Lukas Brandt

Lukas Brandt (born 18 July 2014) is a Potsdam schoolboy and the closest friend of Alexander I, German Emperor and King of Prussia. He holds the ceremonial appointment of Page and Gefährte, Page and Companion, in the imperial household, one of three such appointments made to the Emperor’s pre-accession friends in the weeks after Alexander succeeded in 2028. The appointment regulates access, safeguarding and public appearances. It confers no patronage, no function in government and no access to state papers, and the household has been consistent in saying so.

He is an ordinary boy by every measure the record can apply. His father teaches history in a Potsdam school and his mother keeps a cafe; the family has no connection to the court, the nobility or the imperial service, and had none before 2022, when the two boys met in a school walking group at the ages of eight. The friendship therefore predates the Gymnasium they now attend together, the regency, the Prussian crisis and the crown itself. It is the only relationship in Alexander’s life that was formed before he was a person of consequence.

Its public significance is a matter of proximity rather than of anything Brandt has done. Since the accession he has been photographed beside a reigning sovereign, named in the press, recognised in the streets of Potsdam and claimed as a supporter by political movements he has never addressed. He knows the Emperor’s private view of the dismissal of Johanna Falk and has said nothing about it to anyone who has asked. He privately supports the campaign for early personal rule and has never said so in public either. The distance between what he knows and what he says is the substance of his position, and it is maintained by loyalty to a friend rather than by any constitutional conviction, a distinction the record should not blur.

The arrangement that governs him remains unsettled in ways the household has not resolved. It presented the appointments to three children as an honour rather than as a set of obligations; it never formally told Brandt that he must not see state papers, and he was in due course present when something was said that he should not have heard; and it has since come to rely on a pattern of ordinary walks and ordinary company that steadies the Emperor, while continuing to insist that the boy providing it has no function at all.

Family and early life

Königsberg

Brandt was born at Königsberg on 18 July 2014, six months after Alexander, in the eastern province of the Kingdom of Prussia. His mother’s family has been in the city for four generations and remains there; his father came to it for a first teaching post and left it for a better one. The birth is therefore an accident of his father’s early career rather than a family fact, though the family does not describe it that way and the city itself has taken a proprietary interest in him since 2028 that no one in the household anticipated.

The family moved west to Potsdam during his early childhood, and the Königsberg connection now survives chiefly in the family’s speech, its relatives and its habit of describing itself as Prussian rather than as Berliner. The distinction matters more inside the household than outside it. Potsdam is a court town and a scientific one, and a family arriving from the far east of the kingdom entered it without the local networks that a Potsdam childhood would have supplied.

Brandt has no memory of Königsberg and has been back three times, twice as a small child and once in the summer of 2027, before any of this. He speaks of it as a place his grandparents live. Since the accession the city’s newspapers have run a steady quantity of material on the local origins of the Emperor’s friend, and a Königsberg school has twice asked to name something after him, which the household has twice declined on his behalf without consulting him.

The move to Potsdam

The move was made for work and for schooling and involved no drama. What it produced, and what the family did not foresee, was a boy raised in a town where the court is a visible employer, where the Emperor’s household is a fact of the local economy, and where the arrival of a royal motorcade is an ordinary interruption to a Tuesday afternoon rather than an event. Potsdam children grow up near the monarchy in a way that children in Berlin, forty minutes away, do not.

This is worth stating because it partly explains why the friendship survived the discovery of what Alexander was. Brandt did not have to learn that a prince was a person. He had grown up in a town where the household’s cars went past the end of his street, and where the palaces were places you walked through on the way to somewhere else.

The parents

His father teaches history at a Potsdam school, not the one his sons attend. His mother owns and runs a cafe. The family is professional in the ordinary sense, comfortable without being wealthy, and its two incomes are of different kinds: a salary and a small business whose takings depend on the season and the street. The distinction has mattered since 2028, because a salary is insulated from public attention and a cafe is not.

The parents were pleased when the appointment was offered and have grown more careful since. Both have refused payment for accounts of their son’s friendship, on more than one occasion and without publicising the refusals; the largest of the offers, made through an intermediary by a magazine, was for a sum that would have cleared the outstanding loan on the cafe fittings. Their private hopes for him differ in a way that is not a disagreement: his father would like him to have a vocation, and his mother would like him to be left alone.

The household requested at the outset that the family be identified only by surname, and the German press has broadly observed the request. The first names of his parents and of his brother are therefore not in the public record. This has not prevented the family from being found. His mother’s cafe has drawn visitors who came to see where the Emperor’s friend lives rather than to buy coffee, and the business has had to absorb an attention it did not seek and cannot easily refuse. His father’s position has been unaffected, which the family attributes to the good sense of the school rather than to any protection.

The brother

Lukas has one younger brother, three years his junior, who regards the entire situation as enviable and says so at every opportunity. He is not a companion, holds no appointment, is not covered by the household’s arrangements except incidentally, and is photographed anyway.

The asymmetry is the family’s quietest difficulty. One son has a protection detail’s attention, a household contact, a press office and a rule against being named in captions; the other has none of these and lives in the same house. The household considered extending the safeguarding provisions to siblings and did not do so, on the reasoning that a formal arrangement would draw more attention to him than it deflected. Whether that reasoning was correct has not been tested.

Faith and the confirmation

The household is Lutheran in the customary manner of the Prussian evangelical settlement, which is to say that it observes the festivals and does not otherwise organise its week around the church. Brandt was confirmed in the spring of 2028, in the parish church his family has attended since the move, in a class of nineteen.

The confirmation was the first collision between his ordinary life and his new position, and it was managed badly by everyone involved and well by the parish. Alexander wished to attend, which raised a question the household had not yet had to answer: whether a reigning sovereign can be present at a private religious occasion in a parish church as a guest rather than as the Emperor. The answer arrived at was that he could, provided the visit was not announced, not photographed and not recorded as an engagement. He came, sat with the family, and left before the reception. The pastor, who had been given four days’ notice, has declined every request to discuss it.

Queen Caroline exercises the formal governorship of the Evangelical Church of the Prussian Union during Alexander’s minority, a fact of which Brandt was entirely unaware until it was explained to him afterwards, and which he found, in his own account, extremely funny.

Politics of the household

The family’s politics are Social Democratic and have been for two generations, a fact the family states without heat. Neither parent is a member of a party and neither has held office in anything larger than a residents’ association. Since the Falk dismissal the family’s position has become awkward in a way it has never discussed publicly: the ministry the Regency Council removed was led by an SPD lawyer, the coalition that supports her contains the party the Brandts have voted for all their adult lives, and their son is the closest friend of the sovereign in whose name the removal was carried out.

They have said nothing about any of it. Neither parent has been quoted on the crisis, and both have declined to be. The household regards this as exemplary and has never asked whether it costs them anything.

School

The Humboldt-Gymnasium

Brandt attends the Humboldt-Gymnasium in Potsdam, in Klasse 8, in the same form as the Emperor and sharing most of his lessons. The school is an ordinary state Gymnasium and was chosen for Alexander on precisely that ground, the household having preferred an ordinary day school to a palace education.

It has found the resulting arrangement difficult in ways it did not anticipate, and its staff have managed the presence of a reigning sovereign in a classroom with an anxiety that has not entirely subsided. The practical measures are modest and unmistakable: a permanent protection presence at the gate, a revised procedure for visitors, a rule against photography on the premises that predates 2028 and is now enforced, and a press liaison arrangement that the school’s administration finds burdensome. The staff have been briefed not to accommodate reporters, and have not.

The school’s own view, so far as it has one, is that the situation is temporary and must be endured with as little alteration to the ordinary school as possible. The teachers have been notably better at this than the parents of other pupils, some of whom have made requests of the school in the past year that its head has described in a letter to all families as inappropriate.

His work

He is a strong pupil, strongest in history, which is his father’s subject and his own intended field. He is weak in mathematics. The weakness is worth recording because it shapes the rest of him: it is the reason his astronomy has remained a matter of looking rather than of calculating, and it is the one area of school where his enthusiasm reliably outruns his competence. A report of the period observed that he contributes readily and works hard at what interests him, and cautioned him against allowing enthusiasm to substitute for precision.

He is competent in English, which the school teaches from Klasse 5 and which Alexander speaks fluently, and he has picked up a small and eccentric quantity of Polish from Jakub Nowak, chiefly consisting of insults. He reads a great deal, mostly history and mostly narrative, and has been working through his father’s shelves in no particular order since he was eleven.

How they met

The two boys met in 2022, at eight, in the school walking group they both joined at their Grundschule, six years before either of them had any public standing. The group walked on Friday afternoons in the parks and the forest margins around Potsdam, was run by a teacher who is now retired, and existed because a certain number of eight-year-olds in any school need somewhere to put their legs.

They were not brought together by astronomy, which each of them had come to independently and discovered in the other only afterwards. They were brought together by the ordinary mechanism of two children being placed at the back of a line together for a term. Brandt has been asked repeatedly, by journalists and once by a biographer, whether he understood who Alexander was. His answer has been consistent and unhelpful to everyone who has asked it: that he knew, in the way a Potsdam child knows, and that it did not seem to be the interesting thing about him.

The Grundschulen of the province run to Klasse 6, so the two of them stayed in the same building until they were thirteen. They transferred up to the Humboldt-Gymnasium together in 2027, the year before the accession.

The six ordinary years

Between 2022 and 2028 the friendship was, by every account, unremarkable. Alexander was the second child of the Crown Prince and later of the Emperor, was expected to succeed in due course and at an age nobody had cause to think about, and lived a childhood that the household had deliberately arranged to be as normal as protection would allow. Brandt came to the family’s residence, was given supper, was taught to play a card game by the Emperor’s daughter, and went home. Alexander came to the Brandt house rather less often and liked it rather more.

There was a protection detail throughout and Brandt’s memory of these years is largely a memory of not noticing it. The arrangements that now govern every walk existed then in a lighter form, and the difference between a prince who is fourth or fifth in the ordinary calculations of a household and a sovereign who is the reason the household exists is a difference that only became visible on 12 February 2028.

Both boys are conscious that this period is now the thing they are asked about, and both find the questions difficult, because there is nothing in it. It was six years of walking, homework, arguments about nothing and a shared discovery of the planets. Its entire significance is that it happened before.

Since the accession

His position among his contemporaries has changed unevenly. The bulk of his classmates treat him as they always did. Some do not: he has lost friendships over it, has met resentment and teasing, and has on one occasion been the subject of organised abuse online. He has not made a public issue of any of it.

The specific pressures are the predictable ones and are none the lighter for being predictable. He is asked for things: introductions, photographs, a word passed on, an opinion he is not permitted to give. He is accused, generally by older pupils, of having arranged his own position. He has been told more than once that he is being used, which he has never denied, and once that he is using Alexander, which he minded a great deal more.

His place in the school cross-country team was never in question, on the team’s stated reasoning that he can still run.

Astronomy

The telescope and the garden

Brandt’s astronomy began independently of Alexander’s and remains a different thing from it. He owns a modest refracting telescope, an eighty-millimetre instrument bought second-hand by his parents for his eleventh birthday, and observes from the family garden, which is small, overlooked and badly affected by a neighbour’s security light that has been the subject of four years of unsuccessful diplomacy.

His interest is in the planets: he can find them, follow them across a season and describe them with enthusiasm, and he cannot perform the mathematics that would let him predict them. He keeps his own observing notes, separate from Alexander’s, and they are less rigorous. They are also, in the assessment of an observatory astronomer who has seen both, more pleasant to read.

The observatory

He is at the Potsdam observatory with the Emperor about three times a week, less often than before the accession, and the staff there know him by name. The visits are now arranged rather than casual, appear in a schedule, and involve a protection presence in a building that was not designed for one.

Where Alexander’s interest is a discipline of accuracy, patience and record, governed by correspondence with working astronomers, Brandt’s is frankly romantic. He belongs to no society, corresponds with no one, has no intention of studying the subject and does not want it to become anything. Asked what it gives him, he has said in effect that it asks nothing of him, which is the point.

The equality

There is a second and unstated reason the pursuit matters to both of them. It is the one part of their shared life in which they are exactly equal, because the sky is indifferent to which of them is Emperor.

The household has never given or lent him equipment. The point is not incidental. A telescope from a sovereign to a schoolboy would be a gift creating an obligation, and the rule against patronage exists to prevent precisely that; the modest refractor in the Brandt garden was bought by his parents. Alexander has wanted him given a security clearance so that the friendship need not be conducted around a line, and the answer has been no. The refusal is correct and it is also a small portrait of the Emperor’s isolation.

The comet

The night both boys still refer to is a comet, seen in the winter before the accession, from open ground with no filed route, no protection detail and no arrangements of any kind. They cycled out after dark without telling anyone in sufficient detail, were gone for rather longer than either family had expected, and were not, in the event, in any difficulty.

They have not had a night like it since, and both of them understand that they will not. The household, which learned of the episode only afterwards and only because Brandt mentioned it, has never commented on it. Brandt has been asked what the comet looked like more often than he has been asked any other question, and has never given a good answer, which suggests that the comet was not the point.

Running and hiking

Hiking

Hiking came first and matters more to him. He walks the Brandenburg lakes and forests, generally for a full day where the day allows it and an afternoon where it does not, most often with the Emperor and otherwise with his younger brother.

He learned it from his father, who walks badly and enjoys it, and he has the ordinary equipment of a boy who is serious about it without being expensive: a pair of boots resoled once, a map case, and a route notebook that he keeps with more discipline than he keeps his observing notes. He has walked the same eleven-kilometre circuit near Werder more than forty times and can describe the state of a particular gate in each of the last three years.

Cross country

He runs cross country for the school. He is solidly good rather than exceptional, trains without a coach, and runs in the parks before school. He won his district championship and finished fourth in the Brandenburg schools final, and it is the fourth place he talks about, on the ground that the field was better.

Alexander runs with him and cannot keep up. This is the only arena in either boy’s life in which their relative standing is reversed, and neither of them has ever pretended otherwise. It is also, according to people who have watched them, the only context in which Brandt is entirely without deference, since a running partner who is losing gets told so.

What a walk with a sovereign involves

A walk with a reigning Emperor is a protection operation, and the fact governs everything about it. Routes are filed in advance, which removes the possibility of deciding at the trailhead to go further. Officers walk ahead and behind at a distance calculated to be unobtrusive, which it never entirely is. Vehicles wait at road crossings and medical cover is kept within reach. The forest is not closed, since closing it would attract the attention the arrangement exists to avoid, and the detail’s most persistent difficulty is therefore the ordinary walker with a telephone.

Brandt’s proposed routes are now reviewed before they are walked, a circumstance he finds both funny and mildly humiliating. He continues to propose the longer route. It is occasionally allowed.

The two interests are separate halves of him and converge only sometimes, on the walks that end far enough from the towns for the sky to be worth looking at.

The depression

Alexander has publicly acknowledged a diagnosis of depression, and Brandt’s part in it is best described by what he does not do. He has never used the language of treatment, never proposed exercise as a remedy and never discussed the Emperor’s health with anyone at all.

He has worked out, without being told, which days Alexander needs to be outdoors, and on those days he observes that the weather is good and asks whether he is coming. The household has noticed the pattern and values it. It has never asked him to maintain it, on the sound reasoning that a duty would destroy the thing that makes it work.

Page and Gefährte

The appointment

The appointment was made within weeks of the accession, on the proposal of Princess Charlotte, who chairs the Regency Council and who judged that a small number of named and regulated friendships would be safer for everyone than an undefined circle. Three appointments were made, on identical terms. His parents were required to consent in writing.

The problem it was designed to solve was real and had already begun. In the days after 12 February a number of people who had known Alexander slightly began describing themselves in print as his friends, and a smaller number began being approached by others who wanted something. An undefined circle of children around a sovereign is an access route that nobody controls. Charlotte’s solution was to define the circle, publish it, and attach rules to it.

The funeral

Brandt’s first appearance in the public record predates the appointment. He attended the state funeral of Heinrich I in February 2028 as a private guest of the family, and the question of where he should stand had no settled answer, because no category existed for him. He was placed with the household rather than with the mourners or the public, which was a decision taken quickly by an official under pressure and which turned out to have set the pattern for everything since.

He was photographed there. It is the earliest photograph of him in general circulation, and he appears in it as what he was: a thirteen-year-old in a borrowed coat, standing where he had been put, some distance behind a friend who had become Emperor six days earlier.

The three companions

The other two appointments were made to Amalie von Keller and Jakub Nowak, and the three are treated identically by the household in every formal respect.

Von Keller is a childhood family friend rather than a school friend, from a family with an established connection to the court, and she is therefore the only one of the three for whom the appointment represents continuity rather than a change of life. She is the most at ease on ceremonial occasions and the most careful in private. Nowak is a Polish-German classmate from the Gymnasium, whose position is the most exposed of the three: a Polish-speaking boy standing beside a King of Prussia who has deliberately learned Polish is a political image whether or not anybody involved intended one, and Nowak has been claimed, attacked and used in the German and Polish press in roughly equal measure.

The three are not a group and were not friends with one another before 2028. They now share a situation that nobody else in Germany shares, and have become, in Brandt’s phrase, colleagues. He and Nowak are close. He and von Keller are correct with each other and improving.

Terms and duties

It carries no salary. Expenses are met and nothing else is provided. There is a uniform for state occasions, which he wears without complaint and with some pleasure; it is dark, plain, provided by the household and altered twice already, because he is fourteen and growing.

The duty itself has almost no content: he processes with the household rather than with the guests, is seated in its junior rank, is presented to visiting figures as a companion of the Emperor and carries nothing more consequential than a folder or a wreath at a memorial. That the role is nearly empty is the reason it exists. A boy of Alexander’s own age standing near him means the Emperor is not the only child in a room of adults.

He is on duty rarely, and the household’s standing instruction is that school comes first. He has attended eleven engagements in the year and has been withdrawn from three at short notice on the household’s own initiative, twice because the occasion was judged too political and once because he had an examination.

Frau Reinhardt

His point of contact is Frau Dorothea Reinhardt, the household secretary responsible for the companions, who telephones his mother, files his walking routes and handles the press office on his behalf. She is dry, exacting and generally liked.

The post did not exist before 2028 and was created because somebody had to hold it. Reinhardt is a career household officer of twenty years’ standing who was given the companions in addition to her existing duties and who has, by general agreement, made a better job of it than the arrangement deserved. She telephones on Sunday evenings. She has twice told the press office to withdraw a proposed photograph and has been overruled once.

Safeguarding

Safeguarding operates through logged visits, notice to his parents of travel, a prohibition on unsupervised contact with the press, a rule that he is not to be named in captions without his consent, and a briefing to his school so that its staff do not accommodate reporters. He has given no interview, and would require the press office’s arrangement to give one.

Underneath these lies a standing provision that he may withdraw from the appointment at any time and is not required to give a reason. He and Alexander are ordinarily alone together in private, as friends of fourteen are, the rules being addressed to access and to publicity rather than to friendship.

Prohibitions

What he is forbidden is more specific than what he is asked to do. He may not accept gifts, payment or hospitality from any person seeking access to the Emperor. He may not speak for Alexander or repeat his opinions. He may not comment on the Falk case or on any political question. He may not carry messages. He may not use the friendship to obtain anything for himself or his family.

He holds no security clearance, and holding none is the substance of the arrangement rather than an oversight in it.

In private

In private he calls the Emperor Alex and uses no style at all. The household has never corrected him. On ceremonial occasions he uses the correct forms without difficulty and reverts the moment the occasion ends, a switch that visiting officials have found more disconcerting than either boy appears to realise.

The two boys message each other constantly on a device that both of them know is monitored, and which neither of them has ever mentioned.

The household’s failure

An honour, not an obligation

The arrangement was introduced to three children as an honour. It was not introduced to them as a set of obligations, and the difference has consequences that fell on the children rather than on the adults who drafted it.

The distinction is not pedantic. A boy told that he has been honoured will try to deserve it. A boy told that he is now subject to a set of restrictions will ask what they are. The household chose the first framing because it was kinder and because it was true, and did not notice that it had thereby declined to give three fourteen-year-olds the information they most needed.

The papers

Brandt was never formally told that he must not see state papers. He inferred the rule, correctly, and kept it. He was nonetheless in due course present when something was said in his hearing that he should not have heard, which was a foreseeable result of giving a schoolboy standing in a working household without first explaining to him what the standing excluded.

There was no procedure for the situation when it arose, because none had been written. One exists now: he reports the matter to Frau Reinhardt, a single line is entered in the household log, and nothing further follows. He is not sworn, cautioned or asked to sign anything, on the deliberate ground that a caution would convert him into a person bearing obligations, which he is not. The household’s position is that the failure was its own.

Rules written afterwards

The rules now governing the companions were therefore written after the difficulty rather than before it. Princess Charlotte’s procedural exactness, which is the most consistently praised feature of her chairmanship, did not extend to the children whose appointments she had proposed. The household has not publicly conceded any of this.

The observation is not that Charlotte acted badly. It is that the same official who insisted on separate agendas, papers, minutes, votes and seals for the imperial and Prussian capacities of a regency council did not think to write down what a fourteen-year-old was and was not permitted to hear, and that the gap between those two standards of care is the most revealing thing in the record about how the household understood the appointments.

The dependence

A second criticism has attracted less notice and is the graver of the two. The household has come to depend on Brandt. It values the walks and the ordinary company that keep the Emperor functioning, has arranged its expectations quietly around them, and continues to maintain that the boy supplying them holds no function whatever.

He is unpaid, unacknowledged and, in a practical sense, load-bearing. Engagements have been arranged around the walks. A member of the household has been heard to describe a given week as a good one on grounds that reduce, on examination, to the number of afternoons Brandt was available. None of this appears in any document, because the household’s formal position is that no such function exists, and a function that does not exist cannot be scheduled.

Nobody representing him

No adult in the arrangement is charged with representing his interests. Frau Reinhardt is a household officer and her duty runs to the household. His parents consented in writing to an arrangement whose terms were explained to them fully and whose consequences were not, because nobody yet knew them. The press office acts for the Emperor. The protection detail acts for the Emperor.

Brandt has never asked for anyone to be appointed and appears not to have considered the question. He is fourteen, and the absence of a representative is not the kind of thing a fourteen-year-old notices until he needs one.

Public exposure

Becoming a public figure

He learned that he had become a public figure from a photograph circulating online, three days after the funeral and before any appointment existed. He is named in the German press rather than described anonymously, and he is recognised in Potsdam by people who have never met him.

The recognition is the part he has found hardest to describe and the part he mentions most. It is not hostile and it is not frequent, and it happens in shops. Its effect, by his own account, is that he no longer goes anywhere without knowing in advance what he will do if it happens, which is a thing no fourteen-year-old should have to have worked out.

The press

The family home has not been doorstepped. The cafe has had visitors of the wrong kind. Offers of payment for an account of the friendship have been made and refused.

The German press has, on the whole, observed the household’s request. The exceptions have been in the foreign and online press, which is not subject to the request and has not felt bound by it, and in a small number of German outlets which have published photographs taken in public places on the correct legal reasoning that they were entitled to. The household has been obliged to correct at least one published story concerning him.

The abuse

He was, on one occasion, the subject of organised abuse online: a coordinated campaign of a few days’ duration, originating with accounts hostile to the campaign for early personal rule, which took the form of material about his family and his appearance rather than about anything he had done.

He did not tell his parents for four days. He told Frau Reinhardt, who told the press office, which took the ordinary steps and achieved the ordinary partial result. He has said almost nothing about it since. The household’s internal assessment, which has not been published, is that the episode was the most serious foreseeable harm the appointments have so far produced and that no provision had been made against it.

Political actors

Political actors have attempted to reach Alexander through him. He has been asked directly what the Emperor thinks about the Falk dismissal, and has said nothing. He has been claimed as a supporter by people he has never met, and images of the young companions have been used by the campaign for early personal rule without their consent or their comment.

The approaches have come from more than one direction and have varied in subtlety from a journalist’s question to an adult at a public event who told him, at some length and without introducing himself, what he should tell his friend. Brandt’s response in every recorded instance has been to say nothing and to remove himself, which is the correct response and which he arrived at without being taught it.

The correction

He has repeated something he should not have on one occasion. It did not concern the crisis or the government. It concerned Queen Caroline, it reached print, the household issued a correction, and Brandt sat with Frau Reinhardt and explained how it had happened.

Nobody raised their voice. The Queen was kind about it, which he found harder to bear than a reprimand. He describes the following week as the worst of the period, and his mother’s account is that he did not eat properly for four days and would not discuss it. He has been noticeably more careful since, in a way that the household regards as the appointment working and that at least one observer has described as a fourteen-year-old learning to be afraid of his own conversation.

The best of it

The best, by his own account, is the comet. His private answer is smaller and more recent: an afternoon on a Brandenburg path when the detail fell back far enough that for the better part of an hour it was simply a walk.

The Prussian crisis

What he follows

Brandt does not follow the constitutional dispute in any detail, and it would be false to present a boy of fourteen as an informed observer of a case turning on the personal powers of the Crown, the status of a dismissed minister-president and a pending reference to the Constitutional Court. He follows Alexander.

He can state the outline correctly if asked, which he has been, by his father. He cannot state the arguments, has no view on the Advice-Binding Declaration, and does not know what the Court is likely to do. What he knows with complete precision is which parts of it Alexander finds unbearable, and this is not a form of knowledge that appears in any account of the crisis.

What he supplies

Alexander talks to him about it a great deal. What Brandt supplies is not analysis, which the Emperor has in abundance from the Regency Council, from Princess Charlotte and from the Imperial Chancellor. It is company that wants nothing.

The distinction is the whole of his position. Every other person Alexander speaks to about the crisis has an interest in it: a vote, a duty, a professional obligation, a party, a case. Brandt has none, and cannot acquire one, because the rules that bind him were written to ensure he could not. He is the only person in the Emperor’s life whose advice cannot be worth anything, and that is precisely what makes his company usable.

The question about motive

On one occasion he said something that changed how the Emperor understood his own conduct. Alexander was going over whether he had been right to insist that his dissent from the dismissal be entered in the Council’s minutes. Brandt asked him whether he had actually believed it, or whether he had wanted the Council to see that he cared.

The question is not one an adviser would ask, since it goes to motive rather than to law. Alexander did not answer at the time and has repeated the exchange since. It altered nothing in the Council, nothing in the litigation and nothing in the constitutional position. It is recorded here as a remark between friends and not as advice tendered, and the distinction should be preserved.

His own position

He supports the campaign for early personal rule, and supports the modernisation of the monarchy more generally, in the manner of a boy who knows the Emperor as a person and thinks it absurd that other people decide for him. He has never said so publicly and does not intend to. He is aware that his silence is not neutrality.

The position is also, on examination, not entirely coherent, and he has not examined it. He wants his friend to be allowed to decide, and he has never asked himself whether his friend wants to, which is a question Alexander has asked himself continuously and answered in the negative more often than not.

Character

Manner

He is dry, silly and given to teasing, and none of these survive contact with the ceremonial parts of his position, which he performs correctly and without conviction. He is perceptive about people, more so than his manner suggests. He is brave in the specific and unglamorous sense that he says the awkward thing in the room and accepts what follows.

He has a temper, which flares briefly, ends quickly and is apologised for at once. In this he is the precise inverse of Alexander, who does not flare and does not quite finish an argument. The two temperaments have never seriously collided, and the household’s view is that this is because Brandt’s flares are over before Alexander has decided what he thinks about them.

What angers him

He can keep a secret and does. He is angered by two things: being treated as a route to the Emperor, and hearing adults discuss Alexander as though he were an office rather than a boy.

The second is the more consistent. He has walked out of a room over it once, at a household function, in circumstances that were noticed and not commented on. He has never explained the incident and has never been asked to.

The insecurity

His insecurity is the obvious one and he is honest about it. He is the ordinary person in every room he now enters, and he is aware that his presence is explained entirely by somebody else. He has said, in a form of words his mother has repeated, that he does not mind being nobody and minds being nobody in front of an audience.

The criticism

The criticism the record should make of him is narrower and more serious than the criticism his detractors make. His discretion is loyalty to a person and not adherence to a principle. He keeps the rule because Alexander is his friend, and there is little in his conduct to suggest the rule would survive Alexander asking him to break it.

He has also begun to enjoy being known, which he does not admit, and he holds a settled political opinion while presenting himself as a person without one. Neither of these is a serious fault in a boy of fourteen. Both are recorded because the alternative is to present him as the household presents him, which is as a person with no interests of his own, and that would be a portrait of a function rather than of a child.

The assessments

His mother’s assessment is the most useful in the record: that he was like this before any of it, and will be like this afterwards.

Frau Reinhardt’s, given in an internal note and later released, is that he is the least difficult of the three companions and the one she worries about.

Alexander’s own description is a single sentence, which he has repeated more than once. Brandt has never changed the way he speaks to him.

Prospects

The plan

He intends to become a historian and to read history at the University of Hamburg, a plan which would take him some distance from Potsdam and which he has not discussed in that light. The choice of Hamburg is his father’s suggestion and his own preference, and it predates 2028 by a year, which is the only reason anybody believes it is genuinely his.

He has also told Alexander that he might join the Luftwaffe, a remark of the kind fourteen-year-olds make and which sits oddly beside the rest. His running is expected to continue past school.

The appointment

He would accept a court appointment as an adult if one were offered. He wants a public life and a private one, and has not yet discovered that the combination is difficult.

The appointment does not lapse at the Emperor’s majority. The household’s settled expectation is that it continues, though nothing compels it, and Brandt has only lately understood the implication: that the photograph is permanent, that he will be the Emperor’s school friend for the rest of his life, and that no decision of his can now undo it. He does not regret it and has never asked to be released. He has simply stopped assuming that it will end.

The friendship

Whether the friendship survives is a separate question from whether the appointment does. Both boys expect it to, through difficulty. The risk to it is not the crisis, the press or the campaign. It is the ordinary one, that two people who met at eight may grow apart at twenty, and that one of them will be unable to leave.

What the record cannot say

A caution belongs at the end of this article that would not be necessary in most others. Almost everything above about Brandt’s inner life rests on a small number of sources: his parents, Frau Reinhardt, a household that has an interest in how he is described, a press that has an interest in his being interesting, and the Emperor, whose account of his closest friend is the least disinterested of all.

Brandt himself has given no interview and has said nothing on the record. He is fourteen. The person the sources describe is therefore a construction, assembled by adults, some of whom are fond of him and none of whom are neutral, and the ordinary rule that a public figure may be assessed on the public record does not apply cleanly to somebody who did not choose to be one and cannot yet answer for himself.

The Register records what is documented and marks the boundary. What he actually thinks about any of this is not known, and will not be until he is old enough to say so and free enough to be believed.

Trivia

See also

• Alexander I, German Emperor and King of Prussia, whose friend he is
• German Empire, the realm whose sovereign he attends
• Kingdom of Prussia, his kingdom of birth and residence
• George V, born Prince Frederick, the Emperor’s cousin and closest peer among the young dynasts, King since 31 October 2028
• Amalie von Keller and Jakub Nowak, the other two companions (no separate articles)

Categories

People · World People · German Empire · Prussia · Astronomy · Sport · Constitutional History