariness of a ruler who hands out offices to favourites. That purpose is honourable, and it has often proved itself.

The feudal relic is not tenure for life. It is the direction of accountability. Whoever complains about an authority turns to that authority’s superiors. German lawyers call the disciplinary complaint, not without reason, “formless, timeless, fruitless”. Whoever writes to the apparatus usually does not even meet rejection, only silence; that is the subject of “The Cartel of Ignorance and the Toxic Silence”. The sensor that measures the apparatus’s behaviour sits inside the apparatus itself. An institution that examines itself examines above all its own survival. Whoever inside the apparatus serves the public rather than the master is not promoted but sidelined. Anne Brorhilker, who uncovered the largest tax scandal in the history of the Federal Republic, is the best-known example: “The Inconvenient Civil Servant”.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. Since 1919 the constitution has required that the state’s payments to the churches, which go back to the expropriations of 1803, be redeemed. To this day it has not happened, and the Länder pay more every year. Chambers and guilds help decide who may enter a profession. Large family fortunes are inherited largely tax-free, on the argument that jobs depend on them. That is the logic of the fief, as we described it in “Rents, Sinecures and the Highwaymen”: the property stays in the family because others depend on it. Everywhere accountability runs inwards, to one’s own estate, and not outwards, to those who bear the consequences.

VI. When the Master Changes

The Weimar Constitution had already answered the question this essay asks. “Civil servants are servants of the community as a whole, not of a party,” said Article 130. Reality looked different. Most officials of the Empire stayed in office after 1918, and their loyalty belonged more to an abstract “state” than to the Republic. After 1933 Jewish, Social Democratic and Communist officials were dismissed; the great majority went on serving. In 1937 the duty of loyalty was finally bound expressly to the person of Hitler. The administration did not slow this down; it carried it out. Its model official was Adolf Eichmann, who fulfilled his duty reliably to the very end, no matter whom it served: “Petrov’s Failure and Eichmann’s Reliability”.

This history raises a question one does not like to ask aloud today: how would an apparatus built on loyalty to the master behave if at its head stood not a jovial prince of the land but a representative of the extreme right? In Saxony-Anhalt this is no longer a thought experiment. There a party stands on the threshold of government that the state’s own domestic intelligence service classifies as confirmed right-wing extremist. We described this in “The Friendly Face”.

Here too one has to be fair. The great majority of civil servants stand by the constitution, and civil service law obliges every one of them to raise objections to unlawful orders instead of carrying them out. But a large survey of some 50,000 police officers found in 2023 that one in seven thinks there are “too many foreigners” in Germany, and that about four in ten answer questions about democracy evasively with “partly, partly”. Fewer than one in a hundred held a closed misanthropic worldview. So the problem is not a right-wing majority. The problem is an order in which the majority has learned to obey and not to ask. Such an order serves whoever sits at the top, whoever that may be.

VII. The Sovereign as Chimera

“All state authority is derived from the people,” says Article 20 of the Basic Law. Bertolt Brecht is credited with the question that follows: “But where does it go?”

On paper the citizen as sovereign is the master whom the state serves. In reality he is that for a moment every four or five years, in the polling booth. In between he is applicant, contributor, spectator, witness. One can object that courts, a free press and elections work in Germany, and that is true, measured against many other countries. But they work above all for those who have the time, money and nerve to make use of them. For most people the sovereign remains a chimera: a beautiful creature made of different parts that does not exist as such.

That is no reason for despair, but it is a reason for honesty. Sovereignty is not granted; it has to be exercised. A state serves those to whom it owes an account. As long as accountability runs inwards, it serves itself, and the citizen remains what he was in the princely state: a subject with the right to vote.

A few clear steps follow from this. Complaints about authorities belong with an independent body with powers of its own. Whoever intervenes heavily against an uninvolved person owes him a written explanation and compensation, without his having to fight for it. And constitutional mandates need a deadline. None of these steps abolishes the professional civil service. They merely reverse the direction in which one has to answer.

And perhaps it begins more simply still: with our ceasing to call our minister-presidents princes of the land, and starting to ask them whose servants they are.

Further reading: “It Doesn’t Matter Who Governs” · “Which Democracy?” · “The Democracy Gap”