Who governs Germany?

Imperial Germany had a monopolistic elite which managed to establish and uphold, with the assistance of an authoritarian welfare state, the apparent paradox of an industrial feudal society. Members of this elite held many of the leading positions in German society themselves, but others they passed into strange, if safely controlled hands. The monopoly broke along with the political system of Imperial Germany. But the memory of—and at times nostalgia for— the masters of the monopoly, whose passing turned out to be a long process, followed their surviving servants throughout the Weimar Republic. In any case, no distinct new political class emerged before that created by the National Socialist leadership clique and this was, once again, if in a more precarious version, monopolistic. East German society has followed in this tradition in its own, apparently similar, although substantively peculiar, manner. Moreover, there can be no doubt that these traditions reverberate in West German society as well; not even total defeat produces a social tabula rasa. But two features characteristic of traditional German elites are now absent: first, the monopoly of one elite, or indeed the claim to it; and secondly, the nostalgic memory which the leadership groups of the Weimar Republic had of such a monopoly.