Germany’s Cloud Cuckoo Land Coup

You couldn’t make this one up, but Germany’s bizarre coup scandal this week keeps getting stranger amid hints of a Kremlin connection

Wolkenkuckucksheim is a German phrase that many in the Anglosphere know, at least in translation. It came into German literary use in the nineteenth century via such notables as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and it gradually snuck into English too (though Cloud Cuckoo Land sounds stronger in the original, as Teutonic phrases so often do). In both languages, the phrase evokes a place where big, impractical dreams develop but inevitably never materialize.

Germany gave the world a story this week which, on the surface, appears terrifying indeed. Yesterday, in a massive operation, some three thousand German police (including heavily armed paramilitary special operators) raided 150 locations across the country, touching 11 of Germany’s 16 federal states, taking into custody 25 suspects on suspicion of plotting the overthrow of the Federal Republic. This was astonishing news by any standard.

The arrested were pronounced to be a terrorist group by German authorities and, on the surface, this was a very serious matter. The 25 persons taken into custody include several reservists from the Bundeswehr, the German military, plus a soldier belonging to the elite Special Operations Command or KSK. That several of the plotters have military experience, and possible access to military-grade weapons, understandably alarmed the authorities. German police have admitted they were surveilling 52 targets in all relating to this investigation, which stretches back to the spring of this year, so more arrests are possible.

The coup plotters are nebulously part of a far-Right tendency in Germany which calls itself the Reichsbürger (Citizens of the Reich) movement. This group rejects the legitimacy of the Federal Republic established in 1949 after German defeat in the Second World War, which they view as a fraudulent, Allied-imposed regime. Instead, they recognize the country’s 1937 boundaries: significantly, right before the Hitler regime began occupying foreign countries. Its ideology is a strange amalgam of nostalgia for the Nazi period – which must be handled carefully since overt Nazi views result in arrest in Germany – with robust patriotism for the Wilhelmine Second Reich that existed from 1871 to 1918. There’s also an unhealthy dose of QAnon-flavored conspiracy sentiment here, complete with the vaccine skepticism proffered by so-called Querdenker in Germany. Moreover, the loose Reichsbürger movement apes America’s Sovereign Citizen Movement, rejecting the existing government as fake and illegitimate, with members issuing their own documents, including passports and driver’s licenses.