by Andrew Eames
‘Where are you going to go?’
‘We usually have a round of mini golf just down the hill here. It’s just one of our little routines. He’s always been competitive – he gets quite cross when he misses his putts and accuses me of trying to get him to take the Lord’s name in vain. Which of course I am.’
‘Is that what he wants to do – mini golf?’ It was hard to visualize: a monk desperate to get his hands on a putter.
‘Usually we end up in the nearest McDonald’s, too.’
I couldn’t hide a look of surprise. ‘You’re joking?’
‘No, we really do. McDonald’s represents a moment of freedom. Something a little bit naughty. And we loved McDonald’s when we were kids, it’s what we have in common. God knows, there’s not a lot else.’
I took my time over my drink, and then sauntered downhill to the monastery church. Dressed as I was in lycra cycling shorts, I didn’t feel entirely comfortable going inside, but there was no congregation amongst the high baroque, with its fulsome confection of pink-and-white marble pillars, frescoed ceilings, robed saints, flamboyant stucco ogees and pediments and cherubs. If it wasn’t painted, then it’d be gilded, and even the organ pipes were topped and tailed with gold. It wasn’t the sort of place to find peace of mind with all that ornamentation screaming at you. I found it an indecent display of wealth, but in case there is a God, I knelt in a pew and thanked Him for my Donaueschingen bicycle experience, and I asked for the Fuerteventura one to be taken into consideration too, just in case; I wouldn’t want to be thought of as ungrateful. After all, even the Muslims have a saying: ‘Trust in Allah, and tie your camel to the tree.’
Sigmaringen turned out to be a jovial, intimate town, with lots of pavement cafés clustered round a jagged knuckle of rock towering above the river. Its streets were busy with students and soldiers on leave from the Tenth Panzer Division, whose barracks were sufficiently nearby to keep Gaby’s Exotic Cabaret in business. The Danube did a tight right turn around the town, and the jumble of streets at all angles and gradients would have been confusing were it not for the Hohenzollern castle rising above everything, the cock of the rock, a helpful way of getting one’s bearings. In fact this was just one of several Hohenzollern properties, with another even bigger castle not far to the north at Hechingen, but this one at least had a Hohenzollern in residence, while the Hechingen castle was the official, unlived in, family seat.
There’s Hohenzollern memorabilia all over town, recording the passing of each noble benefactor. An equestrian statue of Leopold von Hohenzollern in the main square, and a fountain presented by the Hohenzollerns in the pedestrianized centre, with copper figures holding flowers, shielding fires, cutting corn and presenting grapes. The schloss itself towered over a big, still pool in the river, something of a fearsome engineering achievement in the way it sprouted out of the rock. In terms of location, it looked as if it was designed for hot-oil-pouring on enemy heads, but its architecture was more ornamental than defensive, sending out a mixed message of intimidation and exhilaration. There was an odd mix of styles: a Dutch gable-end, some peaked towers that looked like they belonged to Tuscany, giant red roofs studded with tiers of dormer windows and spiked with chimneys, and painted red shutters on the main windows that could have been a job lot from Ikea. No surprise, then, to learn that when the original fortress-like building was damaged by fire in the 1870s, it was largely rebuilt in the eclectic style that was fashionable at the time. The net result reminded me of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, and I could imagine a pale, lonely prince peering down from behind those shuttered windows, wondering what it would have been like to have friends and mix with ordinary people.
Anxious about my first meeting with German aristocracy, I’d been careful to do a bit of research about their role in the territory and quickly realized that virtually the sum total of my knowledge of German history revolved around two key twentieth-century events. Those two world wars represent all we learn about Germany at school and completely mask how young a nation it actually is. We tend to bracket it with Britain and France as one of the long-standing powers of Europe, but actually Germany only formally became a single entity in 1871, when Bismarck’s victories over France and Austria led to the proclamation of the German Empire. Up until then it had been a patchwork of 350-odd principalities, run by electors, margraves, counts and dukes, amongst whom were the Hohenzollerns. Today’s Germany is an awkward but powerful young adult on the world stage, just emerging from a troubled adolescence during which it had put on muscle faster than brain.
A thousand years ago the land populated by Franks, Alemanii, Saxons and Swabians extended eastwards into what is now Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria. All were loosely federated into something called the Holy Roman Empire, which saw itself as the successor to the Roman Empire, but historians usually point out that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. The emperor (invariably also the German king) was based in Bavaria but he had little real authority beyond his own region.
The principalities in this empire of wishful thinking eventually sorted themselves out into two main camps, particularly after Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses on a church door in 1517, kick-starting the Reformation and demonstrating the potency of the printed word. Prussia, in the north, went largely under the thumb of the Brandenburgs, the Protestant arm of the Hohenzollern dynasty, which had split into two in the fifteenth century. And what was called Austria, to the south (including the whole of today’s southern Germany), was run by the Habsburgs. Here the Catholic arm of the Hohenzollern dynasty had its territories, one of which was Sigmaringen.
Despite the ‘empire’ label, there had been little organization to any Holy Roman lands over and above a basic feudal system accorded to the local lord. Crucially there was no central taxation and no German army, so when Napoleon arrived in 1806 he skittled the electors one by one, as easily as knocking a row of bottles off a wall, and dissolved the Holy Roman Empire altogether. It was he who then amalgamated lots of the principalities, consigning hundreds of local ruling dynasties to the scrap heap and ending up with a list of thirty-five monarchies of various kinds, plus four free-standing cities: Hamburg, Bremen, Frankfurt and Lübeck.
In the southern region of Germany he rationalized 121 principalities down into three regions. While doing so he allowed the southern Hohenzollerns to keep (and even expand) their authority, principally because Princess Amalie Hohenzollern had been brought up in France and was a friend of Josephine Bonaparte. They’d gone shopping in Paris together.
Napoleon then moved on eastwards to make the mistake of taking on the Russians, a famous error that others have made since. Encouraged by his defeat, the Prussians, the Austrians and the British took him on at Leipzig in 1813 and spanked him too. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 sorted out the aftermath of conflict and set Germany’s national borders close to where they are today, but it didn’t go so far as to create a unified German state. Instead a loose German Customs Union, incorporating eighteen states and twenty-three million inhabitants, was formed in 1834, but the whole federalization process stalled until the arrival of beefy Bismarck, who rose through the ranks of the Prussian army in the north. It was he who took on the Habsburgs, controllers of southern Germany, and forced them off German soil. He then used his political and military power to coerce the remaining local aristocracy to accept the authority of one unified German state, with Prussia the dominant partner. And Germany was born.
The Hohenzollerns cleverly rode out all these changes. The schism between the northern Protestant and southern Catholic branches of the dynasty had been patched up in the mid-nineteenth century, and they agreed to share the family castle at Hechingen as the official family seat. Thanks to Bismarck’s efforts, the Protestant branch was by far the stronger of the two, and both of the kaisers of the newly formed German Empire were northern Hohenzollerns, including the much-derided Kaiser Wilhelm II, who made the unfortunate decision to go to war in 1914. And this is the mo
ment when most school history books turn their searchlights on Germany for the first time.
Frankly, I was a bit relieved to learn that the Sigmaringen end was the less powerful of the two dynasties, less instrumental in world history, because meeting Kaiser Wilhelm’s son or grandson could have been uncomfortable given what had transpired: ‘So it was your grandpa who started fifty years of war?’ Happily, the Sigmaringen family’s dabbling with kingship was restricted to a brief flirtation with the Spanish throne in 1869 and to the invitation extended to a spare son to become prince of Romania in 1866, thus starting a Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen Romanian royal family. At the time of that invitation from Romania the intervening Habsburg-ruled lands had been hostile to the Hohenzollerns, so twenty-seven-year-old Karl (the future King Carol I of Romania) had had to board a Danube steamer disguised as a travelling salesman in order to collect his throne. To us it seems odd to hear how an obscure land on the eastern side of Europe could invite a relatively minor nobleman from the western side to cross the continent to take their crown, but that’s how it happened in those days, even in the UK, which at the time was being ruled by a family from a northern German town called Hanover. And as a king, Karl/Carol turned out to be a jolly good thing.
These incidents apart, the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen dynasty had bumped along neither prospering unduly nor threatening to fade away until it arrived at the gateway to the twenty-first century with handy assets of a steel factory, extensive forestry, a Bavarian ski resort and half of Vancouver Island, not to mention a few other small castles and manor houses in the neighbourhood. All of which was controlled by the prince I was about to see.
I pitched up outside the castle at the appointed time, and seine Durchlaucht – His Serene Highness – sent one of his staff to escort me through to his offices. The castle’s interiors looked relatively unchanged since the fire that prompted the remodelling of the 1870s. That fire had been caused by great-great-grandfather Prince Leopold’s interest in technology: he’d installed a hydropower unit down on the river below in order to supply one of the first electric lighting systems in Germany, and a fault on the circuit had started the conflagration.
Apart from this early venture into son et lumière, Leopold had also installed the first flushing toilets in Germany, still in place in the castle, but elsewhere the interiors were pretty timeless: the usual grandeur of velvets, tapestries, portraits and hand-carved Louis XV furniture. There were ladies’ quarters, a long chandeliered ballroom and a dark-walled gentlemen’s smoking room with slate-topped tables for the menfolk to play cards and chalk up the scores. The walls of the Hubertus Hall were covered in hunting trophies, usually one representative beast from each of the Hohenzollern’s extensive domains, including a moose from Sweden and a stuffed Romanian bear snarling from the top of a rock. The accumulated testosterone from all these shot animals added to the perceived potency of the Hohenzollerns themselves. A goodly horn collection signified a spunky duke.
There was, however, no visible souvenir of Sigmaringen’s most celebrated temporary residents, the less-spunky pro-Nazi Vichy government. This French government-by-proxy had been moved here in the latter stages of the Second World War. The Hohenzollerns had had to pack their bags and move out in order to make way for Marshal Pétain and his staff of eighty, in order that the Vichy administration could churn out the necessary paperwork under the ceiling frescos and the close supervision of their German ‘allies’. By this stage Hitler didn’t trust them an inch so they were effectively under house arrest atop the rock in Sigmaringen, and the view of the Danube stretching away unimpeded from virtually every window must have been difficult to bear. Fortunately the French treated the schloss with the greatest respect and their temporary residence did it no harm, but the emotional impact on the Hohenzollerns was significant.
Following their eviction, the family was temporarily rehoused in the von Stauffenberg castle near Ulm, which had not surprisingly fallen empty after Claus von Stauffenberg’s bomb-in-the-bunker plot to kill Hitler had missed its target. Von Stauffenberg had been summarily executed and his family dispersed to concentration camps, so the family home was unexpectedly vacant. Handy for the Hohenzollerns, but these were not comfortable circumstances in which to lose your main residence, or to go housesitting for old friends, especially when fanatical Nazis wanted to burn the von Stauffenberg castle down, no matter who might be inside.
‘The family never really returned to live in Schloss Sigmaringen after that,’ explained Prince Karl-Friedrich, when we finally met in his smart suite of offices somewhere up on the fifth floor. ‘I have an apartment here, but our main house is a few kilometres away. It is rather smaller.’ I tried to visualize what ‘rather smaller’ meant – presumably not a ‘small’ that I would recognize.
Various of his female staff fluttered around, producing coffee and waving diaries, treating him with a reverence and formality that made me feel nervous, acutely aware of the wear and tear of travelling by bicycle: ‘This man’s feet smell. Chop off his head!’ And I’d end up on the wall of the Hubertus Hall, between the Swedish moose and the Romanian bear, my dark glasses still hanging around my neck.
Contrary to my expectation of a sort of leisurely bicycling aristocracy, Scandinavian style, Karl-Friedrich was a steely, formal character in his mid-fifties, dressed in the sort of Savile Row suit you see in the smarter gentlemen’s clubs of St James’s, with yellow tie and a silk handkerchief in his top pocket. A captain of industry, British style, with very little of the idle rich about him. The message I got was that he was a very busy man, and he seemed impatient with my vicarious interest in Hohenzollern life and times.
To my opening questions about the family’s resources he suggested, almost with a touch of severity, that I should have consulted the Hohenzollern website, which had all necessary details. He wasn’t much more expansive on the subject of his wider relatives, either, barely acknowledging the greetings I brought from his cousin in Romania, the (self-proclaimed) heir to the yet-to-be-reinstated Romanian throne. In fact, although he mentioned nothing of it then, I later discovered that he was in far closer contact with Romania than I could have guessed, being touted in some circles as a possible future king.
‘It’s hard to keep up with the whole family,’ he said, passing his hand repeatedly over his brow in a gesture I wasn’t sure was habitual or just the stress of dealing with me. ‘There are so many cousins, so many of them, and there are invitations every month. In the old days there were lots of visits, but these days when communication is so easy, paradoxically we don’t meet nearly so much, and then it’s usually brief. Sometimes there are family shooting parties and traditional events like weddings, but mostly I travel for business.’
I asked what sort of business, and again he referred me to a website for the details of the steel factory, the forestry and the ski resort. ‘And I have an investment company for business start-ups.’
I had the distinct feeling that he would be happier discussing the state of the Dow Jones index than the life and times of the German aristocracy.
‘So do you get involved in town life?’ I persisted, thinking of the various statues in the streets below.
‘Obviously the castle is a big attraction for tourists, so inevitably I am involved.’
I tried a different tack, thinking of the Leigh Fermor era. ‘Would family life have been much different in the 1930s?’
‘Of course. In those days the land was enough to support the castle, there was no need for all the other businesses and there was a lot more leisure time. Now we have a hard time keeping up. We’ve sold seven castles in the last twenty years, just to keep costs down. Initially we tried to find tenants, but these are big properties. One of them was formerly a monastery. It is not easy to find buyers for places that size in the middle of the countryside.’
He seemed to lose a little stature as he talked about the necessary disposal of family property. Plainly it was a matter of huge personal pride whether or not the dynas
ty prospered under his control.
‘I guess it must seem a big responsibility, keeping the whole show on the road. Did it ever occur to you to do something else?’
‘My father left the choice to me. I wasn’t forced into it.’
‘Did you at least do other things for a while?’
‘I had to decide before university.’
That seemed tough, and I said so. ‘So what about the next generation?’
‘I’m guiding my son. I’ve said he can have a gap year, but he’s got to make his mind up. He’s beginning to show the right aptitude.’
Poor kid, was my first thought, swiftly followed by a second thought that the word ‘poor’ didn’t really apply. ‘And if he doesn’t want to?’
‘Then I have to make preparations for the future. Possibly a nephew.’
It turned out that his son had just finished at an upmarket English boarding school, which Karl-Friedrich had presumably considered to be a better education for a German prince than his own experience in a Swiss international school. I wondered whether the future prince had made any unsuitable liaisons with young assistant matrons away from the watchful eye of his parents.
‘And what about future marriage partners? Do your children have to marry into the nobility?’ I knew that he himself had, to a von Stauffenberg countess, which must have seemed absolutely the right thing to do given that uncomfortable housesitting during the war.
‘I wouldn’t disapprove if they didn’t,’ he said, somewhat unconvincingly. And then, perhaps aware that he hadn’t been definitive, he added, ‘The point is that they’ve got to have the same ideas as each other to make the relationship work, ideas about responsibility towards society, etc., about having to give as well as take. Inevitably that means a similar social background. You have to accept that as an aristocrat you are a person of public interest, like it or not. It is not as if we have to arrange meetings for the children as they did in the old days, when sometimes marriages would take place without both partners even being present. My children are finding family connections via the Internet and arranging to meet up anyway.’