From The Times:
Hot news from Germany: the Queen is about to abdicate to make way for Prince William. “A world sensation,” says the cover of Frau mit Herz (Woman with Heart), the weekly that broke the story.
“The Queen will flabbergast her subjects with this wide-reaching decision.” The Prince of Wales, we are told, took the news “as pale as chalk. He left the Palace without saying a word.”
The story is only the latest concoction — albeit the most daring in its use of fictional narrative — in a country that has become obsessed with British royalty.
More than a dozen weekly magazines with titles such as Neue Welt, Frau Aktuell and Neue Post have been spinning a fantasy world about Buckingham Palace for Germans enthralled by the magic of kingship. Every week an estimated nine million here absorb the nuggets from unnamed courtiers, and though few admit to buying the magazines, the stories inform the conversation at hairdressers and sausage counters across the country.
“We all grow up with fairytales where princes and princesses play a major role,” says Rolf Seelmann-Eggebert, for many years the royal expert for the ARD state television channel. “And then we get older and think, oh, they really exist. So the curiosity remains and the need to be informed grows.”
The Germans have lived under a republican system since the Kaiser abdicated in 1918. The aristocrats have not disappeared — the Association for Nobility reckons that up to 80,000 people in Germany have titles of some sort — but there is little glamour attached to them. A reality television series featuring the search of four counts to find commoner wives merely reinforced the idea that German aristos were rather dull.
[...]
The editor of Frau mit Herz, Ingeborg Wagle-Kaul, was not available yesterday to take calls or reply to e-mails. It is, therefore, unclear as to how she intends to follow up the abdication story next week. The sourcing of the story — “British aristocracy experts” — also remains a little vague for a world sensation. The sources seem to know though that the Queen is working on her abdication speech. “The news has not yet been officially confirmed,” the magazine says, “but when it is, it will hit Britain with the force of a bomb.”
I get uneasy when Germans say that kind of thing.
