Gloria of Thurn and Taxis: She turns 65

She is perhaps the most controversial aristocrat in Germany. While Gloria von Thurn and Taxis (65) caused a sensation with her jet set and party lifestyle and her eccentric fashion style in the 1980s, she recently caught up with controversial statements and polarizing opinions. On February 23, the princess celebrates her 65th birthday with a castle residence in Regensburg.

In the course of its eventful life, Germany has collected a number of nicknames controversial aristocrat: “Bavaria’s Gloria”, “Punker-Fürstin”, “Rebellin”. “Princess TNT” is particularly memorable, although TNT means less the abbreviation for her Empire Thurn and Taxis, but rather the explosives. This is how Mariae Gloria is known from Thurn and Taxis for decades.

With her controversial views, she polarizes. This is how the fashion magazine “Vogue” in Gloria of Thurn and Taxis “sees one of the few true eccentric”, while it is amazed: “Princess Gloria […] has grown into the sun queen, around which many traditionalist Catholics revolve, which Pope Francis reject. Her castle in Regensburg is a potential ‘gladiator school’ for conservative Catholics, which are on a crusade to preserve church traditions. “

In contrast to this strict conservatism, earlier actions seem to be standing with which she attracted attention: on what unconventional ideas she is capable of, shows the legendary gift that she has long since faded in 1986 on the 60th birthday of her now -faded Prince John of Thurn And Taxis (1926-1990) surprised: Gloria had a self-revised cake opened, which out with 60 penises Marzipan was decorated.

Years later she explained the present in a “Spiegel” interview with a kind of theological manifesto: “We are Catholic. The Catholic religion celebrates the sexual act. The creation of God manifests itself in the sexual association. Holiest ever. “

As far as her own sacred procreation is concerned, Gloria was a very successful wife for her husband at that time because mother of triple. She had already born him the two daughters Maria Theresia (born 1980) and Elisabeth (born 1982) and in 1983 the hoped -for male heirs. This gave her more than fulfilling her dynastic and life -sensitive responsibility.

The three-time young mother began to lead her own jet set life. Now Gloria became the famous punk princess, she was wearing Rococo dresses or a chain shirt from Paco Rabanne, celebrating in Munich, London, Paris, New York. With Mick Jagger, Prince or Michael Jackson.

It was apparently the same for her husband, he lived his own party life. The Countess of Schönburg-Glauchau, a impoverished nobility from Saxony, which was expropriated in the GDR, had met the 34-year-old prince of Thurn and Taxis in Munich in 1979 and married a year later. In 1990 the head of the family died after two heart transplants aged 64.

After the death of her husband, the widow has to renovate the family company Thurn and Taxis, which she succeeds with with great energy within ten years. The US business magazine “Business Week” chooses “Tenth’s best financial manager”. The punk phase is finally over. Gloria wears a bubic head and no towering hair towers. She writes books with Alessandra Borghese and Cardinal Meisner, she paints celebrities against fee, accepts awards – including the Bavarian Order of Merit and the Cross of Merit 1.

She no longer dances with rock stars on tables, but is socially involved, for example at the Bavarian Hospiz Foundation. She meets with clergymen, with bishops, cardinals and popes. Only sometimes does she treat herself a small external eccentricity when she drives to the service on her Harley.

To do this, she no longer causes a sensation with imaginative hairstyles, but with statements that many people find hair -raising.

She tries to mediate, she says in an interview: “I just want to be able to say my opinion and bring people together who would not otherwise meet each other.” It is by no means part of right -wing extremist networks. “On the right, left, that doesn’t work for me.” That is something for philistines. “My conservative religious views have no influence on my openness to cultural diversity and inclusion.”

She wins when people say that she is racist. “I love Africa,” she says. She is in her house in Kenya three months a year, many locals are good friends. After all, she spent several years in Somalia in childhood, where her father Joachim Graf von Schönburg-Glauchau had worked for the German wave. And she replies to the criticism of the alleged hostility to homosexuality: “My gay friends today laugh when they hear that I am homophobic.” It is completely okay for her that homosexuals could live freely today – as long as she did not make an ideology from her way of life.

Of course, she hurts that some people go to her at her way because of her views. But that is the damage “because it’s always fun with me” (NZZ). And if, “no sow” wants to hear “what I have to say, I can’t do anything now … then I just go more golf and play tennis.”