The second day of this little Hohenzollern Festival, which happened by chance in Berlin, was less lively. No fewer than four appeals proceedings in cases brought by the Prince of Prussia against journalists and historians were heard in a marathon session in front of the Chamber Court on Thursday. Another five are still pending, the judge said.
The first ended in a fiasco for the Hohenzollern lawyer, Markus Hennig. The fact that the prince was “happy to complain,” as a journalist had written in a Verdi magazine, cannot be dismissed out of hand, and is also covered by the right to express one’s opinion. But the second calling was more important. This was about a statement that the historian Stephan Malinowski made in an interview with a journalist for Deutsche Welle. Malinowski had expressed reservations that, in his opinion, the Hohenzollern wanted to publicly finance research into their family history. It was about details of the family museum that the family wanted to set up. Hohenzollern attorney Hennig agreed to drop the lawsuit after Malinowski said he would not repeat it. Both parties share the procedural costs.
Had the judge been present at the book launch the night before, she might have decided differently
In the third case, the court joined the Hohenzollern-friendly district court in Berlin, which had granted the prince’s lawyer. There Hennig had obtained an injunction against the “Open Knowledge Foundation” association, which had written that the Hohenzollern private archives were not publicly accessible. Hennig had found plenty of evidence that these archives were indeed publicly accessible.
If the judge had been present at the book presentation the previous evening, she might have decided differently: In the presence of the prince, Lothar Machtan had raved about the picturesque details of his finds in the attic of the Hechingen Hohenzollern Castle. Whether one would like to see a “private archive” in an attic with important artefacts is certainly a matter of opinion – these parts of the locks are hardly publicly accessible, however.
In the fourth appeal, the court decided on an injunction that lawyer Henning had obtained against the parliamentary manager of the Green parliamentary group in the Berlin House of Representatives. Here, too, the Prince of Prussia suffered a defeat.