Before anyone underestimates the importance of Coburg for the course of the world: Michael Selzer thinks you don’t have to exaggerate insubordinately to arrive at the thesis that the Christmas tree would not be widespread around the world at Christmas time without the residence town in Upper Franconia. Why? Selzer, Head of Projects in Coburg, explains it like this: Prince Albert, the husband of King Victoria, introduced this tradition from his Franconian-Thuringian homeland to the royal family. And introducing something to the royal family also meant: to the British Isles, from there to the United Kingdom and so on. Why does it smell so wonderfully of conifers in the rooms across continents in December? Ask in Coburg!
So far for the time being the big and good from Coburg, now for the sobering. Charles III, the great-great-great-grandson of Coburg’s Prince Consort Albert, is coming to Germany at the end of the month and will visit a total of three federal states during the state visit: Berlin, Brandenburg and Hamburg, as the Federal President recently announced. Now perhaps not everyone knows that Coburg chose the country to which it wanted to belong in the future relatively late. But the fact that the people of Coburg did not vote for a union with Hamburg, Brandenburg or even Berlin in 1919 should be common knowledge. Coburg has been part of Bavaria for over 100 years – and no, the Federal President did not name this federal state as the king’s destination. Which means, as tough as it may seem there: nothing Coburg.
But isn’t the man rooted there? And didn’t you just recently? in the big series about the historical world leader Victoria on Arte where the word “Coburg” was even more common than “Christmas tree”? Already. And it’s also true that Michael Selzer, the man for Coburg Events, only had an animated chat with Charles four years ago. The occasion was a reception given by the British ambassador in Berlin. Coburg’s deputy mayor had strategically positioned herself on the carpet, and so the Franconian delegation struck up a conversation with the man who was not yet king at the time. It goes without saying that he was invited to Franconia, initially for the Albert anniversary in 2019, Selzer recalls. “I really want to try to come,” Charles replied.
Now it must be mentioned that he knows Franconia well. In 1987, as Coburg chroniclers know, the Crown Prince visited Bayreuth and used the following day to briefly visit Schloss Rosenau near Coburg, where his great-great-grandfather Albert von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha was born in 1819. But hardly anyone really noticed the visit of the Prince of Wales at the time, it was rather semi-official. Now as king, an inaugural visit, that would have been something completely different.
The city had officially invited him. So why won’t that happen? It’s like this: after two world wars, court reporters weren’t the only ones to recognize the cool distance between the British royal family and the German dynasties. Coburg, of course, was hit particularly hard by the ban, as the noble house there had distinguished itself in an inglorious way, in the brown period of all times.
Does that still matter? You don’t know, they say in Coburg. But he invited the king as a precaution for the opening of the Globe Theater, the interim location of the Landestheater. The Globe is also intended to indicate Coburg’s connection to the island, albeit in this case more to Shakespeare than to Charles.