[2][3] Kirchheimer worked as a research analyst at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, starting in World War II and continuing to 1952.
jur., magna cum laude) from the University of Bonn for a thesis titled Zur Staatslehre des Sozialismus und Bolschewismus (On the State Theory of Socialism and Bolshevism).
During the Weimar Republic, the young Kirchheimer came to prominence with sensational analyses of the relationship between social structures and constitutions.
In the meantime Kirchheimer had broken off contact with his teacher and mentor Carl Schmitt, who had risen to become the "crown lawyer of the Third Reich".
Kirchheimer left the OSS and accepted a visiting professorship at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research (1954).
On 22 November 1965 Kirchheimer died of a heart attack while trying to board a plane at Dulles International Airport near Alexandria, Virginia and Washington, D.C.[1] He was buried at the Jewish cemetery in Heilbronn on January 18, 1966.
Kirchheimer's multifaceted academic work reflects in an almost unique way the political and scientific experiences and conflicts of the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, French and American exile, and the founding and establishment phase of the two new German states of East Germany and West Germany that emerged after 1945.
For both, the majority system was bound to the precondition of homogeneity, because otherwise it was not the parliament that decided on politics, but economic power complexes.
Kirchheimer regarded the Weimar Constitution only as an outdated legal mechanism that would inevitably have to fail due to the real balance of power.
After the National Socialists seized power, the focus of Kirchheimer's work shifted to the analysis of "German fascism".
In doing so, Kirchheimer expressly opposed the thesis of the Doppelstaat (dual state), which his comrade-in-arms from the Weimar days, Ernst Fraenkel, had put forward.
As with Neumann, Kirchheimer too asserted there can be no structurally unified state authority under National Socialism; the Third Reich thus appeared as a "non-state".
Kirchheimer's anxiety about modern democracy originated with what he saw as the vanishing of principled opposition within parliament and society, and the reduction of politics to the mere management of the state.
Kirchheimer's comprehensive approach remains relevant to much of the contemporary debate about the transformation of Western political systems.