Present-day Germans have a reputation, in Britain at least, for being law-abiding, solid, even stolid citizens who generally toe the line. Like most stereotypes, this caricature is hopelessly inaccurate. Anyone surprised by last week’s foiled “coup” ignores German history and the insurrectionary exploits of one Wolfgang Kapp.
Abetted by an aristocratic soldier, Gen Walther von Lüttwitz, he launched the so-called “Kapp putsch” in 1920 against the national government in Berlin. The aim was to overthrow the Weimar Republic that replaced the Second Reich at the end of the first world war – and so avenge the mythical “stab in the back”. His putsch flopped.
Failed coups and uprisings are a German tradition, dating from the shambolic 1848 Prussian revolution to the decadent era of Babylon Berlin. Otto von Bismarck, who plotted Germany’s unification, favoured direct action. “The great questions of the time will not be resolved by speeches and majority decisions … but by iron and blood,” he famously declared in 1862.
In 1923, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler led the “Beer Hall Putsch”. It quickly collapsed – and he was charged with treason. In 1944, the leader of the Third Reich was himself the target of a planned assassination coup by disaffected officers at his Wolf’s Lair hideaway. Unfortunately, they failed, too.
The German Democratic Republic – East Germany – was founded in 1949 and foundered in 1989 in a sea of anti-communist fervour. Yet supporters of groups such as the far-right Alternative für Deutschland continue to deplore the consequences of the 1990 reunification, or even reject it outright.
Anger over east-west inequalities, migration, pandemic restrictions and, now, the German government’s support for Ukraine, stoke weekly “Monday night” protests in former East Germany. Sympathy for Moscow’s view that Ukraine is Nato’s war on Russia is rooted in cold war anti-Americanism.
Anti-establishment, anti-constitutional agitation is not confined to the east. The far-right Reichsbürger movement, whose members allegedly plotted the latest coup, believes former West Germany was a puppet state manipulated by the US. Like Wolfgang Kapp, they reject the legitimacy of today’s Berlin government.
This may sound nuts. But the Reichsbürger – literally, people of the empire – have strong connections stretching back to the far-right nationalists, revisionists, imperialists, Prussian Junkers and ultra-patriotic militarists of Bismarck’s time.
In recent years, the Reichsbürger have reportedly developed transnational links, for example to the violent US antisemitic conspiracy theorists QAnon. The common enemy is the supposed “deep state” run by globalist elites. From here, it is but a short jump to Donald Trump’s “big lie” and the abortive 2021 Capitol Hill coup.
The identification of tweedy Prince Heinrich XIII of Reuss, heir to an 800-year-old noble dynasty, as leader of last week’s plot led some commentators to dismiss the affair. Yet Heinrich and his police and army collaborators, drawing on this deeply rooted legacy of febrile if incompetent rightwing insurrectionism, symbolise a serious democratic problem reaching far beyond Berlin.
Who next after Germany and the US? Kapp that.
