Over the years, we have noted some oddities about modern day Germany and the group of folks called "nobility".
Noble titles and privileges don't exist in today's Germany, but you see articles and magazines with what looks just like titles and names in 19th century print. In several pieces about a former minister of defense, the old title "Freiherr" (Baron) was liberally used on its own to refer to the gentleman. In much the same way as we talk about "the minister" or "the CEO" once we have introduced the person at the beginning of a piece. Or like "the Doctor" in the long running British TV series refreshingly far removed from any hospital or ER.
As it turns out, when Germany abolished nobility in the wake of World War I, the ladies and gentlemen were allowed to keep their then titles as part of their new civic names. Today, some of them never use this often long part of the family name, others cling tenaciously to it.
Until a couple of decades ago, maybe even today, some big German companies had a few "reserved" jobs, positions you'd get if you had the name. No, we have no documentation for this claim - the information came from an occupant of such a position. There is a chance, however small, that the gentleman was simply making this up in order to have some private fun with the inquisitive foreigner who asked.
Other non-users of the title cum name include a reporter. The reporter comes with a great story. One day, she invited her colleagues from the newsroom for dinner to celebrate her birthday. They all came and enjoyed home cooked spaghetti a la bolognese with a couple of glasses of wine or a beer.
Towards the end of the night, the young lady steered the conversation to a topic they had hotly debated at work a short time earlier. It was about claim that some old people in Germany resorted to having cat food or dog food as their only kind of meat because they were too poor to afford the real thing. There were, indeed, in wealthy Germany, old folks, mostly women, who had very small pensions or none at all, and the current "basic minimum living allowance" was still a decade or more in the future.
Abject poverty existed, as did the claim of people eating cat food.
At the birthday bash, probably fueled by the alcohol, she eventually found herself out argued once again by a simple claim: you can't make this stuff edible.
So she took her friends and coworkers into the kitchen and showed them freshly opened cans of cat food.
She had no cat.
One of the "impossible" camp dashed to the bathroom. He didn't take much food home in his digestive tract that night.
The story is true. It appears in this post as an example of former German nobles with a social conscience and a sense of humor.
The non-users of derelict name titles may or may not be in the majority, they certainly are everywhere, hogging headlines and making up the content of "women's magazines" for an audience of middle aged and up.
But the true blue descendants strive to have an honorable place in society. That's what the article in the conservative mainstream daily Frankfurter Allgemeine reflects. The paper has a great number of bylines with the three letter particle "von", the smallest common denominator of German nobles. So, they may be a bit biased, but who isn't? There is/was high nobility and low nobility, if you know what I mean, so not all nobles were alike either.
Articles about funerals tend to be rather smooth, but the piece demonstrates the "old values". The deceased is introduced a son of the last German nobleman who "held governmental responsibility". That's such a gorgeous phrase, "held governmental responsibility", isn't it. It has none of bad taste taste of simply being born into a family that passed down power over generations no matter what those their ruled over said or did.
Instead, it encapsulates the rarefied air of responsibility. The article dwells on that last responsible member of the house and its history so much that the eulogy for the man in the "simple casket wrapped in the flag of the house" feels a sideline at times.
The statements "He regarded humility as his greatest duty. He found glamor and the rainbow press despicable" show us non nobles that we have it all wrong when we sneer at the current set of close relatives of the House.
In fact, there is enough in the article to substantiate the claims. While the three sons out of the first marriage of the last governing nobleman took wholeheartedly to the Nazis, the deceased kept his distance. He became a soldier but refused to become an officer, despite, as the article explains for just a bit too long, having had a long list of officers and generals to look back upon.
But it was a step the deceased undertook when the reconstituted West German military was fed with recruit from the draft that very much stands out: he became one of the very first conscientious objectors in West Germany.
In 1950s Germany, that meant you were considered a traitor by many. Some men went to prison for refusing to serve in the new military. Unfortunately, the article is silent about the consequences of his action.
So, the descendants of German nobility really are just people like everybody else. Except when the past is held up as better than today.
Ending this on a light note, you very likely have not heard of the weirdest conspiracy theory ever about Germany's nobility. Neither had we until June 2014, when we felt we just had to write about it in The weirdest German Kaiser conspiracy theory ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment