At the end of a winding country road, about an hour south of Berlin, stands a sign proclaiming: ‘Welcome to the Kingdom of Germany.’ I scan the horizon for fairytale castles, oompah bands and tables groaning beneath beer and bratwurst, but there’s little to see here beyond a cluster of slightly drab buildings. Since 1918, when Wilhelm II, the last Kaiser, was driven into exile, most Germans have assumed that they lived in a republic, but today a new and unsettling kind of ‘monarchy’ is taking root.
The Kingdom, headquartered in a former chicken-canning factory near the small town of Wittenberg, issues its own currency, passports and driving licences, and contends that the ‘other’ Germany – the federal state established after World War II – is a gigantic confidence trick that has cheated the country’s near 85 million people out of their birthright.
In recent years, several other breakaway mini-states have sprung up around Germany, and the number of people joining them is soaring. Many members of the Reichsbürger [Citizens of the Reich] movement are united in wanting to dissolve modern Germany entirely and rebuild the old Imperial state, created in 1871, often intent on placing a new Kaiser at the helm, too. But their manifesto goes beyond a romantic harking back to pomp and ceremony, and into what many see as
