Modern Hohenzollern

THE REBEL PRINCE (347 pp.) -- Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia -- Regnery ($3.95).

"Strip your Louis Quatorze of his king-gear," rumbled Thomas Carlyle one day, "and there is left nothing but a poor, forked radish with a head fantastically carved." The last German who ever wore king-gear, Kaiser Wilhelm II, took his Carlylean comeuppance in 1918. His heirs, as a result, have faced the necessity of sinking their roots in the radish patch of common humanity. In The Rebel Prince, his grandson, Prince Louis Ferdinand Victor Edward Albert Michael Hubert Hohenzollern ("Lulu" to the family), says it was a hard fight but he made it.

His main difficulty, says the prince, is that he has always been too individualistic. Not that he minded when his father, Crown Prince Wilhelm, with Prussian humor, jovially smeared mashed potatoes in his face. He even enjoyed it when the Crown Prince emptied a jug of water over him and his elder brother Wilhelm as they lay in bed at night. Lulu objected, however, when his governess made him eat soap as a minor punishment, and he got fighting mad when tangled in royalism's red tape. Once, when he was about seven, he slipped free of it for a moment, when no one was looking, and actually crossed a street all by himself.

One day in November 1918, Lulu's mother, Crown Princess Cecilie, came into his room and told him between sobs, "The revolution has broken out. Gross-papa has abdicated. The war is lost." Lulu felt a most unhohenzollernly glee. That meant he wouldn't have to go to military school next year.

One Monarch to Another. He and brother Wilhelm went instead to an ordinary public school in Potsdam. "Our very first report cards," writes His Royal Highness without the suggestion of a double take, "indicated that we were the best of the whole class."

After school the Prussian regimen continued unabated. Lulu was 14 before he was allowed to take a train trip alone. But as soon as he was graduated from high school, he began to catch up with the world around him. He studied hard at the

University of Berlin, and so became the first Ph.D. in the family. Meanwhile, at 19, he fell in love with Actress Lily Damita, and sxercised so hard, trying to overcome a certain stringiness of physique, that he developed heart exhaustion and had to take a two-month holiday.

Lulu followed Lily to the U.S., got a job as a Ford mechanic with the romantic idea of becoming self-supporting and marrying her. Grandfather said no, however, and took up the matter with Henry Ford, as one monarch to another. Suddenly Lulu found himself in a Ford plant in Argentina to "cool off."

In the years just before World War II, Lulu took a transport-pilot's license, went to work in the front office of Lufthansa, and joined the Luftwaffe reserve as a pilot. He found his progress blocked at every turn by the Nazis, who feared, he says, to let him become prominent lest he revive royalist feeling in the Reich.

Dearborn Advice. Just before war came, Lulu married Grand Duchess Kira, one of the last of the Romanovs. Through the war, they lived mostly on the family's East Prussian farm with their growing brood of princes and princesses (there are seven of them now). In 1940, when brother Wilhelm was killed in action in Flanders, Lulu became the Hohenzollern heir in his stead. In 1944 he barely escaped the Russian advance, and almost got nabbed by the Nazis too for knowing a thing or two (not much more) about the bomb plot on Hitler's life.

Lulu says nothing about his chances for the German throne, and he gives the impression that he is not wasting much effort in that direction. He seems to be following a shrewd piece of advice that was given him one day by a Ford employee at Dearborn: "Louis, my boy," he said, "never forget this. If you keep your [backside] flat on the ground, you cannot fall very far."

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