Klaus Scharioth: A Remembrance

By Michael Glennon, Professor of Constitutional and International Law

With the passing of Klaus Scharioth on October 30, Germany lost a preeminent diplomat, Fletcher lost an esteemed professor and I lost a dear friend and colleague.

Klaus joined the Fletcher faculty in 2011, teaching a spring semester module each year. This followed his service as Germany’s ambassador to the United States since 2006. His life-long affection for the United States traced to 1967, when he studied on a scholarship at the College of Idaho. Klaus became a “big fan” of the United States, as he put it. He imbibed Americana. He interviewed and admired Idaho’s young U.S. senator, Frank Church. He was inspired by John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. He was amazed that the United States Supreme Court could at one time include so many towering jurists. He read John Steinbeck. He and his wife Ulrike later drove across the continent, relishing diners and truck stops and county fairs. Later they would regularly close his spring stint at Fletcher on Block Island, vacationing in the same seaside house year after year. His American Oxford-cloth button-down shirts would have been distinctive in the German Foreign Ministry. Klaus became a go-to expert for German media on all things American.

I knew Klaus well and liked him immensely. During his spring visits we had lunch regularly at his favorite local restaurant, a Turkish place on Teele Square (favored for, among other things, smooth Georgian red wine). When Covid interrupted his visits, he taught on Zoom and our friendship moved to Zoom as well, with weekly, hour-long chats. These continued, less frequently, until his death. We never ran out of topics to discuss. We exchanged articles, book recommendations (he had read all of John le Carré), reactions to current events, recollections of people we’d known and the latest family news. Klaus was ever devoted to Ulrike and their three children and grandchildren.

I cherish the memory of those conversations not least because of Klaus’s candor. More than once I urged Klaus to write his memoirs, but he said he couldn’t because so much of what he knew he had learned in confidence. His insights carried a wisdom forged in deep experience in the highest councils of national and international governance, burnished by an unerring instinct for what prompts people and organizations to behave as they do. He understood the imperative of institutional responsibility and strove for accountability. The highlights of Klaus’s career are familiar at Fletcher—representing Germany’s U.N. mission on the sixth committee (on international law), negotiating the treaty for German unification, serving on the foreign office’s prestigious policy planning staff, advising multiple chancellors, running the private offices of three NATO secretaries general, heading the foreign office’s political department and finally assuming the role of its secretary of state, the highest civil service position in German diplomacy. What is less familiar, at least in the United States, is the role he played in bringing sunlight to a dark period in German diplomacy.

When Klaus entered government, a myth was afoot in Germany that the foreign office had been less committed to the Nazi cause than other state institutions. Klaus increasingly realized this to be untrue as he became aware that former Nazis continued to hold office in the foreign office in much larger numbers than was commonly realized. When he was appointed state secretary, he played a key role in creating a commission of independent historians to investigate foreign office activities during the Nazi era and the extent to which it continued afterwards to be influenced by earlier sympathies. 

The commission’s 900-page report, based on extensive archival research and issued while Klaus was ambassador, confirmed what he had known: far from being a source of resistance to the Nazi regime, the foreign office played a direct role in carrying out the mass murder of Jews, provided legal and diplomatic cover for Nazi atrocities and after the war continued to pursue a deliberate strategy of myth-making and cover-ups.

The report’s release sparked a heated, polarizing debate in Germany and, from some quarters, intense criticism of its authors and sponsors. But Klaus stood firmly behind it. He was neither defensive nor dismissive of Germany’s past. Shortly after he arrived at Fletcher I invited him to a screening of Conspiracy in my class, a barely-fictionalized reenactment of the 1942 Wannsee Conference that plotted the “Final Solution.” Klaus made no effort to explain away the cold bureaucratic efficiency of Hitlers’ executioners. Neither, however, was he apologetic; it was not, after all, his or his generation’s doing. He and they had suffered no little hardship in the immediate aftermath of the war — Klaus grew up in the industrial city of Essen, one of the most frequently bombed cities in Germany — but he recalled as a child feeling no enmity for the Americans, he said, because of the very visible aid given under the Marshall Plan. All this was by way of explaining his view that while the truth may sometimes hurt, in the long run openness is the best policy.

If Klaus had a backbone of solid brass, he also had an 18-jewel mind. His nuanced thinking on legal issues influenced my own views and sharpened points of disagreement. His doctoral thesis at Fletcher had compared approaches of the top courts of India, Germany and the United States in resolving certain property rights. In the course of his law studies in Germany, he was attracted to Konrad Hesse’s doctrine of practical concordance, a principle of German law counselling that, when different rights come into conflict, all are to be accommodated to the maximum extent possible, rather than permitting one to eclipse all the rest. This principle embodied his approach to diplomacy as well as law. Klaus believed in harmonizing valid but conflicting interests rather than elevating one and discarding others. This led him to reject the American position on some free speech issues — he objected, for example, to protecting hate speech and advocacy of violence (on which we disagreed) — but practical concordance was also, I would suggest, an intuition that made Klaus an effective statesman who strove to honor the legitimate wants and needs of all contending parties so far as feasible.

Whatever the ultimate viability of practical concordance, lawyers and diplomats are desperately needed with his sense of balance, honor and integrity and his commitment to conciliation. As his students make their way in the world, they will find no more shining example than Klaus Scharioth to light their path.

Gifts in Memory of Professor Scharioth can be made to the Fletcher Fund for Faculty Support