Frieder Günther. Heuss auf Reisen: Die auswärtige Repräsentation der Bundesrepublik durch den ersten Bundespräsidenten. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006. 178 S. EUR 26.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-515-08819-0.

Reviewed by Martin Menke (Department of History, Rivier College)
Published on H-German (February, 2007)

State Tourism Diplomacy

The President of the Federal Republic of Germany is probably constitutionally the weakest head of state of any German entity in history. While the role provides a respectable way of ending one's career, it is not nearly as influential as the chancellorship. Each president has filled the role slightly differently. Some presidents, like Karl Carstens, who started a campaign to hike across Germany, see their role as lying in the emphasis of German culture, tradition, and virtues and remain largely free of involvement in political issues. Others see themselves as moral authority figures, like Richard von Weizsäcker, who gave a well-known speech on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The current president, Horst Köhler, is taking a more active role in vetting legislation to see if it passes constitutional muster.

Frieder Günther's short study of Theodor Heuss's diplomacy illustrates the early development of the German presidency. Three main themes fill Günther's work. Firstly, he demonstrates how Heuss largely submitted to Konrad Adenauer's attempts to keep the president out of the daily business of government; secondly, he shows how the challenges facing Heuss evolved as the Federal Republic grew in stature in the 1950s; and thirdly, as a part of his main argument, he demonstrates how Heuss's statesmanship helped Germans develop a positive self-image based both on what was perceived to be the lasting German values of the liberal Bildungsbürgertum and a sincere engagement with the Nazi past.

Relying on existing scholarship, Günther shows that not only did Adenauer never fail to assert his own prerogatives in the conduct of German foreign policy, but also that Heuss supported Adenauer's anti-communism and developed little interest in playing a stronger role in foreign affairs. Novel, however, is Günther's demonstration of how Heuss's diplomatic role evolved. Günther argues that during his first state visits, Heuss represented Germany the way Germans wanted to see themselves: as calm, educated yet seemingly uncomplicated, charming, and certainly not overbearing. Heuss himself had little use for protocol and sought to minimize it, and especially its militaristic elements, whenever possible. According to Günther, Heuss openly confronted crimes committed by Germans and in Germany's name during the National Socialist era. For example, it was Heuss who insisted on laying a wreath at sites commemorating German atrocities in Greece and Italy. Additionally, Günther documents the intense media coverage and attention devoted to the first foreign state visits to Germany, although in the later years these visits seemed commonplace and even burdensome. Furthermore, by the late fifties, German society generally was beginning to engage with the Nazi past more publicly, so that Heuss's urgings no longer seemed so momentous, especially as press coverage of his visits to Canada and Britain could not hide the fairly poor reception he had received, for example in the Canadian parliament or by the students of Oxford University, which had refused him the honorary degree he sought. As the economic miracle began to reach its peak, so argues Günther, Heuss as the representative of a classically educated, liberal-nationalist Germany began to seem out of place.

To analyze the role of the president as a figure in public diplomacy, Günther discusses each of the seven state visits abroad made by Heuss and in turn the seven visits of foreign heads of state to the Federal Republic during his tenure. Although Heuss was elected to his office in 1949, these state visits occurred during the last five years of his appointment. When, in 1954, Emperor Haile Selaisse became the first foreign head of state to visit Germany since the Potsdam conference, the Ethiopian ruler still had to pay his respects to the Allied High Commissioners as ultimate authorities in Germany. In this context, Günther demonstrates how attention to even the most minute detail was considered important for the future status of Germany. For example, Heuss played a personal role in choosing gifts for other heads of state. In preparation for Heuss's travels abroad, journalists traveling with the president and those in the host country received extensive background information, often including speeches Heuss had given on topics acknowledging German responsibility for Nazi atrocities. For Heuss's visit to North America, the German government even produced a publicity film for the American press.

Günther points out how sensitive the German government was to the coverage Heuss's visits received in the foreign press, but also how the information the German government received was not always accurate. For example, while the German media claimed that the president's visit had been well received by the Greek press and Athenian populace, the American embassy reported that the president's visit had been received largely with indifference (p. 89). On the other hand, the Greek press extensively and favorably reported on Heuss's wreath-laying at Kalavrita, the site of German reprisal shootings during the war, while the German press hardly noticed the event and initially referred to the site as a Greek officer's cemetery (pp. 86-87).

Important also were Heuss's semi-private tours of Greece, Italy, and the United States after the end of his official visits. In Italy, the semi-private tour took place between the state visit to Italy and the state visit to the Holy See. On these visits, Heuss appeared as a cultured, interested tourist and emphasized the image of Germans as a learned people rooted in the cultural and intellectual traditions of the West.

Günther concludes his study with the argument that, by 1959, the image of Germany and Germans projected by Heuss no longer adequately reflected German's desired self-image and that his retirement served to protect his image, while his successor Heinrich Lübcke was unable to reflect accurately the changing times in which he served as president. In many ways the role of the President of the Federal Republic as a moral voice whose authority relies on his (to date, they have all been men) ability to gauge correctly the sensibilities of his own time has not changed.

The one criticism of this solid study is that Günther perhaps should have paid more attention to the domestic politics of the German press during the 1950s and the differences these politics might have made in coverage of Heuss. Günther claims that the German press largely was unanimous in its appraisal of Heuss's presidential activities, which seems difficult to believe. On the whole, however, the work is well-researched and well-grounded in the scholarly literature on the early Federal Republic. A modern scholarly biography of Theodor Heuss remains a historiographical desideratum.

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Citation: Martin Menke. Review of Günther, Frieder, Heuss auf Reisen: Die auswärtige Repräsentation der Bundesrepublik durch den ersten Bundespräsidenten. H-German, H-Net Reviews. February, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12895

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