Konrad Asmussen

Konrad Asmussen (born 1975) is a German politician of the Deutsch-Hannoversche Partei, the old Welf party of the Kingdom of Hanover, and Minister-President of Hanover since May 2023. He was born in the city of Hanover to a family that kept a bakery in the List district, taught German and history at a Gymnasium in Celle for eleven years, and was Hanover’s Minister of Education for ten, the longest anybody has held the office.

He is the head of government of the kingdom that was not annexed. Hanover sided with Austria in 1866 and lost, and Prussia did not take it, so that the kingdom entered the German Empire with its Crown, its ministry and its archives intact. It is a constituent state of the Empire, with six votes in the Bundesrat, and its King is the sovereign of the Atlantic realms acting in a separate Hanoverian capacity. The King acts in Hanover only on Hanoverian advice, and the advice is Asmussen’s.

He advised Ernest V for five years and was as close to him as a King and a minister can be. The King signs every Hanoverian act in person, wherever he is, and for five years a box of Hanoverian papers went to London every week and came back signed. Since 12 October 2028 the box has gone to New Westminster instead, to Queen Christina as Regent, and since 31 October it has been signed in the name of George V, whom Asmussen has never met.

The autumn of 2028 was the hardest of his time in office, and he came through it without a public mistake. In four weeks Hanover made the Queen its Regent, gave effect to the abdication of the King it had advised, answered the Interrealm Succession Compact jointly with Brunswick, and sent the German Empire’s rescue team to the earthquake in Los Angeles. On 1 November he wrote privately to the Imperial Chancellor proposing that the Empire, Hanover and Brunswick study what would follow if the Hanoverian line reached the German Emperor, who has stood second in it since the accession. The letter leaked, and on 7 November Berlin agreed to talks in the new year.

His party is warmly monarchist, and he is very popular. The DHP has governed Hanover with a majority of its own since 2023 and has taken the Social Democrats into government anyway, on the principle that a one-party Hanover would frighten Berlin. Hanoverians call him der Lehrer, the teacher, affectionately in the villages and with a faint edge in Berlin. Outside Hanover he is regarded, when he is regarded at all, as a monarchist curiosity: the premier of the court party.

The office

The Minister-President of Hanover is the kingdom’s head of government. He is elected by the Landtag, leads the cabinet, answers to the chamber, and advises the King in every Hanoverian matter, so that every act of the Hanoverian Crown is done on his ministry’s advice and on nobody else’s. The King of Hanover is the same person as the King of thirteen other realms, but in Hanover he acts only as King of Hanover, and the only advice he may take there is Hanoverian.

The office has two halves, and the second is unlike any other premiership in Germany. The first half is that of every head of a German state government: schools, police, roads, hospitals, the budget, the Landtag, and Hanover’s six votes in the Bundesrat, cast together as the constitution requires. The second half is the Crown. Hanover is the only German state whose sovereign reigns elsewhere, and its government is responsible, through the Crown Relations Office and the Royal Archives, for the Crown Exception: the protected competence under which Hanover handles recognition instruments between Crowns, succession notices, the certification of regnal styles, the authentication of royal documents and seals, and lawful communication with the Crown offices of the sister realms, without treating any of them as imperial foreign policy.

The Crown Exception is narrow and he keeps it so. It does not cover diplomacy, trade, war, intelligence or the policy of any sister realm, and it gives Hanover no voice in the affairs of the Atlantic realms or they in Hanover’s. It exists because a monarch may be one person but the offices are not one office, and in ordinary years it is invisible. It becomes contentious when a monarch dies, when Berlin asks to see a Crown instrument before it is made, or when a sister realm sends urgent wording, and in the autumn of 2028 all three happened in the same month.

The kingdom has no representative of the Crown. There is no Governor-General in Hanover and no viceroy; the King signs every Hanoverian act in person, wherever he is. Brunswick, the other Welf state, has a Landesverweser to complete appointments in the Duke’s name. Hanover never has, on the ground that a kingdom that was not annexed does not need anybody to stand in for its King, and the consequence is that its premier has more direct dealing with the sovereign than any other head of government in the Empire.

Early life

List

He was born in the city of Hanover in 1975 and grew up over a bakery. His parents kept a bakery in the List district, a residential quarter of the north of the city with long terraced streets and a market square, and he was brought up above the shop with the smell of the ovens coming through the floor at four in the morning. The bakery is still there. His son runs it now.

His grandmother came from East Frisia and spoke Low German. She had come to the city as a young woman to work in the bakery, married the baker’s son, and never lost the language of the coast. She spoke it to her grandson, who answered her in it from the time he could talk, and by the time he went to school he had two languages, the High German of the classroom and the Low German of the kitchen, and a clear sense that the second was the one people were ashamed of. He has said that everything he has done in politics began with that shame and his refusal of it.

He was a city child with a countryside language. The family were not political in any organised sense. His parents voted, read the Hannoversche Allgemeine and took him to Hannover 96 on Saturdays, where he has had a season ticket in the same seat since he was twelve. He went to a Gymnasium in the north of the city, where his teachers remembered him as talkative, good at German, very good at history and incapable of keeping a debate to the time allotted.

The university

He read German and history at the University of Hanover and lived at home. He took the tram to lectures and worked in the bakery at weekends, and he has said that he learned more history from the customers than from the seminars. His final dissertation was on the Low German press of the nineteenth century, and it was the first time he discovered that the language his grandmother spoke had once had newspapers.

Celle

From 2001 to 2012 he taught German and history at a Gymnasium in Celle, the old ducal town on the southern edge of the Lüneburg Heath, half an hour from Hanover by train. He commuted every day for eleven years. He taught the kingdom’s history to children whose parents, as he put it later, had never been told that Hanover was a kingdom by choice and not by accident, and he taught it with a conviction that his pupils remember and his headmaster occasionally had to moderate.

He was by all accounts a very good teacher. His former pupils describe a man who talked a great deal, never repeated himself, and expected them to have read the document before the lesson rather than after it. Several of them have said that they learned what a constitution was from a class in which he read them the settlement of 1866 aloud and asked them who had decided it.

Yorkshire

He spent the school year 2004 to 2005 as an exchange teacher in England, teaching German at a comprehensive school in the West Riding of Yorkshire. It is where his English comes from, and it is fluent, with a Yorkshire vowel that English interviewers notice and he does not try to lose. It is also where he acquired a liking for rugby league, which he follows from Hanover with a devotion that nobody else in the Landtag shares or understands.

He has said that a year in Yorkshire taught him that a region can be proud of itself without wanting to leave anything. It is the closest he has come to describing the politics of his party in a sentence.

The Deutsch-Hannoversche Partei

1867

The Deutsch-Hannoversche Partei was founded in 1867, in the year after the war, to defend the kingdom’s survival. Prussia had won, and Hanover’s future was undecided, and the party’s founders were Hanoverians of every class who wished the kingdom to go on existing. The settlement that left Hanover unannexed gave them what they asked for. The party did not dissolve. It has existed ever since as the party of Hanover’s continuing to exist, and its slogan has not changed since 1867: Hannover bleibt Hannover, Hanover stays Hanover.

Its colours are yellow and white, the colours of the Welf house, and its posters carry the white Saxon horse, the Sachsenross, the kingdom’s older emblem, which appears beside the Welf lion in civic use. The kingdom it was founded to keep was never dispossessed, and the party became, and has remained, the largest political organisation in Hanover that exists only in Hanover.

The court party

The DHP is warmly monarchist. It is the party of the King’s birthday, of the Herrenhausen gardens, of the yellow and white flags that go up in the villages in February, and its opponents call it the court party, a name it accepts without embarrassment. Its monarchism is real and sentimental, and it is also constitutional: the DHP has never asked a Hanoverian King to do anything personally, and has opposed every proposal for a personal royal role as firmly as any party in Germany. Hanover’s King matters to the DHP because he proves that Hanover is a kingdom, and the party’s view of what he should do is that he should sign what his ministers advise.

The Crown Exception

The DHP counts the Crown Exception as its proudest achievement. As the Atlantic realms multiplied and the King’s capacities became numerous enough to need handling, it was a DHP ministry in Hanover that negotiated with Berlin the arrangement under which Hanover handles Crown-to-Crown matters, recognition instruments, succession notices, the authentication of royal documents, without treating them as imperial foreign policy. Every DHP manifesto since has mentioned it, and Asmussen’s speeches mention it more often than the manifestos do.

No position but Hanover’s

The DHP is a catch-all party with no position except Hanover’s. It has members who would vote with the conservatives anywhere else and members who would vote with the SPD, farmers from the Heath, shopkeepers from the cities, teachers, Lutheran pastors and a substantial Catholic minority from the Emsland, and the only thing they share is the kingdom. It is a party in which a member’s view on taxation is his own business and his view on the Crown Exception is the party’s. This makes it unusually easy to form a coalition with and unusually hard to predict.

In Berlin

The DHP has eleven members in the Reichstag, all from Hanover, and they sit in no group. They vote case by case on imperial business, and in a close division eleven votes matter, which every imperial Chancellor has learned. The DHP’s rule is that its Reichstag members take no office in an imperial government and its ministers in Hanover accept no honour from Berlin.

Why he joined

He joined the DHP for Low German. In the late 1990s, as a student, he looked for a party that cared about the language his grandmother spoke, and found that the DHP was the only one that did. His parents voted for whoever seemed likeliest to keep the bakery’s rates down; his decision to join the old Welf party surprised them, and he has said that his father asked him whether he had joined the King’s party or the grandmother’s, and that he said both.

Early career

He went into politics while still teaching. He was elected to Hanover’s city council for List in 2006, and to the Landtag in 2008, and taught part-time in Celle for four more years while sitting in both. He has said that the arrangement was exhausting and the best training he could have had, because a man who has to face thirty sixteen-year-olds at eight in the morning cannot make a speech in the Landtag the night before that he would not be willing to repeat to them.

In the Landtag he was a member of the education committee and very little else. He spoke often and at length, and he was known, within a year, for two things: for being unable to make a short speech, and for a speech in Low German on the language’s place in schools, which was the first speech given in the Landtag in that language for thirty years. He has given one every year since. The Landtag’s stenographers, who must take it down, have asked twice for notice of the date.

Minister of Education, 2013 to 2023

The ministry

In 2013 he became Minister of Education in a coalition led by the SPD, with the DHP as its partner. The SPD’s Minister-President, who led the government for ten years, gave him the ministry because the DHP asked for it and because nobody else wanted it. He held it for ten years, through two elections, and is the longest-serving Minister of Education Hanover has had. He was thirty-eight when he took it.

1866 in the classroom

He put the kingdom’s own history into every school. Under his curriculum every Hanoverian pupil learns the war of 1866, the settlement that left the kingdom unannexed, the Crown Exception and the personal union, as a part of German history and not as a local footnote to it. Berlin’s education officials called the curriculum parochial. Hanover called it accurate. He has said that a child who does not know why her state still has a King cannot be expected to understand why it does not have a President either, and the remark was quoted against him in Berlin for a year.

The village schools

He refused to close the kingdom’s small rural schools. Hanover had dozens of village primary schools with one or two classes, and his ministry’s own officials recommended closing most of them and taking the children by bus to larger schools in the towns. He kept them open, every one, against his officials’ advice and at a cost that the finance ministry never forgave. He has said that a village without a school is a village without a future, and that a bus to a school is the first step to a bus out of the village.

Empress Caroline opened one of them in 2015. It was a two-class school on the Lüneburg Heath that his ministry had wished to close and he had kept open, and the Empress, Ernest V’s sister and the wife of the German Emperor, came to reopen it after its rebuilding, sat in the back of a lesson for forty minutes and talked to the children afterwards. The two have liked each other since.

Low German

He had Low German taught in schools as a regional language. It is offered in every primary school in the kingdom that asks for it, and in most of the Gymnasien of the north and the coast, with teachers trained for it at the university. The number of children learning it has risen every year since 2015. His opponents said it was sentiment. He said that his grandmother had been made to feel stupid in her own language for seventy years, and that he would not have a single child in Hanover made to feel the same.

A Hanoverian Emperor

On 18 January 2014 the son of the German Emperor was born at Hanover, by his mother’s choice, and the city treated the birth of Alexander as its own. Asmussen, then a year into the Ministry of Education, gave every school in the kingdom a half-holiday on the day of the christening, which Berlin queried and Hanover ignored. Fourteen years later the boy succeeded his father as German Emperor and King of Prussia, and Hanover found that the Emperor of the federation it belonged to had been born in its capital. The DHP regards it as the most satisfactory fact in modern German history, and has never quite managed to say so without sounding as if it thought Hanover had arranged it.

Leader of the party

He became leader of the DHP in 2021, succeeding a long-serving leader under whom the party had been the SPD’s junior partner for a decade. He was the obvious choice and was elected without a contest. He said on his election that the DHP had been a partner long enough and that it was time it asked Hanover whether it wished to be led.

Minister-President

2023

In May 2023 he led the DHP to a majority of its own and became Minister-President. He defeated the SPD Minister-President under whom he had served for ten years, and the DHP won about eighty of the Landtag’s 135 seats, its best result in living memory. The swing was attributed by everybody, including the SPD, to him: to the village schools, to Low German, to a campaign conducted largely at village fairs, and to the fact that Hanoverians liked him.

He took the SPD into government anyway. The DHP did not need a partner and he did not want to govern without one. His reason, stated at the time and repeated since, is that Hanoverian governments are built wide, that the city of Hanover is the SPD’s and should be inside its government, and that a one-party Hanover would frighten Berlin, which needs to be able to trust that the kingdom’s Crown Exception is not the instrument of a single party. The SPD, which had expected opposition, accepted.

His deputy is Jonas Hellwig, the SPD’s leader in Hanover since 2023, who was elected to lead his party after its defeat and became Deputy Minister-President and Minister of Labour. Hellwig is forty-four, a former trade union official from the Hanoverian steel and car towns, and the two men have governed together without a public quarrel for five years.

The campaign was conducted largely at village fairs. He visited, by his party’s count, a hundred and forty of them between February and May 2023, made a speech at most of them that was longer than the fair’s own programme allowed, and ate, by his own count, something at every one. The SPD’s campaign was conducted on television and in the city, and it was the Heath, the coast and the small towns that turned. The SPD Minister-President he defeated, under whom he had served for ten years, telephoned him on election night to concede, and Asmussen offered him nothing and the SPD a coalition, and the former premier has said since that both decisions were correct.

The Landtag

The Hanoverian Landtag has 135 seats. Its composition at the last three elections was as follows.

The Zentrum’s seats are in the Catholic west of the kingdom, the Emsland and Osnabrück, where the DHP’s Catholic minority competes with it for every vote. The DKP, the agrarian conservatives, lost their last two Hanoverian seats to the DHP in 2023 and have not won one back.

The buses

His government’s largest programme is the rural transport guarantee, under which every village in the kingdom has at least an hourly bus or a call-bus that comes when it is telephoned. It is the countryside’s answer to the village schools, which needed buses that did not take the children away, and it is the most expensive thing his government does.

The guarantee is simple to state and expensive to keep. Every village with more than a hundred inhabitants has a bus at least once an hour from six in the morning to ten at night, and every smaller place a call-bus that comes within forty minutes of a telephone call. The buses are run by the counties and paid for by the kingdom, and they carry, by the transport ministry’s own figures, more schoolchildren and pensioners than everybody else together. The finance ministry has said that the guarantee costs more each year than it did the year before, and the transport ministry has said that this is because more people use it each year, and both are right.

Housing and the Trade Fair

He has also built houses and saved a fair. His government’s housing programme has built in the city of Hanover, in Göttingen and in the other university and market towns, where rents had risen faster than anywhere in northern Germany outside Hamburg. And the Hannover Trade Fair, the largest industrial fair in the Empire, which had had its worst years in the early 2020s, was refinanced by the kingdom and reorganised under a new board, and has filled its halls again since 2025. He opens it every April in a speech that runs, by the fair’s own count, eleven minutes over its allotted time every year.

May 2028

In May 2028 he was re-elected, three months after the death of Heinrich I and in a campaign that was quieter than his first because Hanover was in mourning for a German Emperor whose son had been born in the city. The DHP held its majority, gaining a seat, and he took the SPD into government again on the same terms. It was the last Hanoverian election of Ernest V’s reign.

In the Empire

Hanover’s six votes in the Bundesrat are cast together, and the DHP has never once split them. Under his government they have gone, on imperial business, with the Chancellor’s coalition more often than against it, and on two matters, the financing of rural rail and the federal share of school buildings, they have gone against it and decided the vote. The DHP’s eleven members in the Reichstag sit in no group and vote case by case, and Chancellor Matthias Brenner’s coalition of the progressive liberals, the Zentrum and the SPD has needed them on four occasions since 2023 and has had them on three.

He treats Berlin as a partner and the Empire as his own. Hanover belongs to Germany: its law, defence, citizenship and economy are German, and its premier has never proposed that they should be anything else. What the DHP defends is not autonomy from Germany but competence within it, and the distinction is the whole of Hanoverian politics. He has said that Hanover is the most loyal state in the Empire precisely because it is the only one that once had the choice.

The King’s minister

The box

The King of Hanover signs every Hanoverian act in person, wherever he is, and the kingdom has no representative of the Crown. Under Ernest V, who lived in London, that meant that the Hanoverian papers went to London. Every week a red box of Hanoverian papers was flown to London by a courier of the Crown Relations Office, read by the King, signed, and flown back, and the arrangement had worked that way for most of the reign.

Asmussen went with the box four times a year. Each of his audiences was in London, in German, for about an hour, and the King kept them although he had no constitutional need to, on the ground that a King who signs a kingdom’s laws should see its premier more than once a decade.

Ernest V

He was as close to Ernest V as a King and a minister can be. The King liked him, asked for him by name when Hanoverian business arose, and asked at every audience about the village schools, whose names he learned. Asmussen called him Majestät and the King called him Herr Asmussen, in German, always; the King never used his first name, and Asmussen has said that he would have been distressed if he had.

They never once confused the Crown they were discussing. The King held fourteen capacities and Asmussen advised him in one of them, and both men were, by the account of the Crown Relations Office, punctilious about it to the point of comedy: on one occasion the King stopped a conversation about the Hannover Trade Fair to ask whether it was proposed to raise anything that touched Brunswick, and when Asmussen said that it was not, said that in that case he would enjoy it.

The birthdays

Ernest V’s birthday, 9 February, was kept every year at Herrenhausen. The gardens were opened, the yellow and white flags went up, and the kingdom’s schools had the afternoon off. Over the reign the King came in person every second or third year, and three times in Asmussen’s time, in 2024, 2025 and 2027, and Asmussen was host each time.

In February 2025 the King conferred on him the Royal Guelphic Order, in the gardens at Herrenhausen, on his birthday. It is the only honour Asmussen has accepted. The DHP’s rule that its ministers take nothing from Berlin does not apply to the Hanoverian Crown, and he has said that he could not have refused it without explaining the Crown Exception to the King, which would have been absurd.

The Royal Archives

The Royal Archives at Hanover keep the one authenticated register of recognition instruments and succession notices for all fourteen Crowns. They are the only office the realms could agree to trust, and the Crown Relations Office administers the register under the Crown Exception. The Archives are a Hanoverian institution, answerable to Hanoverian law and funded by the Landtag, and the minister answerable for them is the Minister-President.

In the autumn of 2028 they did more work than in the previous fifty years. They certified the form of a regency of the Hanoverian Crown exercised by a Queen of another Crown, for which there was no precedent. They received and registered the succession notices of all fourteen Crowns when the King abdicated, so that the one register in the world that records who reigns in each of the King’s realms recorded, on the evening of 31 October, the same name in every line. And they certified the regnal style of the new King in Hanover, as they certify every regnal style. Asmussen has said that the Archives are the reason Hanover matters to the realms, and that they are staffed by eleven people.

The Welf estates

The Welf family’s estates, in Lower Saxony and in Austria, belong to the house and not to the Crown, and the line between the two drawn by the settlement of 1866 has been argued over in the law reports ever since. The Crown holds the Herrenhausen palaces and the Archives for the kingdom; the house holds its private patrimony; and successive cases have turned on which side of the line particular lands, paintings and revenues fall.

The DHP holds that the estates belong to the family, and he says so. It is the one Welf question on which his party takes a side against the Crown’s own interest, on the ground that a monarchy that takes its family’s property because it can is not one the DHP wishes to defend. His government is not a party to the litigation, and he has never commented on a case while it was before the courts. But asked in the Landtag in 2024 whether the kingdom should claim more of the patrimony for the Crown, he said that Hanover had once been very glad not to have its own property taken by a larger neighbour, and that it would not now do the same to a family.

The year of the regency

February

On 12 February 2028 Heinrich I died at Potsdam. His son Alexander, the German Emperor at fourteen, had been born at Hanover, and the city mourned him as a Hanoverian Emperor’s father. Asmussen attended the imperial service at Berlin Cathedral and spoke about Heinrich in the Landtag the next week, briefly, for him. His government said nothing about the Prussian regency, then or afterwards, on the ground that it was Prussia’s.

25 September

When the King’s aircraft was lost on 25 September, he went to Herrenhausen. People had begun leaving flowers at the gates of the gardens within an hour of the news, and he walked there from the Leine Palace in the evening, stood among them for some time, and went home. He said nothing that night. Hanover made no statement until London and New Westminster had made theirs.

The Regency Act

Hanover made Queen Christina its Regent by an Act of the Landtag on Wednesday 11 October, the day after the German amendments. The day’s delay was the Royal Archives’. A regency of the Hanoverian Crown exercised by a Queen of another Crown had no precedent, and the Archives, which certify the form of every Hanoverian Crown instrument, needed a day to settle it. The Act declares the King incapable of performing the royal functions in Hanover and makes the Queen Regent, acting only on Hanover’s own ministers’ advice and paid nothing for it.

The day before, Hanover’s six Bundesrat votes had gone for the imperial regency amendments, which abolished the Prussian Regency Council and made Princess Charlotte sole Regent. Asmussen voted for them in the Empire’s name and said nothing about them in Hanover’s.

Columbia Palace

On 12 October he flew to New Westminster to hear the Queen take the Hanoverian oath. She took it at Columbia Palace in the second sitting of that day, for Raj, Hanover, Brunswick and Normandy, each in the realm’s own language, and his presence made him the first Minister-President of Hanover to set foot in the Realm on Crown business. He was in New Westminster for eighteen hours.

He did not go into the hospital. The King was unconscious in New Westminster General, and his household had asked that nobody visit. Asmussen left heather from the Lüneburg Heath at the hospital’s door, without his name, and a card with one line on it in German: Hannover wartet, Hanover is waiting. A nurse saw the card and the line was reported, and Hanoverians have taken it as the most Hanoverian thing their premier has ever said.

The Regent

Since 12 October he has advised the Regent in a weekly audience by video, on Thursdays, from the Leine Palace to Columbia Palace, in German. The red box goes to New Westminster now instead of London. The Queen reads every paper in it and asks one question an audience.

The audiences are short and exact. The Regent has the papers by Tuesday, reads all of them, and on Thursday asks about one, in German, usually the one he hoped she would not notice. He answers it, and the audience ends, and the box goes back with her signature on everything in it. He has said that in twenty minutes on a Thursday he is examined more closely than in a week of the Landtag, and that he has come to prepare for it as he once prepared for an inspection.

Their relationship is correct and growing warmer. He has said in public that she is the best-prepared head of state Hanover has had, and was rebuked for it by his own party, whose members did not wish their premier to be comparing the Regent with the King, in either direction. He has not said it again.

The abdication

On 30 October the King told the peoples of his realms that he would give up the Crown, and the thirteen governments of the Interrealm Succession Compact answered with common terms drafted in London. In the days before, while the realms were being asked, Hanover’s and Brunswick’s answers went to London from the two Landtage in German, in the same envelope. It was Asmussen’s doing and Thomas Rehbein’s, the Minister-President of Brunswick: the two men agreed on the telephone that the two Welf states should answer together, and the two Landtage sat on the same morning to do it.

He let Berlin see Hanover’s abdication Act in draft. The imperial Interior Ministry asked to review it before the Landtag passed it, which under the Crown Exception it had no right to do, and he agreed, to keep the peace in a week when Hanover needed Berlin’s goodwill more than its own precedent. His own party minded, and minds still. It is the only occasion in his time in office on which the Crown Exception has been tested, and the DHP’s view is that it failed the test.

On 31 October he spoke for five minutes in the Landtag before the Act passed. He thanked the King for fifty-six years in Hanover, said that the kingdom had been fortunate in him, and moved the Act, and the Landtag passed it standing. The abdication took effect in every realm at six in the evening, London time, and Hanover had its second Georg V.

The numbering was argued in his own party. Hanover’s own King Georg V reigned from 1851 to 1878, the same man the Atlantic realms call Ernest II, and the DHP’s traditionalists asked that the new King be Georg VI in Hanover, by Hanover’s own count. Asmussen took the union’s numbering instead, so that the King is George V in every realm, and the Royal Archives certified the style. He has said that a King with fourteen Crowns and fourteen numbers would need fourteen secretaries to address him.

Los Angeles

After the earthquake in Los Angeles on 2 November, the German Empire’s rescue team came from Hanover. Foreign affairs belong to Berlin, and it was the imperial government that offered help to the Realm. It chose Hanover’s team as the best equipped, and Asmussen said yes within the hour. Forty searchers of Hanover’s fire service and six dogs flew that night, and worked in the collapsed blocks of the Inland Empire from the morning of 3 November. They came home on Friday 10 November, and he met them at the airport, as he had said he would.

He remarked once on what everybody had noticed. At a press conference on 3 November he said that Hanover was offering help to a government that advised the same Regent he did, and that this was exactly why the offer had to go through Berlin. He said it once and has not been asked to say it again.

The succession

The question

Since 31 October the German Emperor has stood second in line to Hanover’s Crown. The King is fifteen and an only child, and behind him the line passes to his aunt, Empress Caroline, and then to her son, Alexander I, German Emperor and King of Prussia, and her daughter. Hanover and Brunswick are constituent states of the Empire, and no instrument of Hanover, of the Empire or of the Compact says what would follow if their Crowns reached the Emperor of the federation they belong to.

The question is constitutional on three levels at once, which is why nobody had touched it. If the line reached the Emperor, the head of the German federation would become King of Hanover and Duke of Brunswick, two of the federation’s own constituent states, and the imperial Constitution, written in 1871 for a federation of princes who each reigned in one place, says nothing about a federal head who is also a member. He would hold the Hanoverian Crown, which acts only on Hanoverian advice, as the same person who holds the imperial Crown, which acts on the Chancellor’s; Hanover’s six Bundesrat votes would be cast in the name of the man whose government they exist to check. And he would hold twelve other Crowns in the Atlantic realms, whose Compact has rules for many things and none for a sovereign who already reigns over a European empire.

Asmussen’s view, so far as he has given one, is that the answer matters less than having one. He has said that a question nobody has studied becomes a crisis on the day it is needed, and that the day it is needed is the worst possible day to begin. He has not said what he thinks the answer should be, and his letter was drafted so that it could not be read as proposing one.

The letter

On Wednesday 1 November, the day after the abdication, he wrote privately to the Imperial Chancellor, Matthias Brenner. The letter proposed a joint study by the Empire, Hanover and Brunswick of what would follow if the Hanoverian line reached the Emperor. It expressed no view on the answer. It said that the question had been noticed by everybody and studied by nobody, and that it was better studied while the King was fifteen than when he was not.

It leaked to a Hamburg newspaper on Saturday 4 November. Asmussen confirmed it the same day, said that he had nothing to add to it, and added nothing.

On Tuesday 7 November the Chancellery said that the Empire welcomed the proposal, and that talks among the imperial government, Hanover and Brunswick would begin early in the new year. It is the first time since the accession that any government has undertaken to do anything about the question, and the talks have no date, no agenda and no published terms of reference.

Relationships

Brunswick

He and Thomas Rehbein are close friends. They speak every week, they take their holidays near each other on the North Sea coast, and they were the two premiers who answered London in one envelope. The friendship is personal and he is careful with it: Brunswick’s great fear is absorption by its larger Welf neighbour, and he has said that the duty of a Hanoverian premier in Brunswick is to remember that he is a foreigner there.

He has said nothing about Brunswick’s industrial dispute, in which the duchy’s Landtag passed the Productive Continuity Act to stop the closure of Brunswick Motor Works, although Hanoverian suppliers had work at stake in it. The treaty council of the two states coordinates broadcasting, health planning, transport, universities, emergencies and archives, and cannot direct either ministry, and he has said that a Hanoverian premier who gave Brunswick advice on its own factory would be doing what Brunswick has feared from Hanover for a hundred and fifty years.

Berlin

His relationship with the Chancellor is friendly and wary. They like each other, they have known each other since Brenner was a Reichstag member and Asmussen a schoolteacher, and every negotiation between their governments begins with a memorandum. Brenner is reported to have said that he has never had a conversation with the Minister-President of Hanover that did not end with a document, and that he has come to find it restful.

Empress Caroline

He and Empress Caroline have liked each other since 2015. She is in Hanover every month, to see her husband’s mother and the archives, and they meet, by the account of both households, rarely and warmly, and discuss nothing that touches the business of any government. The DHP regards her as its own, a Welf princess who went to Potsdam, and she has never given the party the slightest encouragement to.

George V

He has never met the King he now advises. The King was not at the second sitting at Columbia Palace on 12 October, and since the accession Hanover’s business has gone to the Regent. Asmussen has said that he looks forward to meeting him, and that he hopes the King will come to Herrenhausen for his birthday when he is old enough to want to.

Private life

He is married to Pastor Silke Asmussen, who is the pastor of a Lutheran parish in Linden, the old workers’ quarter on the west bank of the Leine. They met at a church choir in the 1990s and married in 2000. They live in the parish’s quarter of the city, which is why the Minister-President of a kingdom lives in a district better known for its students, its cafés and its political posters, very few of them his.

His wife’s parish is one of the oldest in Linden, a large brick church on a square where the old factory streets meet, with a congregation of millworkers’ grandchildren, students and the families who have come to the quarter from Turkey, Poland and the Balkans over sixty years. Pastor Asmussen has been its pastor since 2009. She has declined every invitation to appear with her husband in an official capacity except at the King’s birthday, and has said that she has her own parish to look after and that he has his.

They have two children. Their son, who trained as a baker, runs the family bakery in List that his grandparents kept. Their daughter is a medical student at Göttingen. Neither is in public life, and the Hanoverian press has an understanding, honoured since 2023, that the bakery is not to be photographed.

He is a Lutheran and goes to church on Sundays, in his wife’s parish, where he sits in the congregation and sings. He has said that he is the only member of the Landtag who is preached at every week by a member of his own household.

His daughter is at Göttingen, the Hanoverian university, where she is in the clinical years of medicine, and his son, who trained as a baker after leaving school, took over the bakery in List when Asmussen’s parents retired. The Minister-President is at the bakery most Saturday mornings before the football, behind the counter, and the customers of List have long since stopped finding it remarkable.

He goes to work by tram. It is a ride of about twenty minutes from Linden to the Leine Palace, in the morning rush, with a protection officer standing beside him, and Hanoverians are so used to seeing him on it that they no longer remark on it. He is at Hannover 96 whenever the Landtag allows, in the seat he has had since he was twelve, and he follows rugby league from Yorkshire on the radio, alone.

Manner and reputation

Der Lehrer

He is a warm and talkative man. At a village fair he is unstoppable, at a Landtag debate he is long, and his speeches at the opening of the Trade Fair have become a fixture of the Hanoverian calendar partly for how far they overrun. Hanoverians call him der Lehrer, the teacher, which in the villages is affectionate and in Berlin faintly mocking.

On the business of the Crown he is very brief. On every formal call or audience touching the Crown he speaks as if each sentence were a legal instrument, which in a sense it is. Officials of the Crown Relations Office describe a man who talks for an hour at a school prize-giving and for four sentences on the telephone to the Regent, and who sees no inconsistency, because the second is law and the first is not.

He has a teacher’s habits that he has never lost. He reads every paper before a meeting and expects others to have done the same, he answers a question he thinks badly put by restating it properly first, and he has been seen, more than once, correcting a minister’s grammar in the margin of a Cabinet paper with a red pen. His officials say that the red pen is the surest sign that he has read a document all the way through, and that its absence is the surest sign that he has not.

In Hanover

He is very popular in Hanover, more popular than his party, across the kingdom and in the city as well as the countryside. There is no republican current in Hanover to speak of, and nobody in the kingdom argues for a republic in earnest; his popularity is that of a premier liked by people who agree about the thing that matters most to him.

In Germany

Outside Hanover he is a monarchist curiosity. The German press regards the DHP as the court party of a kingdom whose King lives on another continent, and its leader as a talkative schoolmaster from the Leine who speaks Low German in parliament and has eleven votes in the Reichstag. Interest in him is chiefly among those who watch the Welf states, and it rose briefly in October and again with the letter of 1 November.

Failings

The sharpest criticism of him is cost. The village schools he kept open as Minister of Education, and the rural bus guarantee he has built as Minister-President, are the two largest recurring commitments in Hanover’s budget that its neighbours do not carry, and the kingdom’s finance ministry, under two governments, has said that Hanover cannot afford both indefinitely. He has said that it cannot afford to lose the villages. Neither side has produced a figure the other accepts.

His own party’s criticism is the draft. Letting Berlin’s Interior Ministry see the abdication Act in advance was, in the DHP’s view, a concession that the Crown Exception does not require and that Berlin will remember. He has defended it as the right decision in a week when everything else mattered more. The party has not forgiven it and has not challenged him over it either.

And he talks. His critics in the Landtag say that a premier who can speak for an hour at a fair on any subject can speak for an hour without answering a question, and that he sometimes does. His defenders reply that on the questions that matter most, the Crown’s, he has never used more than four sentences.

Honours

He holds one honour, the Royal Guelphic Order, the Hanoverian order of the Crown, conferred by Ernest V at Herrenhausen on the King’s birthday in February 2025. He wears it at Hanoverian occasions and nowhere else.

Assessment

He is a regional politician who found himself, in one autumn, handling more Crown business than any Hanoverian premier since the Crown Exception was made. In four weeks his government made a Queen of another Crown its Regent, gave effect to the abdication of the King he had advised, answered the realms jointly with Brunswick, and sent a rescue team across the world through Berlin. It made no public mistake, and the one concession it made, the draft shown to the Interior Ministry, was made knowingly.

His achievement before that autumn was in the schools. The curriculum of 1866, the village schools and the Low German lessons are the work by which Hanover knew him before it knew him as premier, and they are, on the evidence of two elections, the reason the DHP has its majority.

His party’s success under him is the success of a regional politics that does not want to leave anything. The DHP has never asked for Hanover to be less German, and under Asmussen it has asked for the kingdom to be more itself: its history in its schools, its language in its classrooms, its villages served, its archives kept, its Crown’s business done by its own government and nobody else’s. That this programme has produced a majority in a German state in the twenty-first century is the clearest evidence that the settlement of 1866 is still, for Hanoverians, a living arrangement and not a historical one.

His letter of 1 November is the first step any government has taken on the question that the accession left open, and the Register records that Berlin has agreed to talk, that the talks have no date, and that what the Empire would do if the Hanoverian line reached its Emperor remains unanswered.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Kingdom of Hanover, the kingdom he governs
• Duchy of Brunswick, the other Welf state, whose premier Thomas Rehbein is his close friend
• Ernest V, the King he advised for five years
• Christina II of Sweden, the Regent he has advised since 12 October 2028
• George V, the King he now advises through her and has never met
• Empress Caroline, heir presumptive, who reopened one of his village schools in 2015
• Alexander I, the German Emperor, born at Hanover, second in line to its Crown
• German Empire, of which Hanover is a constituent state
• Kittyhawk, the loss of the King’s aircraft and the regencies that followed

Categories

People · World People · Hanover · The German Empire · The Crown