Current book project: The German Federal Monarchies Abroad. A Transnational History of Princely Federalism in the Kaiserreich, 1871-1918 (London 2027, Palgrave Studies in Modern Monarchy).
This monograph challenges Paul W. Schroeder’s famous thesis that the international significance of the German states and their monarchs as intermediary bodies in the European states system ceased when they joined the German Empire in 1870. It focuses on the interests that decision-makers in Berlin, and particularly outside Germany, had in involving them in their international game. Did the German monarchs, as representatives of semi-sovereign states, continue to be politically relevant in the international arena after their states joined the German Empire? Additionally, this study provides an answer to Lothar Machtan’s work on German monarchies. In his monographs, Machtan describes the German monarchs as living anachronisms, unable to make themselves relevant again after their states’ loss of external sovereignty and in an era of mass democracy. The German princes would have suffered from a ‘political helper’s syndrome’, which motivated them to compensate for their lack of political power and military prestige by pursuing diplomatic activities and successes, defending their external sovereignty, their legations, and trying to shine in the international arena. Indeed, the German monarchs with their legations and their sovereign pretentions may seem eccentric and antiquated to us. Were they not the most unmodern of Europe’s monarchs? This study argues the opposite: the German monarchs and their continued role on the international stage was no eccentric anachronism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but rather characteristic for this period. It shows that decision-makers and authorities in Berlin (chancellors, emperors, officials at the German Foreign Office) and decision-makers and royals outside Germany continued to involve and to value German monarchs as intermediaries after 1870.
See for more information on my dissertation project (funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung):