KING AND COUNTRY

It could be a plot point from Monty Python's Holy Grail but it's only too real. In the castles, factories and beer halls of small-town Germany, a new movement of conspiracy theorists and far-right royalists is threatening to topple the republic.

At the end of a winding country road, about an hour south of Berlin, stands a sign proclaiming: ‘Welcome to the Kingdom of Germany.’ I scan the horizon for fairytale castles, oompah bands and tables groaning beneath beer and bratwurst, but there’s little to see here beyond a cluster of slightly drab buildings. Since 1918, when Wilhelm II, the last Kaiser, was driven into exile, most Germans have assumed that they lived in a republic, but today a new and unsettling kind of ‘monarchy’ is taking root.

The Kingdom, headquartered in a former chicken-canning factory near the small town of Wittenberg, issues its own currency, passports and driving licences, and contends that the ‘other’ Germany – the federal state established after World War II – is a gigantic confidence trick that has cheated the country’s near 85 million people out of their birthright.

In recent years, several other breakaway mini-states have sprung up around Germany, and the number of people joining them is soaring. Many members of the Reichsbürger [Citizens of the Reich] movement are united in wanting to dissolve modern Germany entirely and rebuild the old Imperial state, created in 1871, often intent on placing a new Kaiser at the helm, too. But their manifesto goes beyond a romantic harking back to pomp and ceremony, and into what many see as a menacing underworld of extremism and demagoguery.

Any doubts about the Reichsbürger movement’s seriousness were dispelled last December when 25 of its members were arrested in a wave of police raids. Several of those seized were accused of plotting an armed attack on the German parliament, which they hoped would ignite a national uprising.