Georg Friedrich von Preußen told an interviewer for the daily newspaper Die Welt that when he was a child he did not hear much about his great-grandfather, the former Prussian Crown Prince Wilhelm, who died in 1951.

But that had nothing to do with the question, which has been preoccupying the German public for a number of years, as to whether the former heir to the throne had made a significant contribution to National Socialism - with a technical concept of the law on compensation for victims of expropriations by the Soviet occupying power.

"Because the role of the family in the Weimar Republic and in the Nazi era was always discussed openly." So it was read on June 15, 2021.

Patrick Bahners

Features correspondent in Cologne and responsible for “humanities”.

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    If the last sentence quoted were to be true, the von Prussian family would be even more unusual than their name (including the fact that they have a second name as "Haus Hohenzollern") suggests. Also for the Weizsäcker and even for the Scholls and Stauffenbergs it should not be true that the behavior of family members before 1945 was always talked about with absolute openness.

    But we don't mean to say that Georg Friedrich von Prussia's sentence is wrong. Disseminating such a claim would run the risk of becoming a recipient of legal mail. In terms of form, the proposition is an assertion of fact. Their negation would also be a factual assertion that would have to be proven in case of doubt. That would have to be difficult, however, since family conversations do not usually take place in front of the press. From a logical point of view, however, a single princess would suffice to falsify the prince's sentence, who testifies that at a single family celebration, for example, the topic of the ex-crown prince's participation on the “Day of Potsdam” was circumvented.

    This consideration shows that the statement that this or that has always been openly spoken about in a particular family inevitably includes a factor of judgment.

    It is not a matter of factual assertion of the same kind as the statement that Prince August Wilhelm, one of the younger sons of Wilhelm II, was wearing his SA uniform on March 21, 1933 in Potsdam.

    In an interview with Die Welt, Georg Friedrich also commented on the accusation that he intimidated scientists and journalists with lawsuits and threats of legal action.

    “We did not oppose reporting as such or historical research.

    We only took action when false statements of fact were published and disseminated. "

    A database of court orders

    Everyone should now be able to check whether this claim is true with an aid that the Association of Historians of Germany made available to the public on June 15, 2021. A website documents all court decisions in the legal disputes brought about by the family in the context of the current controversy, provided that the respective defendants have consented to the publication. The FAZ has also given such consents. The name "Hohenzollern-Klage-Wiki" is somewhat misleading in that not every user can change the text of the page. The inventor and editor of the database is the Düsseldorf constitutional lawyer Sophie Schönberger, a specialist in the law of cultural goods.

    Where Georg Friedrich von Prussia gives the impression that he has limited himself legally in positivistic minimalism to the demand for the correction of false representations of facts, the Association of Historians sees the freedom of research threatened by the fact that well-founded and substantiated contributions to the dispute can be attacked by the plaintiffs breaking out partial statements and submit to courts in isolation as alleged statements of fact. Typically, these statements do not directly concern historical reality, but the current debate. In terms of legal policy, Sophie Schönberger described it as a problem when presenting the projectthat the civil courts or rather individual particularly zealous courts, through their jurisdiction for the protection of privacy, claim a general truth control of facts that are linked to persons. It will then be part of the decision-making process on questions of valuation that are better off in social disputes than in state bodies.

    The sentence that the Prussian family always talked openly about their inner workings during the Nazi era is interesting regardless of the truth value. In bourgeois families, regret over silence has long been integrated into the standard narrative. Seen in this way, the Hohenzollern family have still not become a normal family like any other, claiming the protection of civil rights for their private affairs. This lag is typical of the nobility mentality. Turned the other way around, it describes the potential for future adaptation.