Let us start, as we sadly must, with the po-faced but necessary stipulation that of course all attempted coups to abolish democracy are bad, and illegal, and that for better or ill, efforts to change the constitution or governance of countries should be done democratically, and not through glorious force of arms.
That said, surely one must have some little tingle of appreciation for a plot so daring, and – from a certain point of view, noble – as this:
Twenty-five people have been arrested in raids across Germany on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government.
The group of far-right and ex-military figures are said to have prepared to storm the parliament building, the Reichstag, and seize power.
A minor aristocrat described as Prince Heinrich XIII, 71, is alleged to have been central to their plans.
According to federal prosecutors, he is one of two alleged ringleaders among those arrested across 11 German states.
The German Monarchy was abolished in 1918, when the third and last Emperor of Germany, William II, abdicated his throne and fled to the Netherlands at the end of the First World War. In the intervening 104 years, Germany has gone from being a Republic, to a Nazi dictatorship, to a divided country under Communist rule on one side and American supervision on the other, and only recently back to united Federal Republic. Because “Germany” as a theoretical entity has been around so long, it is often forgotten that the country we know as Germany today is just over thirty years old, and democracy is still a fantastically new concept for many Germans. If you live in East Germany, for example, then out of the 122 years since 1900, only 47 of them have been lived in a democracy. In historical terms, that’s less than the blink of an eyelid.
In other words, it probably should not be as shocking as it sounds that there remain those who believe in, and desire, other forms of Government.
The BBC reports that the Government’s claim – which has yet to be tested in court and should accordingly be treated with caution – is that the conspirators were motivated by a “far right” Qanon-adjacent desire to overthrow the Government and rescue Germany from the “deep state”, which is certainly possible. But bear in mind that the German Government itself has also been involved – as Ben revealed just a few weeks ago – in actively stoking these views:
At least some of the accounts are involved in actively promoting the extremist views in question, with the report claiming that one agent emphasised the need to “feed this bubble” of radical ideology.
The content posted includes not only “far-right” and “neo-Nazi” material, however. German authorities have also been behind far-Left, anti-vaxx and Islamic jihadist accounts issuing radical posts. They have even run accounts espousing the views of “Reich Citizens” – a term used to describe individuals who reject the legitimacy of the modern German state.
In other words, German law enforcement has not just been monitoring these people, but actively encouraging them. It will certainly be interesting to see if that issue comes up at any future trial.
It is hard to take this story seriously as a major threat to the German State, however. It is not immediately clear that this attempt would even have won the support of committed German monarchists – of whom there remain many. The proposed Emperor, this Heinrich fellow, has no claim to the German Throne. That claim rests with George Friedrich, the present head of the House of Hohenzollern. George Friedrich, sadly for Monarchists, is something of a liberal dilettante, and unlikely to support efforts to restore his family to power. He doesn’t even sport an appropriately Prussian Mustache.
And so, it all seems just sort of enjoyably wacky. What did they think would happen, had they successfully executed phase one of their plan, and deposed the German Government in Berlin?
The point I make above about the legitimacy of the Hohenzollerns might seem silly, but it’s not silly in the context of a coup: Any militarily installed “German Emperor” would of course, at the very minimum, need to be seen to have a legitimate claim to the title if he or she were to have even the slightest, smallest chance of gaining the acceptance of the German public. In reality, every German noble house would have immediately denounced the “Emperor” as a fraud, for both democratic and dynastic reasons. It’s much harder to call yourself “German Emperor” if the actual claimant to that title says you’re a fraud.
And of course, then there’s the EU, NATO, and the international community. Long gone are the days when a country’s coups are its own business, at least in Europe. Long before the EU was even a fever dream, all of Europe united against the French Revolution, and Napoleon. They would have done the same here, economically and diplomatically.
The story has received relatively little attention, and that surprises me – a serious plan for a coup in an EU country is virtually unheard of, and virtually impossible. For these fellows to have gotten as far as they apparently did is, in its own way, sort of remarkable.
But alas, those of us who wish to see the Kaiser restored will have to continue to wait for the German people to do that democratically. The days of installing a claimant by force are gone.