Knicknacks of the Rich and Famous
A Letter from Bavaria

No matter where I am in central Regensburg, every 15 minutes I hear the bells of the Dom St. Peter, a Gothic cathedral begun in 1250--a reminder, if one is needed, of this Bavarian city's storied past. Regensburg, for centuries a crossroads for trade between northern and southern Europe, and Europe and the Orient, escaped World War II virtually unscathed. Just walking around its narrow, cobblestone streets and taking in the gabled houses, Roman towers, rococo churches, and travel-poster monuments, visitors can feel the history.

Regensburg's 12th century stone bridge, spanning the Danube, was the launching point for two crusades, one led by Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III, the other by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Its ornate 14th century city hall hosted the Empire's princely electors. And for 800 years, its tiny Alte Wurstk che has served up skinny pork sausages, sauerkraut, and peasant bread. After sampling the wurst at a communal wooden bench, I leave, reeking of smoke from the open grill and feeling as if I'd stepped out of a stark drawing of life in the Middle Ages.

But it's not the past that brings me to Regensburg. I'm here to witness history in the making--sort of. Sotheby's is selling off some 7,600 lots of art, furniture, silver, porcelain, wine, and other items from the princely collections of von Thurn und Taxis. The mammoth sale, staged in the riding stables of the family's 900-year-old Schloss St. Emmeram, will take nine days. It's expected to raise at least $8.4 million. House sales like this are unheard of in Germany. Even Great Britain, where they're common, hasn't seen anything this size in this century.

GLITZ UND GLAMOUR. Days before the auction, though, Sotheby's has few worries. This sale offers something easier to peddle than art and antiques: glitz and glamour. For that, it's hard to beat the house of Thurn und Taxis, which created a European postal system in the 1400s and had a near-monopoly in mail for centuries. They got rich, won titles, and married royalty. Their land stretched across Germany, Austria, and the former East bloc. Even now, they're said to be Europe's largest private landowners, with nearly 100,000 acres. An empire that size has castles, of course--25 of them. This century, as 19 were sold or confiscated by communists, the superfluous contents were hauled back to St. Emmeram's 500 rooms. "I've never seen so much in such space, all jammed together," says Heinrich Graf Spreti, director of Sotheby's Munich office. "It was overwhelming, the masses of it."

Adding to the auction's allure is the clan's more recent notoriety. The seller is Princess Gloria, 33, widow of Prince Johannes (who died at 65 in 1990, during his second heart transplant) and mother of his heir, Albert, 10. Her Serene Highness met Johannes while working as a barmaid in Munich; they wed in 1980. The marriage fit the times perfectly. Johannes was a free-spending, internationally known libertine, said to be bisexual, and given to boar hunts, game shoots, and pranks. Gloria--a.k.a. "the punk princess" and "Princess TNT"--was a motorcycle-riding, disco-dancing, pink- or purple-coiffed high-school dropout who proceeded to entertain her rock-star and artist friends lavishly.

As a widow, Gloria is leading a quieter life--of necessity. During the 1980s, Johannes succumbed to the lure of leverage. Under the tutelage of a couple of German-born go-getters with credentials from Harvard, McKinsey, and Deutsche Bank, the prince borrowed to diversify into commercial real estate in Canada, Germany, and the U.S., and into industrial companies and financial services. All at the wrong time. His fortune, once estimated at $2.5 billion, shrank, perhaps as low as $500 million.

TIARA INFIRMA. So, while some TNT properties--breweries, timberlands--still make money, Gloria has had to tighten her belt to maintain six castles and raise three kids. She continues to have a critical liquidity problem: Bavaria wants some $50 million in death duties.

Last year, Gloria turned to the family jewels, realizing $13.7 million from an auction of, among other things, a pair of 27-carat emerald earrings commissioned by the Romanovs and a pearl-and-diamond tiara that Napoleon III ordered for Empress Eugenie. Germans berated Gloria's crassness and bemoaned the loss to the nation's patrimony. When details of her house sale surfaced, they started in again.

Fortunately for Sotheby's, which began posting staff here last January, Bavaria cleared the sale in June. First, though, it skimmed off $26.4 million worth of the family's art and objects as partial payment. That, of course, merely handed wags another needle. "Gloria's rummage sale," they tagged it. Says a German count: "My uncle and I joked that we should have gone through all our junk and put it in the sale."

As I look around the lots en the block, I see he's partly right. There's no great art here. Many items are handsome, though: French clocks, Biedermeier couches and chests, Meissen porcelain, gilt mirrors, decorative paintings. But there's also plenty to chuckle about--antlers, ceramic figs, musty top hats and livery, clown costumes.

CROWD PLEASER. Surely, these items will test the proposition that ordinary folk will pay top dollar just to own a memento from the rich and titled. To cement that link, Sotheby's branded most items with the TNT emblem--a ploy that could cut both ways. "Who'd want something with another family's crest?" sniffs the count.

Maybe Hubert de Givenchy, Prince Murabak of Saudi Arabia, the Prince of Saxony, or the Duke of W rttenburg. Sotheby's says they all showed up for the VIP exhibition day. Countess Preysing, whose castle lies an hour south of Regensburg, says: "I found loads of undiscovered beauties." And Anna T. Gary, an elegant widow (sporting diamond brooch, diamond earrings, and a huge emerald ring) who brought her decorator to search for furniture for her home in Indian Creek Island, Fla., agrees: "We found quite a few pieces."

Later, back in New York, I see the ladies weren't alone. During the eight exhibition days, a record-breaking 26,000 people showed up. By Oct. 11, the eve of the sale, 10,000 written bids had been left with Sotheby's. An additional 55,000 absentee bids followed during the course of the auction. Day One drew 1,000 attendees, overflowing the sales room into two tents. By the time the auction ended on Oct. 21, just 4% of the lots were unsold, and the total realized climbed to $19.3 million.

The sum is even more impressive considering that just eight items fetched more than $100,000. That suggests a lot of people overpaid for gewgaws they probably have little use for. A silver-plated Buddha, estimated at $6 to $18, went for $433. A silver-gilt desk blotter, estimated at $1,200 to $1,500, fetched $26,761. That shabby clown costume, projected to bring $120 to $180, took in $639. The least expensive item--an engraved, silver-mounted wineglass--brought $72. The Gloria glitz extended even to two custom-made Harley-Davidsons thrown in at the last minute: They sold for $43,037 and $40,215--twice the estimate.

Sotheby's clearly got a big bonus, too. The New York-based auctioneer would love to develop the bidding habit among rich Germans, who have little auction tradition. The TNT sale attracted bidders from all over the world, but most of the buying was German. Considering the publicity surrounding this extravaganza, failure would have been disastrous. And Sotheby's investment--which included putting 140 staffers in Regensburg, building a headquarters, and spending hundreds of hours of staff time to help Gloria choose which items to sell, then examining and cataloging them--would have gone down the drain.

Regensburg, too, came out ahead. Despite its well-preserved condition, its location in northeast Bavaria, far from the popular "Romantic Road" to the southwest, keeps it off the tourist circuit. With a little help from TNT, the city boomed for a few weeks this fall. And there's nothing like a taste of glory to whet the appetite for more.