Profile : He’s the Man Behind Kohl : While Bonn’s chancellor gets the publicity, Horst Teltschik is quietly crafting strategy for a unified Germany.

A government organization chart will tell you Horst Teltschik is a civil servant, one of 128 in the West German buraucracy with the title “ministerial director.”

The truth about Mr. Teltschik, however, extends beyond the organization chart. Far beyond.

Bright, ambitious and controversial, the 49-year-old bureaucrat is both Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s main foreign policy adviser and a man who, after 18 years of working for Kohl in various capacities, has become one of his closest, most trusted aides.

The combination has made Teltschik a player in German foreign policy as the process of German unity begins to alter the political map of Europe.

“Seldom, if ever, has an official in the chancellery had so much influence in foreign affairs as Teltschik,” summed up the prestigious Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung newspaper.

While Bonn political pundits like to describe Teltschik as Kohl’s Henry Kissinger--a reference to Kissinger’s years as the national security adviser in the Nixon White House--such a comparison is almost certainly overdrawn.

Although respected for his knowledge on security and foreign policy matters, Teltschik lacks the stature and accumulated depth of inside vision and scholarship that Kissinger brought to Nixon.

Still, the roles are similar.

“He’s one of the few real conceptual thinkers in German foreign policy,” noted a respected political analyst here. “He’s the one who can put the detail into the larger framework.”

Hans Joerg Sottorf, who has covered the chancellor for several years as a correspondent for the Duesseldorf economic daily Handelsblatt, puts it differently:

“They (Kohl and Teltschik) fit so well together because they are so different,” he said. “Kohl has the political instincts of what is possible, but Teltschik is the idea man, the strategist who can package the concept.’

Teltschik, for example, authored Kohl’s famous 10-point program last November that became the first clear blueprint for German unity within a more unified Europe.

That speech cast German unification for the first time as a near-term issue and proposed a confederated relationship between the two Germanys as an interim step toward eventual unity.

“With that speech the chancellor took the lead on the issue of unification--domestically and internationally,” Teltschik said during an hourlong interview in his chancellery office. “We were heavily attacked for it (domestically), but internationally, it couldn’t have surprised France or others. They’ve known for years the chancellor has been for reunification. What we tried to do is elaborate a concept of how to manage it.”

When Kohl travels abroad, Teltschik is rarely far away.

In Moscow last February, he drafted the chancellor’s statement welcoming Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s green light on unity.

Two weeks later, he was the lone policy adviser to accompany Kohl for a weekend meeting with President Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III at Camp David, Md.

Teltschik was born in the Sudetenland in 1940, in what is now Czechoslovakia, and his family became part of the wave of German refugees forced to flee west in the wake of the Nazi collapse.

He studied political science, contemporary history and civil law at the Free University in Berlin before heading a Christian Democrat working group on inner-German and foreign policy matters.

Kohl picked him out of the party apparatus in 1972 to write speeches and run his office as premier of the West German state of Rhineland Palatinate.

The two have been together since.

When Kohl became chancellor in October, 1982, his inexperience in foreign affairs and an alleged mistrust of the Foreign Ministry led him to break with a long-held tradition that the Foreign Ministry supplied the chancellory’s foreign affairs adviser.

He brought Teltschik instead.

Those who know them both say Teltschik fashioned a Kohl foreign policy from a few general concepts that Kohl inherited mainly from the country’s first Christian Democratic chancellor, Konrad Adenauer: strong relationships with France and the United States, commitments to the European Community and the Atlantic Alliance and reconciliation with old enemies.

The work provided Kohl with enough to keep abreast of his highly experienced Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

But as is true with the man he serves, hard-edged comments occasionally land Teltschik in controversy.

Some members of Genscher’s Free Democrats, who are the junior partners in Kohl’s ruling coalition, recently demanded Teltschik’s head for what they perceived as his slight of Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze. Responding to the Soviet official’s prediction that Germany unity would probably take years to achieve, Teltschik quipped publicly that Shevardnadze would be surprised how fast unity comes.

“I was attacked that I can’t speak in such a way to a foreign minister like Schevardnadze,” Teltschik said, “but that’s crazy, because I’m sure he’s heard much worse things.”

He was also accused of attempting to destabilize East Germany on the eve of its first free elections last month after being widely quoted as saying the country was effectively bankrupt.

“Teltschik will say things that Kohl doesn’t dare,” commented Josef Thesing, head of the international department at the Konrad Adenauer Institute, a Christian Democratic Union think tank.

A family man who enjoys tennis and likes to work late and sleep late, Teltschik has a relaxed, informal manner and quick smile that puts visitors quickly at ease in either English or German.

“He’s got the charm and humility of a young man,” noted a colleague who once worked with him. “He doesn’t try to impress people, but he’s tough. He’s easily underestimated.”

His easygoing manner has enabled him to cultivate a prickly Bonn press corps and at least partly offset the impact of Kohl’s own stiff, combative encounters with reporters.

This role, coupled with his direct, open manner, has helped make him a personality in a country where government servants seem collectively allergic to publicity.

The West German press gleefully catalogues his alleged run-ins with the Foreign Ministry, and magazines feel compelled to inform readers of his favorite color, personal motto, literary heroes and political villains.

Foreign Ministry officials decline to comment publicly on their alleged differences with Teltschik.

“We are not obligated to talk about a civil servant in the federal chancellery,” said a ministry spokesman. “We never respond to Teltschik.”

Privately, however, there is frequent sniping and complaints of rough-edged, ill-considered comments.

He has been blamed for the 1985 fiasco that led President Ronald Reagan to lay a wreath at a German war cemetery in the small town of Bitburg that contained graves of Hitler’s SS troops and for a similar reconciliation gesture that went awry during Kohl’s November visit to Poland.

When, during a magazine interview, Teltschik listed the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran along with Hitler and Stalin as his three most despised leaders, Foreign Ministry officials complained to reporters that he was damaging already touchy German-Iranian relations.

Teltschik claims that the chancellery’s differences with Genscher are often overplayed by the press, and political observers agree the clashes are usually more personal than policy-oriented.

“Sure there are differences, but we have to cooperate,” said Teltschik. “Sometimes we do it in a brilliant way, sometimes in not-so-brilliant way.”

If differences exist between Teltschik and Kohl, they rarely surface, even in private discussions with third parties, according to those who know them both.

In the course of an interview, Teltschik made these points:

* The Germans would be the first to lose if the North Atlatnic Treaty Organization were dissolved, he said, but he stressed that arms control agreements and an overhaul of existing strategies will radically diminish NATO’s military character.

“It’s not the NATO from yesterday or today, but the NATO of tomorrow we are discussing, and that will be much easier for (a united) Germany to be a member,” Teltschik said.

* The George Bush presidency is “a stroke of luck for us, because he supports German policy completely and unconditionally.”

* The East Germans, not the West German chancellery, have set the pace of German unity.

“When it is said in the United States that unity is like a steamroller, there’s only one such steamroller, and that is the people of the GDR (German Democratic Republic--East Germany). They are forcing the pace of unity; they determine the tempo, not us.”

In many ways, Teltschik is a contradiction--an unquestionably bright, politically ambitious man who has chosen to serve rather than lead.

Acquaintainces say he has frequently considered leaving and at one point was on the verge of seeking a parliamentary seat in Bavaria, where he grew up. But Kohl refused to let him go.

Teltschik himself tends to fend off questions of his personal future.

“There might come a time when I’ve decided I’ve had enough, but it’s not so easy, you know,” he said with a smile. “I’m a civil servant, and if I quit my job, I lose all my benefits.”

Biography

Name: Horst Teltschik

Title: Ministerial director in the West German government, main foreign policy adviser to Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Age: 49

Nationality: West German; born in the Sudetenland, in what is now Czechoslovakia.

Quote: “It’s not the NATO from yesterday or today, but the NATO of tomorrow we are discussing, and that will be much easier for (a united) Germany to be a member.”