Book Reviews : Memoirs. By HEINRICH BRUENING. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1970. Pp. 750. 30 DM.)

• DOI: 10.1177/106591297102400432
• Date: 01 December 1971
• Published date: 01 December 1971
• Subject Matter: Articles

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Lauxmann has no easy answers for, unlike many Americans, he cannot ignore
the fact that public administration is ultimately a political matter. His major
criterion for measuring administrative reform, then, is its impact upon the nature
of democratic responsibility. This perspective, strange for us since we have chased
public administration from political science into business administration accounts
for the author’s lack of enthusiasm for such &dquo;technological fixes&dquo; as the computer
or the team concept of management.
This is not the most scholarly treatment of current German administration;
the sophisticated scholar will probably prefer the work of Thomas Ellwein. But
for the student for whom the German language and academic style are obstacles,
Lauxmann’s book is valuable. It may even lead one to look at Robert Mohl’s 1844
article on the same topic; the pair will surely humble anyone who believes that
we
have made much progress in the struggle against bureaucracy.
ROBERT D. MIEWALD
University of Nebraska
Memoirs. By HEINRICH BRUENING. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1970.
Pp. 750. 30 DM.)
One of the great disputes in German historiography is whether Heinrich
Bruening, Chancellor from March 30, 1930, to March 30, 1932, was the last of
the democratic chancellors or the first of the authoritarian ones. Bruening’s
memoirs, worked on for thirty years up to the time of his death last year in Ver-
mont, where he had made his home since 1956 after an unsuccessful attempt at a
political comeback in Adenaur’s Germany, clearly support the younger German re-
visionist historians who are critical of Bruening’s chancellorship. For one example,
the memoirs clearly dispel the Bruening myth that the politics of the authoritarian
presidential regime of 1930-32 were the necessary and only way to overcome the
crisis and thus save German democracy. They also reveal Bruening’s inability to
understand the conditions of political action in a modern mass society. It is...