The march of Germany’s extreme monarchists

The far right in Germany isn’t all angry young men with shaved heads, baseball bats and black boots. There are those who appear respectable, even intellectual. The Reichsbürger movement includes accountants, teachers and academics; many members are middle-aged. It’s a fractured network with vastly diverging world views, united in their belief that the current government is illegitimate.  

The Reichsbürgers claim that the German empire was not legally abolished when it collapsed at the end of the first world war and that it therefore continues to exist. To them, the so-called November Revolution of 1918, in which Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate, ending the German monarchy, was a coup without legal basis. The governments that followed – beginning with the Weimar Republic and ending with today’s parliamentary democracy – have no right to exist. Today’s Bundestag can therefore be overthrown without qualms, even with violence if necessary. While this kind of extremism is still rare, there has long been residual monarchism in Germany.