The Captain of Köpenick and the Uniform Fantasies of German Militarism

This article examines a famous 1906 event that occurred when a con man dressed in a captain's uniform commandeered two small contingents of soldiers in Berlin and took them to nearby Köpenick, where he proceeded to arrest the city’s mayor (supposedly on orders of the emperor) and abscond with the city’s cash reserves. Though the incident has long been treated as a paradigmatic example of German militarism’s hold over the civilian population, some recent work has challenged this view by focusing on the incident’s carnivalesque nature and reception, which might suggest that the stunt was really just a piece of hilarious “theater.” However, a psychoanalytic approach to fantasy as ideology troubles both views. The first section of the essay uses contemporary criminological analyses of con men to reconstruct how Voigt successfully created an elaborate collective fantasy that lasted for several hours and mobilized the willing participation of both victims and accomplices alike. The second half then turns to the carnivalesque theatricalization of the “Köpenickiade,” which I argue did not so much mark the limit of German militarism as its continued operation, in particular by underwriting the laughing public’s belief that only Voigt’s Köpenick victims were under the sway of militarism while they themselves were “free individuals.”