Laughing in the Face of Danger
Peter Kuras
It’s easy to poke fun at Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuß. ‘The German “prince” involved in the coup plot looks like he was radicalised after being sacked from a mid-morning BBC antiques programme,’ David Broder wrote on Twitter. Zack Budryk said he ‘looks like if Wes Anderson made a movie about Bernie Madoff’. And when people weren’t making fun of his clothes, it was the absurdity of his title – every male Reuß for eight hundred years has been named Heinrich, the numbers reset either once a century or with the hundredth Heinrich, depending on the branch of the family. Or else it was the piddling size of the Reuß estate. Or the fact that Heinrich XIII is seventeenth in line to be head of his own family.
Some commentators in Germany have criticised the impulse to poke fun at the Reichsbürger (‘citizens of empire’), whose plot to overthrow the federal government was revealed last week. ‘While we were laughing at the crude, muddled and outdated ideas of the Reichsbürger,’ Alexander Jürg wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, ‘we overlooked the fact that they had begun collecting weapons and had started networking more and more with other enemies of the state.’ He isn’t wrong. Germany’s domestic intelligence service estimates that there are more Reichsbürger with possibly terroristic intent than there are potentially violent Islamists.
The biggest danger of political violence in Germany today comes from right-wing extremists. The group around Reuß was typical of the Reichsbürger in that many of its members had connections to the state security apparatus. There were enough current and former special forces, police officers and politicians that they might well have succeeded, for a while at least, in their plan to shut down large parts of Germany’s power supply and storm the Bundestag. The death toll would almost certainly have been high.
The internal security services believe there to be as many as 23,000 Reichsbürger, but say that only around 5 per cent are right-wing extremists. This is baffling. How can there be a moderate version of the claim that the peace agreement signed after the Second World War was illegitimate? What would a centrist version be of the position that German democracy is prima facie invalid, and either the National Socialists or the monarchy should be restored to power? It may be true that only a small percentage of the Reichsbürger are potentially violent terrorists, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t all right-wing extremists.
As dangerous as they may be, however, we should keep laughing at the Reichsbürger. Reuß’s beliefs are both so absurd and so terrifying that to argue against them is to grant them a dignity they don’t deserve. What do you say to someone who believes that the Rothschilds and the Freemasons were responsible for the First World War, that the British assassinated Rasputin and the US financed Hitler’s rise to power? How do you argue against someone who believes he is destined to rule because of his superior bloodline? How do you argue against people who believe they have found a legal technicality that invalidates the last seven decades of German political life?
Less criminally inclined segments of the German aristocracy (like their British counterparts) are funny too. ‘For 850 years,’ the head of the Reuß family told RTL, ‘we were a tolerant and cosmopolitan dynasty in East Germany’ – which can only be true if you overlook a couple of crusaders and a Nazi or two.
Or take the the Hohenzollern. The Franconian branch of the family has spent the last decade in a legal quest to see its property restored. The result has been a glut of historical research proving repeatedly that the family were instrumental in the Nazis’ rise to power. The head of the Swabian line meanwhile is too busy playing jazz with his band Royal Groovin’ – ‘high-carat musicians’ who provide ‘entertainment with a royal warrant’ – to concern himself with his relatives’ lawsuits.
Perhaps because the language of aristrocracy has dropped out of German public life, the recent coup attempt has been described as ‘bourgeois’ by several commentators, as if the plan hadn’t been to reinstate a system of dynastic, hereditary power based on historical military strength, which always understood itself in opposition to bourgeois economic power.
The Reichsbürger movement at first sought to reinstate the Third Reich, not the Second. The origins of the movement are usually traced to the neo-Nazi Manfred Roeder, who approached Admiral Karl Dönitz in 1975. Hitler had appointed Dönitz Reichspräsident in April 1945, and Roeder saw Dönitz as the legitimate head of the German state. Roeder was rebuffed, though that didn’t stop him from appointing himself the ‘administrator’ of the German Empire.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, the most visible representative of the movement was the former Red Army Faction lawyer Horst Mahler, who converted to right-wing extremism in prison, and laid the framework for the ‘arguments’ used by Reichsbürger today (more or less, that Hitler was a charismatic monster who charmed the innocent German people into complicity with a terrible crime; now he is gone, Germans can go back to being German).
Their views have been getting a wider airing recently. At anti-lockdown protests, the flag of Imperial Germany flew alongside posters advocating homeopathic medicine, while speakers who called the efficacy of vaccines into question were followed by speakers who relativised the Holocaust.
The terrorist intent of the plot that Reuß allegedly masterminded is no laughing matter. Right-wing extremists represent a serious and growing threat in Germany, as elsewhere. The rage-fuelled bundling of disparate ideologies has strong overtones of the Nazi era. There are good reasons to be very concerned. But neither earnest argument nor passionate condemnation stands much chance against the anger that motivates the Reichsbürger. Laughter might. Whatever the upcoming investigations reveal, it already seems clear that Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuß is a terrible man, but also a deeply laughable one. Mocking him is a political duty.
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