The German conspiracists yearning for a king The rise of the Reichsbürgers tells an alarming tale

Although standard Anglosphere rabbit-hole stuff is often mixed in — QAnon, Bill Gates is the devil, etc — the Reichsbürger are, at core, a uniquely German phenomenon. One aspect is their hatred of the modern technocratic state. As someone who has run a small business here, I have a certain amount of sympathy. German bureaucracy — its endless paper forms, its hyper-complex procedures, its myriad fees and taxes — can deaden your soul, drive you crazy, and make you shout “enough!” Several Reichsbürger groups print their own German Reich passports and banknotes, and refuse to pay taxes and social insurance contributions. It’s no wonder these groups are founded by and followed by Germans who have been burned by what they perceive as an oppressive, corrupt state that fails to protect their welfare, such as in the vast economic turmoil in eastern Germany in the aftermath of unification.

A lesser-known but still pivotal aspect of German yearning for a Kaiser is its New-Agey side. It’s no coincidence that the Reichsbürger group included an astrologer. During a protest against the government’s restrictive Covid policies in 2020, hundreds of Reichsbürger rushed up the steps of the Reichstag. It was a strange foreshadowing of the events at the US Capitol the following January. Among the flags of the Second Reich were Russian banners, rainbow flags, even signs with Donald Trump’s face. And it was a young woman with dreadlocks — a self-proclaimed alternative healer — who triggered the spontaneous stampede when she called from the demonstration’s stage for protestors to march up the parliament’s steps and take back “their house”.

The pandemic was a unifying moment for Germany’s discontented. A new anti-Covid movement, the Querdenker (literally lateral thinkers), managed to bring together everyone from Holocaust deniers to natural healers to normal people who felt their livelihoods had been shattered by the government’s heavy-handed approach to the pandemic. The alliance between esoteric types and retro-monarchists caught the mainstream off-guard — but perhaps it shouldn’t have. Already two centuries ago, exploration of the occult — the mystical and irrational — was wedded to a desire for national German consciousness. At the start of the 19th century, nationalism among the dozens of tiny German-speaking states was largely a reaction to Napoleonic occupation, with imported French rationalism and universalism seen as an alien threat to the German Volksgeist. Thinkers instead embraced Germanic mythology, folk tales and mediaeval alchemy. Painters such as the Romantic Caspar David Friedrich explored mystical, sublime German landscapes, while the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte embedded the love of the natural and the mystical in German nationalist thinking: the “natural” became synonymous with the “national”.

Over the 19th and early 20th centuries, this embrace of the “natural” by German subcultures stood for resistance against various “artificial”, “foreign” or “un-German” forces. Nudism, organic agriculture, homoeopathy, the wide-reaching work of philosopher Rudolf Steiner — these are some of the not-so-sinister outshoots of this stream of anti-modern thought. But Romantic anti-modernism also birthed the völkisch ideology of the Nazis that saw Jews as “unnatural” non-humans who had to be cut out of the “pure” German body politic.

It’s uncanny to see this current rear its head again among the Reichsbürger and affiliated conspiracy-based subcultures, which range from the AfD leadership who refuse to support the German national football team because it’s too ethnically diverse to far-Right back-to-the-land types who wear felt jackets and try to set up kindergartens blending esoteric Waldorf and völkisch thought.

Indeed, it is mostly outside of Germany’s large, cosmopolitan cities that these movements take root. Self-declared mini-countries are home to these ideas, sometimes headed by cosplaying middle-aged dudes with skullets. Peter Fitzek is but one example — before crowning himself as King Peter I of Germany in 2012, he ran a shop filled with New-Agey knickknacks in Wittenberg, coincidently where another German radical, Martin Luther, nailed his 95 Theses to a church door 500 years prior. Fitzek’s humble business of peddling dreamcatchers has long since morphed into a cultish make-believe monarchy with various properties that have seceded from the Republic and joined the new Reich. Financed by eager volunteers and believers, Fitzek’s fantasy state, “the Kingdom of Germany”, has its own currency, the Engel (Angel). Euros can be exchanged for Angels but not vice versa — ensuring an inflow of hard currency, a trick Fitzek surely copied from the former rulers of this territory, the German Democratic Republic. Fitzek’s “state” also has its own passport, which he claims he has travelled around the world with.

At some point, though, the game’s up for guys like Reuss and Fitzek. The site of Fitzek’s “Kingdom of Germany” was raided by police and fiscal authorities in June. Fitzek is totally upfront about his tax evasion. At some point he’ll be locked up like Reuss, but perhaps martyrdom is what he’s looking for.

One thing all these people seem to agree on is a hatred of the United States and a belief that Russia is the natural partner of the German people. Prosecutors allege Prince Heinrich’s group had contact with Russian diplomats and the Russian biker gang Night Wolves. Reuss counted on Russian support for his Reich, while Russia perhaps considered using his gang for its sabotage and misinformation purposes.

On one level, there’s something rather pathetic about middle-aged to elderly men wearing homemade crowns and declaring silly little independent states in shabby old buildings in forgotten villages and small towns, often in the former east. It reeks of a loss of purpose in a society subjected to rapid technological and economic change — perceived to be increasingly dominated by American technology and American-style capitalism. The irony escapes these groups that it is the platforms of Silicon Valley that have empowered them to spread their message to their flock.

Germany’s mainstream media pundits and experts on the far-Right warn that we shouldn’t just dismiss the Reichsbürger around Reuss as some crazy, harmless old men. After all, they had plenty of weapons and a handful of ex-army officers who knew how to fire them. If they’d summoned the gusto to carry it, the Reuss group’s alleged plan to kidnap Scholz would have certainly failed.

For me, the story of the Reichsbürger tells an even more disturbing tale. They’re the canary in the coalmine pointing to a greater threat than an individual gang of wannabe putschists. It points to a country whose civil fabric is fraying at the edges. Whose sense of shared reality is fragmented into a thousand irrational, naive and antisemitic narratives. A country that is losing the plot. A country that’s yearning for that one strong leader who will bring everything together after the collapse

On my jog along the railway tracks in the north of Berlin this morning, I encountered a middle-aged man slowly, intentionally approaching a tree and then embracing it for several minutes. Harmless enough, right? You never know. Maybe he’s dreaming of becoming the next king of Germany.

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Maurice Frank co-founded the English magazine Exberliner and now co-writes the newsletter 20 Percent Berlin. 

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