In 1981, Steiner entered the
German Foreign Office. As a young political officer in
Prague in the summer of 1989, he won plaudits for his handling of a refugee crisis that helped lead to the fall of the
Berlin Wall. As hundreds of
East Germans surrounded his embassy grounds, asking for asylum and
West German citizenship, he helped some of them over the wall himself, onto the embassy grounds, which were West German territory. Then he worked to negotiate a deal to allow the East Germans to leave the embassy and go to the West. During his career with the German government, Steiner served as head of the liaison office for German humanitarian aid in
Zagreb, made his mark in the 1990s working with the so-called
Contact Group of nations monitoring the
Yugoslav wars (of which Germany was a member), and as head of the co-ordination unit for multilateral peace efforts. He also led the special section "International Peace Efforts in Yugoslavia" from 1994 to 1995. Steiner served nearly six months (January–July 1997) as
principal deputy to
Carl Bildt, the first
High Representative in
Sarajevo,
Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1998, while serving as Germany's ambassador in Prague, he was plucked by Chancellor
Gerhard Schröder to work in the chancellor's office as his foreign and security policy adviser. And in 2001 he was forced to resign after the so-called "". In December 2001 he was appointed a head of the
United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo by
UN Secretary General,
Kofi Annan. He was the third special representative of the secretary general for Kosovo since UNMIK was established in 1999. He followed
Hans Haekkerup of Denmark and
Bernard Kouchner of France, and was replaced by
Harri Hermani Holkeri of Finland on 8 July 2003. From April 2010 to March 2012, Steiner served as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan for the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In March 2012 Steiner was pronounced new ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to India. On 20 July 2012, he hosted a festive ceremony at his residence in the honour of
Zubin Mehta to acknowledge his outstanding contribution in the field of classical music. ==Personal life==