ABSTRACT
Dr. Franz Wetzel’s and the Treubund’s remedy for an end to Bavaria’s deep social, political, and confessional divisions was a Wittelsbach “social monarchy.” Among the diverse approaches to restoration in the Wittelsbach royalist movement of the 1920s which the Konigstreue experimented with was that of “people’s monarchy”. In seeking to energize the monarchist cause along reformist lines, Wetzel applied techniques common in contemporary German political life. Perhaps the least nebulously articulated program of Bavarian Volksmonarchismus was that proposed in the mid-1920s by the relatively little-known Bavarian Loyalist League. The National Socialist example made its strongest mark on the by then long-since-disbanded Treubundler in the early 1930s: several leading Loyalists, including Wetzel, Georg Black, and Wilhelm Berntheisel, joined the brown ranks of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Wetzel’s ideas, Valentin Semmet’s reputation for integrity, and August Rettinger’s “sacrifice” of “his entire considerable assets for the monarchist cause” could have only limited local impact by themselves.
