Stephan Malinowski’s book “The Hohenzollern and the Nazis” – Culture

On the night of January 30, 1933, Oberwachtmeister Josef Zauritz and SA leader Hans Maikowski, who had been at the head of the notorious “Murder Storm 33”, were shot in Berlin. The wake of thousands of SA men in Charlottenburg culminated in a spectacular funeral service in the Berlin Cathedral. It was staged as a state funeral; The new Chancellor Adolf Hitler also took part, in whose cabinet the NSDAP was still dependent on the support of the DNVP and non-party exponents of the political right. Hundreds of members of the police, Stahlhelm, SA and SS stood in line. Hitler took a seat in the front row. A prominent representative of the Hohenzollern family, Crown Prince Wilhelm Prince of Prussia, sat there during the service. The celebration was broadcast live on the radio and was included in the propaganda film “Germany awakes” in the same year.

Stephan Malinowski’s book “The Hohenzollern and the Nazis. History of a Collaboration”, which will be published on Monday and which describes and comments on this scene, was eagerly awaited. In 2014, the author wrote an “Expert report on the political behavior of the former Crown Prince Wilhelm Prince of Prussia (1882-1951)” on behalf of the Brandenburg State Government. The question of whether this had “made a significant contribution” to the establishment and consolidation of the National Socialist regime was put on the agenda by the Hohenzollern family’s demands for compensation for expropriations by the Soviet occupying power between 1945 and 1949. According to the Compensation Act of 1994, the claims are only promising if the question is answered in the negative. Malinowski had said yes. Other experts saw in the crown prince an insignificant, politically conceptless, marginal figure incapable of consistent action. In the end, it is not the historians who have to make a final decision, but the judges at the Potsdam Administrative Court.

The loss of power led to the radicalization of the German nobility

Malinowski, born in Berlin in 1966, has been teaching European history at the University of Edinburgh since 2012. Since his study “From King to Leader. Social Decline and Political Radicalization in the German Nobility between the Empire and the Nazi State” (2003), he has been considered one of the best experts on the history of the nobility in Germany after the revolution of 1918/19. In this book, however, the Hohenzollerns did not play the main role, and his report from 2014 was, as required, focused on the Crown Prince, the eldest son of Emperor Wilhelm II, who had gone into exile in Holland.

His new book continues the thesis of radicalization in the German aristocracy, born of a loss of power, and broadens the view of the Hohenzollern family as a whole, over several generations. The emperor in his exile in Doorn and his second wife Hermine, the Crown Prince, who returned to Germany in 1923 through Gustav Stresemann’s mediation from the Dutch island of Wieringen, and his brothers and their children become visible as an aristocratic network, including rivalries and disagreements.

From the loss of power at the end of the First World War over the years of the fundamental opposition to the Weimar Republic, the presentation progresses to the public appearances and non-public interventions in the years of the establishment of the Nazi regime. This is where it centered, especially in 1932 and 1933, before tracing the loss of importance associated with the consolidation of the Nazi state, which is only slowly followed by parting with the illusions of power participation. Malinowski emphatically denies the thesis put forward by some historians that the Hohenzollern formed a kind of conservative opposition in the Nazi state or even through Louis Ferdinand Prince of Prussia, one of the sons of the Crown Prince, who participated in the resistance against Hitler and in the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 had.

He looks at the period from 1945 to today primarily from the point of view of how the Hohenzollern people appear as historians of themselves. Here he brings the discussion with his Hohenzollern-friendly colleagues, which he previously mentioned in the footnotes, into the main text. And he becomes a contemporary historian on his own account when he takes stock of the tendency of the current Hohenzollern to complain to journalists and historians.

The story includes shady impostors, refused duels and anachronistic obsessions

In this book, Malinowski underpins and orchestrates the historical judgment of his report from 2014. Nevertheless, it is addressed to the general public and presents the wealth of actors and details, including shady impostors, refused duels and anachronistic obsessions, in a consistently clear perspective. The focus is not on the collaboration with the Nazis, which the book bears in the title, but on their foundation, the anti-republicanism of the Hohenzollern. It is older than the Crown Prince’s election call for Hitler in 1932, older than the entry of his brother August Wilhelm Prince of Prussia into the NSDAP and SA, older than the support of the NS state by Crown Princess Cecilie as patron of the Queen Luise Federation, older than the appearance of the Crown Prince at the “Day of Potsdam” in March 1933. It is as old as the republic itself.

The Hohenzollern’s hatred of the republic is more important to Malinowski than the history of the compensation debate, the regulation of the handling of their property ratified by the Prussian state parliament in 1926, and the failed referendum to expropriate the princes in the same year. He followed more extensively the self-integration of the Hohenzollern into the multitude of actors who committed themselves to the counterrevolution and the struggle against the republic in the Weimar Republic. He does not forget to mention that the ex-Kaiser had sparkling wine uncorked when he found out about the murder of the “fulfillment politician” Matthias Erzberger.

Insignia, symbols and rituals are just as important to him as written sources. He does not withhold the discrediting of the emperor and his son, the crown prince, in the eyes of the old Prussian nobility and other conservatives through their flight from the revolution in which they left the army. The idea of ​​the Hohenzollern that the fight against the republic could – in alliance with the National Socialists – lead to a restitution of the monarchy, he makes appear a tenacious illusion. At the same time, however, he rightly objects to the trivialisation of the Hohenzollern’s contribution to the destruction of the republic, which has occasionally flared up in the current discussion. At the center of this trivialization is the image of Crown Prince Wilhelm as a womanizer, bon vivant and political dilettante.

“The collaborator is not a minor figure, but the basis of the Nazi dictatorship.”

The most important instrument with which Malinowski confronts this image, strangely enough, comes from the standard arsenal of monarchical thought. In this the core idea of ​​kingship through a weak king on the throne is not affected. Malinowski applied this thought to the Hohenzollerns and especially to the emperor in exile and the crown prince as crown pretender. He systematically differentiates between their “person”, the empirical individual, and the “figure” in public space, whose charisma cannot completely evaporate because of their name. The reference to the study “The Two Bodies of the King” by Ernst Kantorowicz, which deals with medieval monarchy and its salvation-historical foundation, is less convincing than the practical consequence. It consists in bridging the history of ideology of the Hohenzollern, their anti-republican attitudes and monarchical illusions to the history of the media.

The self-staged home stories, interviews and other depictions in photos and in newspaper articles that Malinowski found during his research make the Hohenzollern people appear as “media princes” whose images are increasingly interspersed with swastikas as they become more radical and open to the right. The stubborn, unreal and increasingly drastic anti-Semitic traits that the exiled emperor Wilhelm II assumed until his death in 1941 are balanced out by subsequent generations who pose as modern leaders. One advantage of bridging the gap to media history is that the voices of contemporaries have their say, showing that the activities to bring the Stahlhelm and SA together were widely recognized, as was the role of the Hohenzollerns as mediators between conservative elites and National Socialists, to their rhetoric heard the criticism of the “degenerate” nobility.

The hopes for a restitution of the monarchy through an alliance with National Socialism were illusionary, but not anachronistic. As Malinowski clearly shows, their model was the coexistence of Duce and König in Italian fascism. He documents in detail the “advertising activity” of the Hohenzollern in the time of the onset of terror after January 30, 1933 and the fire in the Reichstag at the end of February, the objections to the “anti-German atrocity propaganda” addressed to the American public. The excesses of violence of the Nazi state, to which Kurt von Schleicher, the crown prince’s duo friend, also fell victim, did not endanger the rapprochement of the Hohenzollerns towards National Socialism.

Apart from August Wilhelm Prince of Prussia and Hermine, the emperor’s second wife in exile, no one belonged to the hard core of the Nazis, writes Malinowski in the final chapter – and adds that the National Socialists would not have been able to prevail without collaborating groups at the end of the Weimar Republic : “The collaborator is not a minor figure, but the basis of the Nazi dictatorship.” It almost sounds like disappointment when Malinowski describes the Hohenzollern’s “counter-charisma” as a real but untapped potential: “The family has repeatedly used this resource for its own interests, but not against the Nazi regime.”

The more the Crown Prince’s political actions were researched in the course of the compensation debate, the more the aura of his nullity disappeared. The historian Christopher Clark, who denied the “feed” question in his report and later dubbed the Crown Prince as a “bottle”, has since revised his judgment. He was said to have been “an influential actor” in the smashing of the Weimar Republic. Malinowski corroborates this finding with a wealth of evidence and places the Crown Prince in the context of his family and the German counter-revolution since 1918/19. Legally, the “feed” question remains unanswered for the time being. Anyone who pleads for “no” in the judgment has a strong opponent in this book.

Stephan Malinowski: The Hohenzollern and the Nazis. Story of a collaboration. Propylaen Verlag, Berlin 2021. 752 pages, 35 euros.