It’s easy to poke fun at Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuß. ‘The German “prince” involved in the coup plot looks like he was radicalised after being sacked from a mid-morning BBC antiques programme,’ David Broder wrote on Twitter. Zack Budryk said he ‘looks like if Wes Anderson made a movie about Bernie Madoff’. And when people weren’t making fun of his clothes, it was the absurdity of his title – every male Reuß for eight hundred years has been named Heinrich, the numbers reset either once a century or with the hundredth Heinrich, depending on the branch of the family. Or else it was the piddling size of the Reuß estate. Or the fact that Heinrich XIII is seventeenth in line to be head of his own family.
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