“The second time as farce”: the bizarre Reichsbürger plot in Germany

“History occurs twice, once as tragedy, the second time as farce”. As much as I despise everything Karl Marx stood for, the quote is quite apt.[*]

In what is said to be the largest operation of its kind in the German Federal Republic, police working with the Verfassungsschutz [“protection of the Constitution”, i.e., the German domestic intelligence service] stopped a bizarre, Quixotic plot to seize the Reichstag building and install an obscure aristocrat as the new German Kaiser (emperor).

The instigators belong to a small-ish (about 50,000 people all told) movement called the Reichsbürgerbewegung (Reich citizens movement). Its adherents claim the Kaiserreich or Second Reich never formally ceased to exist, and hence the current Federal Republic is an illegitimate state usurping sovereignty over Germany. (This echoes arguments by conservative German nationalists about the Weimar Republic, which tragically led many — but by no means all! — to make common cause with the emerging National Socialist German Workers Party and its infinitely-damned Führer.) The movement is superficially similar to the French Légitimistes of old (who considered the French Republic illegitimate and the House of Bourbon the legitimate rulers of France) and their Spanish Carlist counterparts.

There is apparently a small cottage industry issuing identity cards and passports of this claimed-extant, but actually defunct, “German Reich”:

Note the use of the old black-white-red Reichsflagge colors. An actual German ID would look something like this:

while an actual passport would look like the one on the left:

[More in German, in a newsletter of the German federal police, article titled “Just troublemakers or enemies of the Constitution” Nur Querulanten oder Feinde der Verfassung?]

This movement has been a (somewhat obscure) “thing” for decades, and appears to occasionally cross the line from silly pseudo-administrative cosplaying into true “Verfassungswidrig” (counter-constitutional) activities. There is some crossover with neo-Nazi groups, but the two movements are apparently distinct.

While I fully understand hypervigilance about a resurgent authoritarianism in a country that is still trying to live down the poisonous legacy of National Socialism, I am not afraid we are going to see anytime soon a new Kaiserreich, let alone goose-stepping pickle-helmeted[**] soldiers marching across Europe.

[*] It comes from an essay called “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (i.e., who would later crown himself Napoleon III). The ‘tragedy’ from the quote was the original 18th Brumaire coup which brought General Napoleon Bonaparte to power, on 9 November 1799, or 18 Brumaire Year VIII in the short-lived French Revolutionary Calendar; the ‘farce’ referred to his nephew Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte granting himself dictatorial powers in 1851. (He would crown himself Emperor Napoleon III the next year.)

[**] The point of the Pickelhaube was defense against sabres of cavalrists – thwart the blade as it swooped down on the head of the soldier. When in WW I shrapnel proved much deadlier than anything Hussars or cuirassiers could do, the Pickelhaube was replaced by the iconic “coal-scuttle” Stahlhelm.