The Prussian prince, the compensation claim and the humble pie

With the weekend approaching, here’s my recipe for hot Prussian humble pie. Take an imperial fortune, mix it with a pound of chutzpah, douse with brown sauce, cover with a thin crust of ambivalence and bake for 103 years.

On Wednesday evening in Berlin, 200 people showed up for a book launch that became an impromptu humble-pie-eating competition. The only contestant: Georg Friedrich, prince of Prussia, aka the man who would be kaiser.

The 45-year-old is head of the house of Hohenzollern and bears an eerie likeness to Wilhelm II, his great-great-grandfather, who was run out of office in 1918 and died in exile 80 years ago.

To Wednesday’s invited audience, Friedrich said his family had a “responsibility for working through the dark chapters of our history”. His humble tone reflected the many dark chapters in the book being launched: historian Lothar Machtan’s The Crown Prince and the Nazis.

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The crown prince of the title is Wilhelm, son of the last kaiser: a temperamental playboy who, dreaming of a restored monarchy, became a fervent Hitler fan and sported Nazi uniforms and swastika armbands in public.

Germans have a curiously detached relationship with their former imperial family – criminally overlooked by Netflix. In the post-war years they were too busy with the Nazi past, German division and unification to linger on Kaiser Wilhelm.

Historical embarrassment

He was banished to a memory hole of historical embarrassments and his Hohenzollern descendants appear occasionally in glossy magazines, photographed like exotic birds at aristocratic weddings.

Friedrich has taken a different approach. In the last decade the head of the house of Hohenzollern has campaigned in public to rehabilitate his family’s militarist reputation, in particular, the idea that they alone triggered the first World War.

In 2014, a century after that conflict began, he told The Irish Times that he "refused to be stigmatised by my past".

“We cannot choose our past,” he told me, “we have to live with Germany: the bad and the good.”

There was much good in the Hohenzollerns and their Prussian empire: the foundation for German unification in 1871; the “philosopher king” Frederick the Great stands out, with his embrace of the Enlightenment, science and the arts.

But then there is Crown Prince Wilhelm. Machtan’s new book pulls no punches, calling him a “radical anti-democrat of the extreme right variety” and “co-responsible for the birth of the Third Reich”.

After Hitler took power, even as his father pulled away from his growing extremism, Prince Wilhelm acted as an “amplifier” for the Nazi message at home and abroad. According to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, Hitler described Prince Wilhelm as a “ray of hope”.

Prince Wilhelm lobbied for Hitler in conservative circles and, after the 1933 takeover, he wrote to a friend that “the goal for which I have engaged my whole heart... has finally been achieved”.

Restitution

This all matters now because of a controversial restitution claim launched by Friedrich, prince of Prussia, based on two state agreements.

In 1926, his family and the new German state signed a settlement: the Weimar Republic retained 75 former royal properties, while the family got back another 39, including, in central Berlin, Monbijou Palace.

It was demolished by East Germany in 1959 and its exhibits nationalised. These are the main items sought by the family: the imperial crown and sceptre, now on display in Berlin’s Charlottenburg Palace, as well as the former family library and 266 paintings.

The success of this claim hinges on a second law, enacted in 1994, allowing aristocratic families to reclaim assets lost after 1945 provided the applicant or their ancestors had not “substantially aided and abetted” the Nazis.

Thus the Hohenzollern compensation claim has revived Germany’s slumbering, unfinished business with its former imperial family.

Friedrich admits his family's role in the Nazi era was "a political and moral low point"

On Wednesday evening, Machtan said the crown prince’s courtship of Hitler was “blatant” but “erratic”, but said he found no clear evidence of an “aiding-and-abetting” strategy.

“Historians can only... say how it really was on the basis of sources they have studied,” he said at the book launch. “How that is to be judged, in particular, legally... is a matter for the judiciary.”

Friedrich admits his family’s role in the Nazi era was “a political and moral low point”, a humble-pie approach that has convinced some. But the German federal government, joined by the states of Berlin and Brandenburg, dismisses his compensation claim – worth several hundred million euro – as outrageous Prussian pie in the sky.

Unless someone backs down now, a battle royal looms in the courts.