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Proving Once Again That The Real World Is At Least As Creative As Fiction…

Man, that’s one hell of an obituary:

Count Gottfried von Bismarck
Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.

The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany’s Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.

I bet the writer had fun writing that. “a life of gilded aimlessness”, that’s some good phrasing.

Go read the whole thing. You won’t believe it.

After reading it I had to dig up a picture. Apparently he looked like this:

Count Gottfried von Bismarck

This entry was posted on Friday, July 6th, 2007 at 8:21 am and is filed under One-and-done. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Proving Once Again That The Real World Is At Least As Creative As Fiction…”

dietsch Says:
July 6th, 2007 at 10:09 am
1

I’m clearly wasting my life.
Mr. McLaren Says:
July 6th, 2007 at 10:51 am
2

Don’t feel too bad. It’s not entirely your fault.

I mean some of this stuff you could aspire to, but some of it is just “accident of birth”.

No matter how louche, dissipated, or flamboyant you get in, or how much you dedicate yourself to your vices, you probably won’t have parents that will send a servant around to pay your bills, you know?

His removal from Oxford was so abrupt that he was not given time to settle his bills; Prince Ferdinand sent a servant who did the rounds of von Bismarck’s favoured watering-holes, restaurants and his tailor bearing a chequebook.