Portrait of Elector Joachim I Nestor of Brandenburg by Lucas Cranach the Elder
After over a hundred years, the German government has struck a deal with the descendants of the family that ruled the country for centuries regarding their former properties and art collection.
The Hohenzollerns were one of the most powerful noble families on the European continent for centuries. They ruled over the territories of Brandenburg and Prussia, first as dukes, then as kings. During the eighteenth century, the Kingdom of Prussia became a power player due to a combination of territorial expansion and patronage of the arts and sciences. During German unification in the nineteenth century, Otto von Bismarck ensured the new country would form around Prussia. After their victory in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, the king of Prussia was declared the German Emperor. The Empire would last until the First World War, after Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and fled to the Netherlands, allowing for a republic to be established. But even after the Empire crumbled, the Hohenzollerns continued to serve as influential figures in German high society and the political realm. And this is why many Germans do not have a particularly good opinion of the family. Many members of the former imperial family openly supported Hitler and the Nazis. Several of the Kaiser’s grandsons enlisted in the German army and fought during the Second World War. After the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, many agreed that the militaristic and imperialist attitudes the family fostered and perpetuated among Germans of both aristocratic and common birth were significant factors that led to the rise of the Nazis in the first place. In particular, the Soviet-backed East German government confiscated many properties and works of art. However, since the reunification of Germany in 1990, the current head of the family has made a name for himself, petitioning the government to return much of these treasures.
Georg Friedrich has been head of the Hohenzollern family since 1994. As the great-great-grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm, he goes by the title Prince of Prussia. His efforts to return the former imperial properties to his family began in 2014 in the Netherlands. That year, he claimed that the Huis Doorn, the Dutch countryside estate where Kaiser Wilhelm spent his last twenty years, should be transferred from Dutch government control to his family. The Dutch government subsequently rejected these claims. Also, that same year, he asked the German government to allow his family to take up residency at the Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, the last palace constructed for the imperial family and the location of the famous 1945 Potsdam Conference. For over a decade, the prince has been persistent about restoring the properties and works of art that were lost or confiscated during and after the Second World War to his family. The negotiations between the government and the Hohenzollerns were kept a secret for several years, for good reason.
Many Germans were outraged when news leaked that these talks were in progress. The political party Die Linke, a small leftist party with a few dozen seats in Germany’s parliament, started a petition opposing the return of the imperial family treasures. Jan Böhmermann, a prominent German satirist, commented that these artworks should not be Georg Friedrich’s to claim, since German peoples’ ancestors paid for it all with their taxes as subjects. He argued that these palaces and paintings are now common property for everyone to enjoy, and now the prince wants to hoard it all. “Does Friedrich think that these are for him?” He also pointed out that while many prominent families had their properties returned to them after 1990, the Hohenzollerns and some other former landowners offered considerable support to the Nazis and therefore had their right to compensation withdrawn. During this debate, images spread of the prince’s great-grandfather, the Crown Prince Wilhelm, dressed in a stormtrooper uniform. There was also another photo, this one of the crown prince’s brother August saluting in a Nazi uniform a year before he was elected to parliament as a member of the Nazi Party. Many say that the former imperial family’s support for the Nazis attracted many millions of monarchist and traditional conservative voters to Hitler. Others have disputed the extent of their support’s effect on the German electorate, but none can deny that they threw in their lot with Hitler. However, the new government under Chancellor Friedrich Merz has come to a compromise.
The German government will not return the collections to the Hohenzollerns outright. They will instead turn over the items in question to a new state-run charity called the Stiftung Hohenzollernscher Kunstbesitz (Hohenzollern Art Collection Foundation). This group will oversee the government cultural entities like the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the Prussian Palaces & Gardens Foundation, and the German Historical Museum. The foundation will be run by nine board members, three of which will be members or representatives of the Hohenzollern family. The collection includes furniture, dinnerware, sculptures, and paintings. A comprehensive catalogue of the items being transferred to the foundation is not available yet. However, one of the most prominent works we know about is the portrait of Joachim I of Brandenburg by Lucas Cranach the Elder.