Auswärtiges Amt

The Auswärtiges Amt, the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin, is presented as a place where diplomatic language is produced, revised, and put to political use. Its role in the crisis is not confined to official exchanges: translators, interpreters, and officials handling confidential papers become links between the Nazi government’s public posture, its private decisions, and the people trying to obstruct its course.

Office and diplomatic routine

The ministry occupies a sprawling three-storey nineteenth-century building on Wilhelmstrasse, in Berlin’s government district. Paul von Hartmann is at work there when an overnight telegram arrives from London, a reminder that routine office business has become inseparable from the urgent diplomacy surrounding the Sudeten crisis. His job includes translating incoming English messages into German and drafting replies in the name of Joachim von Ribbentrop, who has been Foreign Minister for seven months.

That work requires more than linguistic accuracy. Hartmann initially writes in the formal, neutral register expected of a professional diplomat, but his drafts are rejected as insufficiently National Socialist. Some are returned by Sturmbannführer Sauer, a member of Ribbentrop’s staff, with a thick black line drawn through them. Hartmann concludes that career survival requires a change of style: he trains himself to imitate Ribbentrop’s bombast and radical political outlook. The ministry’s paperwork thus records not just policy but the pressure to make official language conform to ideological expectations.

Translation as political work

The ministry also turns translation into a rapid-response operation. State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker assigns Hartmann the task of producing a German translation of Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast within thirty minutes of its delivery. High in the building, in a radio-monitoring room beneath the roof’s aerials, Hartmann organizes a three-woman team. One stenographer records the English broadcast; a second secretary types the notes in English with generous spacing; Hartmann writes the German translation beneath them; and a third secretary types the finished version.

The chain is vulnerable to the conditions of transmission: by the time the British Broadcasting Corporation’s signal reaches Berlin, it has weakened, and Chamberlain’s voice fades in and out through static. The staged process makes the ministry’s work visible as a sequence of listening, transcription, translation, and reproduction, rather than a single act by an invisible interpreter. It also places Hartmann between a British public address and the German authorities who want its contents quickly and in usable form.

Reports, secrets, and uncertain provenance

Official records within the ministry can carry evidence that their neutral presentation does not erase. Erich Kordt draws Hartmann aside at an unused entrance and gives him a six-page typescript: Dr Schmidt’s account of Sir Horace Wilson’s meeting with Adolf Hitler. The document is written in bland official language and in unusually large type, but Hartmann can reconstruct the confrontation it describes. Wilson had privately assured Hitler that London would continue to pressure the Czechs, yet had also read a prepared statement warning that Britain would support France if hostilities began. The report therefore preserves the collision between private reassurance and a formal warning inside the same diplomatic encounter.

Elsewhere in the crisis, a secret military directive reaches Hugh Legat through an envelope put through his home letterbox; British officials examine it and debate whether it is genuine. The evidence does not establish that the Auswärtiges Amt supplied that document. The distinction matters in a story where access, transmission, and authenticity are recurring questions: an important paper may expose the government’s intentions without revealing who moved it or why. The ministry’s own documentary world, meanwhile, contains both the bureaucratic record of Wilson’s meeting and the less visible choices of the officials who handle such records.

The ministry at Munich

At Munich, the ministry’s practical functions continue beyond Berlin. Hartmann is expected to translate the agreements when the delegations return to sign them, and to prepare an English-language press summary for the Führer the following morning. The summary is an unusual assignment: Hartmann expects the press department to handle it, but is told that Adolf Hitler has personally requested him for the task. Translation here serves both immediate diplomacy and the controlled presentation of events to an English-speaking audience.

The negotiations also bring Hartmann and Kordt back into contact. At the Führerbau, Kordt asks whether Hartmann has made contact with his British friend. Their exchange places ministry personnel within a covert effort unfolding alongside the official conference. The surveillance is institutional too: Paul Schmidt has checked Hartmann’s Oxford history through the ministry’s personnel department and contacted the German embassy in London. He has learned that Hartmann and Legat attended the same college, and that Legat was added to the British delegation only on the morning of the conference, replacing Cecil Syers. The ministry’s administrative reach can therefore serve scrutiny as well as ordinary staffing.

The episode ends with an act of concealment rather than an official dispatch. Hartmann tells Legat to keep the folded memorandum, hide it in his room, and carry it back to London so it can reach a more receptive audience. He also insists that they stop speaking and move apart. The transfer makes the interpreter’s position precarious: his official duties bring him close to the documents and people that matter, while his private actions redirect information away from the authorities he serves.

Institutional role and narrative significance

The Auswärtiges Amt connects the novel’s central political arenas through routine tasks: translating messages, recording diplomatic encounters, checking personnel histories, arranging transport, and preparing press material. These procedures give the institution reach, but they do not make its staff politically uniform. Hartmann adapts his official prose to the regime’s demands, yet also helps pass a secret memorandum to Legat; Kordt uses a private opening in the ministry’s imposing facade to share a consequential report. Institutional access becomes both an instrument of state control and an opportunity for resistance.

The ministry’s most revealing tension lies between the appearance of administrative neutrality and the political force of the work it performs. A translated speech can become an official account; a formal report can preserve a warning that courtesies might otherwise obscure; a press summary can shape how negotiations are represented. In this way, the Auswärtiges Amt is not merely the setting for diplomatic activity. It is one of the mechanisms through which information is framed, verified, watched, and sometimes carried beyond the state’s control.