On 28 January 1919, in Munich, the sociologist Max Weber gave his lecture Politik als Beruf, politics as a vocation. It contains this sentence: Die Politik bedeutet ein starkes langsames Bohren von harten Brettern mit Leidenschaft und Augenmaß zugleich. Politics means a strong, slow drilling through hard boards, with passion and a sense of proportion at the same time. German politicians quote it often. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier used it on 16 November 2015, when he presented the Federal Cross of Merit to two diplomats. In 2011 the writer Alexander Kluge called a book of 133 political stories Das Bohren harter Bretter, the drilling of hard boards.
In everyday speech the boards have changed. Many Germans say dicke Bretter bohren, to drill thick boards. A Protestant news site wrote in 2014 that many politicians describe their work as das Bohren dicker Bretter, and a FAZ review of Kluge’s book spoke of Webers Wort vom Bohren dicker Bretter. Weber wrote hard boards, not thick ones.