POTSDAM, Germany—On Saturday, Georg Friedrich Ferdinand Prince of Prussia and Sophie Johanna Maria Princess of Isenburg will step out of a church on the grounds of a former royal palace here and ride in a carriage drawn by six horses through the city streets as heirs to a 1,000-year history of German emperors and empresses.
A few weeks later, they will go back to their office jobs. Both studied business. Mr. Prince of Prussia, 35, works as a consultant to academics seeking to market their discoveries. Ms. Princess of Isenburg, 33, is a consultant to nonprofits. Their spokeswoman said they weren't available for interviews.
"I think there's a certain part of both of them that is getting involved in this—the dramatic aspects of it—reluctantly," said a friend of the couple, Todd Fletcher, an American composer living in
Berlin.
Image via WikipediaThe groom is the great-great-grandson of the last German kaiser. And it has been nearly a century since Germany abolished its monarchy. But that isn't stopping the country from getting on Europe's royal-wedding bandwagon.
Legally, the betrothed are just private citizens of the Federal Republic. Germany's noble titles of yesteryear are now merely surnames.
Public television will broadcast the wedding live, for three hours, anyway.
"People are longing for things they don't get out of the republic," says Rolf Seelmann-Eggebert, who will provide live commentary for broadcaster
RBB, a public-service broadcaster based in Berlin and Potsdam. In a confusing, fast-changing world, "people are looking for little princes and princesses who are born and will be of some importance for the rest of their life," he says.
In a year in which royal weddings in London and Monaco drew tens of millions of TV viewers around Europe, it's no surprise that some Germans crave the same sort of hoopla. The country, after all, had more than a millennium of royal history and still has thousands of defunct dukes, bygone barons, and no-account nobles strewn across the land.
Unlike their British counterparts, however, Germany's royals got themselves sacked. The Weimar Constitution of 1919 scrapped the aristocracy. In Communist East Germany, which included much of the former
Prussian kingdom, nobles were mostly stripped of their castles and estates. Official Marxist-Leninist ideology left little role for such fancy people in public life.
Even today, a reference to Prussia reminds many Germans of a military history that this country has vowed not to repeat. An upstart kingdom based in the dreary plain around Berlin, Prussia built a formidable army and expanded until it came to dominate Germany in the 19th century. The aggressive foreign policy of Mr. Prince of Prussia's great-great-grandfather,
Kaiser Wilhelm II, contributed to the outbreak of World War I and, some historians maintain, helped entrench a culture of militarism in Germany that made Nazi rule possible.
"Prussia's history has its periods that we criticize, too, but also many times that we can be proud of," says Michaela Blankart, spokeswoman for the former Prussian royal family, the
House of Hohenzollern. She cited the Prussian kings' religious tolerance and patronage of the arts as examples of a legacy that the royal descendants take pride in.
The plans for the most lavish wedding in decades for the 950-year-old Hohenzollern family have ruffled some feathers. RBB, which will air wedding live, has become a particular target for critics.
Germany's Left party, heirs to the former ruling Communists in the country's East, called on RBB to "finance progressive show formats rather than a cult of nobility."
In Potsdam, a city about 15 miles from Berlin that was a residence of Prussian kings, Lutz Boede is planning to mark Saturday's wedding in his own subversive way. Mr. Boede, a leader of local left-leaning political group The Other, is organizing an ironic event dubbed "Monarchy Now!"
Mr. Boede is distributing leaflets urging Potsdam's "subjects" to put on their finery, paint obsequious banners, and practice their bows.
An RBB spokesman said the idea to televise the wedding came from the broadcaster, not the family. He said the channel, which can be viewed in much of Germany, is showing the wedding because of the prominence of the setting and because the family's history is densely interwoven with that of the region.
Jörg Kirschstein, a student of Germany's noble families, expects Saturday to be the grandest wedding in the Hohenzollern family since the marriage of
Princess Marie Cecile of Prussia in West Berlin in 1965. "It was a bit sleepy for the last few decades," Mr. Kirschstein says of the dynasty. Mr. Kirschstein will join Mr. Seelmann-Eggebert in doing commentary during the live broadcast.
Mr. Seelmann-Eggebert is German television's top royal-weddings expert, with more than a dozen such extravaganzas from Spain to Sweden under his belt. But Saturday's bash will be his first live broadcast of a German noble union since he started covering the weddings of European royalty in 1981.
That was the year Prince Charles and
Lady Diana Spencer married. Mr. Seelmann-Eggebert, then a correspondent in London for
German TV, realized that his audience back home cared more about the
House of Windsor than about the House of Commons.
"It's because your own life is too boring that the whole royal-family business probably has blossomed," he says.
On Saturday morning, the bride, Sophie Princess of Isenburg, will ride with her father to the church in a silver Rolls-Royce, alighting at a lawn set aside for the news media. Potsdam's commoners will be permitted to watch from a fenced-off zone behind the press.
After the ceremony, the newlyweds will pose for photographers, climb into their carriage and ride through town to their reception on the grounds of Frederick the Great's 18th-century summer palace.
On a blustery recent morning, some of the local peasantry dismissed the antimonarchist grumbling and said they will be watching the wedding on TV.
Jürgen Riedel, a 57-year-old Potsdamer, grew up in Communist times when "nobody wanted to know about the aristocracy." He watched Europe's other royal weddings this summer, and is proud that Germany now has its own version. "The Hohenzollern did a lot for Potsdam," he says.
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