Stevan Grimmeburger
Director of Oversight Stevan Grimmeburger | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Director of Oversight, Emergency Transitional Administration | |
| Assumed office March 22nd, 2022 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Estevan Xose Grimmeburger Fernandus 11 March 1971 Bronnhuld, Draakur, UKO |
| Citizenship | South Ottonia |
| Nationality | Draakuri |
| Political party | Nonpartisan |
| Alma mater | Royal Military Academy |
| Profession | Civil Servant |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance | Ottonian Royal Army |
| Branch/service | Quartermaster Corps |
| Years of service | 1993 - 2001 |
| Rank | Major |
| Unit | Central Logistics Office |
Director Stevan Grimmeburger (born Estevan Xose Grimmeburger Fernandus on March 11th, 1971) is an Ottonian and Draakuri government official and statesman. Prior to the South Ottonian Revolution, Grimmeburger was the deputy governor of the South Ottonian province of Draakur, second in command to Governor Ardem Wyatt. After the fall of the Royal government on the mainland, Grimmeburger became the Director of Oversight for the Emergency Transitional Administration governing in the name of Storkeneg Vitus I and as such is the de facto head of government.
Early Life & Education
Stevan Grimmeburger was born on March 11th, 1971 in Bronnsburg to Erik Grimmeburger and Sara Fernandus-Grimmeburger. Erik was an NCO in the Ottonian Royal Navy, stationed at Bronnsburg Naval Station, and Sara was a nurse, although she retired not long after to become a homemaker.
Growing up, Stevan enjoyed a middle-class lifestyle; while the family was not especially well-off, they were prosperous enough that the boy did not experience any notable privation during his childhood. As he grew, he took part in the South Ottonian Scouting Program, while also involving himself in student government organizations and finding his attention captured especially by his civics classes. While Stevan initially intended to apply to the Royal Civil Service Academy in Staalburg, mentors and Stevan's own father recommended he go through the military, since a military tenure tended to aid with networking. The driven young man was able to get into the Royal Military Academy in Waaldhuld, and matriculated there in 1989.
Royal Military Academy
While the hope of many of Stevan's mentors had been that he would be able to network while at the academy, it turned out that while Stevan was a capable student and plenty capable of handling the physical demands, his natural straight-forwardness and experiences with bullying in primary and secondary schools had left the boy with a somewhat prickly (some might say abrasive) personality: he was slow to trust, blunt and unvarnished, and naturally introverted, none of which contributed to him making many friends.
Still, in 1993, Grimmeburger graduated 146th in his class of 819, was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Ottonian Royal Army, and assigned to the Quartermaster Corps.
Military Career
Grimmeburger spent eight years in the ORA, all in the Quartermaster Corps. Grimmeburger cultivated a reputation for attention to detail, punctuality, and reliability. However, his gruff personality also hindered his upward advancement; while his organizational skills were valuable, he rubbed too many senior officers the wrong way, and he only achieved the rank of Major in the final year of his term, and it was very clear that he was unlikely to advance further by staying in. At this point, Grimmeburger opted to resume his original plan and transfer into the Royal Civil Service Bureau, effective December 31st, 2001.
Royal Civil Service Bureau
Early Career
Grimmeburger was assigned to the social policy division of the RCSB and promptly began putting his head down and working. He found himself attached to a project to produce a report about the nation's long-term security and stability.
Report on Inequality, Social Function, and National Security
The report, as it turned out, was both divisive in the government and also a surprisingly-prescient prediction of future events 15 years hence. In it, the authors, including Grimmeburger, noted that South Ottonia was experiencing dangerous levels of socioeconomic inequality, and laid out a series of corrective recommendations, including the institution of universal healthcare, social safetynets, and wage increases, among other things, most of which required an increase in public spending to course-correct. The case was made on both humanitarian/moral grounds, as well as practical ones: it was noted that these issues made the burgeoning South Ottonian underclass susceptible to socialist and republican ideas.
However, due to the political unpopularity of the recommended fixes with the Ottonian Senate and the South Ottonian ruling class, the report never reached the Storkeneg, and most of those who'd authored the report found their careers at the RCSB stalled or functionally ended. Grimmeburger, never much of a political animal, was no exception, and found himself ousted from the Onneria bureau and unceremoniously reassigned to the backwater Royal Authority on Draakur.
Wyatt Governorship
As many of his compatriots were being reassigned to dead-end duties or drummed out of the Civil Service entirely, Grimmeburger gained the attention of an unlikely patron, the newly-appointed Royal Governor of Draakur, Ardem Wyatt. Wyatt requested Grimmeburger, now squarely out of favor, be transferred to the Royal Authority of Draakur in Wyatt's administration.
Back on his home soil, Grimmeburger set about doing his best to reward the career lifeline Wyatt offered, working hard in the Governor's administration and steadily rising through the ranks, becoming the Governor's Chief of Staff in 2015, and eventually receiving an appointment to be the Deputy Governor in 2018. In practice, due to Wyatt's advancing age, the Deputy Governorship was de facto a co-Governorship, as Grimmeburger was often called on to discharge the regular duties of office and handle much of the day-to-day administration alongside a close-knit staff that had worked together more-or-less-consistently (with occasional new additions) over the past decade or so.
Emergency Transitional Administration
The result of the unusual power structure on Draakur was that, when the South Ottonian Revolution began to snowball out of control in March of 2022, Wyatt and Grimmeburger agreed that protestors on Draakur needed to be handled differently than how the government and state security forces had handled them on the mainland; with the sympathies of the Draakuri Home Guard unclear, the strategy would need to be to avoid the outbreak of violence entirely if at all possible.
To that end, Wyatt 'fell ill' (it is believed in some circles that he feigned the illness to give cover to empower Grimmeburger's ensuing actions), empowering the Lieutenant Governor to negotiate with the Popular Front of Draakur and deescalate the situation. These negotiations resulted in a plan to reorganize the government of Draakur, giving a place to the Popular Fronters to help guide reforms that both sides agreed were sorely needed.
The new government, integrating the RAD and the Popular Front, was dubbed the Emergency Transitional Administration. Though Wyatt was still nominally the head of the administration, Grimmeburger was established as the de facto leader, the Director of Oversight & Compliance. When the Ottonian royal family fled to Draakur later that month, Grimmeburger communicated the new arrangement to Storkeneg Rodrik and his son, negotiating with them about a new power-sharing arrangement and the status of the old government that had fled the mainland.
Once its status had been confirmed, the ETA set about negotiating a ceasefire with FOR and rebel forces and organizing the evacuation of remaining South Ottonian loyalists from the mainland. Once the hostilities had been concluded, Grimmeburger and company moved onto enacting a suite of reforms aimed at delivering on the promises of the Popular Front negotiations as well as correcting the systemic inequalities that had precipitated the South Ottonian Revolution in the first place.
Since then, following the abdication of Storkeneg Rodrik and the coronoation of Storkeneg Vitus, while Grimmeburger and Vitus nominally share power, Grimmeburger has in practice been the public face and apparent primary decision-maker in the active Draakuri government.
Personal Life
Grimmeburger is not believed to have any living immediate family. He was an only child, and his parents passed away in the early 2000s; furthermore, he has never been in a publicly-known romantic relationship, and consequently has no known children. He is not known to be close with any of his extended family.
Although Grimmeburger largely uses an Allamunicized version of his name in public and professional use, he is known to speak Draakuri as a co-first language with Allamunnic, and reportedly also is fluent, if non-native, in Eonese, and conversational in Ghantish.
Religiously, Grimmeburger appears to be an agnostic, having generally declined to comment on his religious beliefs with any specificity, and usually expressing views along the lines that "whatever higher power there is seems to mostly leave [humanity] to our own devices." This is believed to be an influence on Grimmeburger's expressed preference for governments to be secular in nature.
Political Views
Although Grimmeburger has typically guarded his personal views, it is believed, based on his history as part of the RCSB and statements made in public and to other officials that Grimmeburger is a liberal social democrat, with republican, socialist, and Draakuri Nationalist sympathies.