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Advice on 'how to grow poor with style'

July 14 2005 at 11:05am 

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By Ernest Gill

Hamburg - Amid soaring unemployment and cutbacks in social welfare and rising taxes, angst-ridden Germans are worrying more and more about the prospect of impending poverty.

A new survey shows 60 percent of Germans say they live from one payday to the next and would be penniless if they lost their jobs.

Now an unemployed German count is giving his countrymen advice on "how to grow poor with style".

Angst-ridden Germans have been snapping up a book by the offspring of a faded German aristocratic family with the intriguing title The Art Of Growing Poor With Style (Die Kunst Des Stilvollen Verarmens). It is a top ten bestseller.

The author, Count Alexander von Schoenburg, says he knows what he's talking about since "my family has been in decline for the past 500 years".

Count von Schoenburg, who claims to be "a poor relative of most all of the crowned heads of Europe", says the well-off middle classes who are facing poverty for the first time can take a lesson from the traditional upper classes who have been learning to make do with less and less for generations as monarchies have fallen across Europe.

"We developed a sense of style and bearing which defies fashion and showiness," he writes in the book, started after he lost his job as a newspaper editor in Berlin.

Drawing parallels to the Old Rich and the Nouveau Riche, von Schoenburg says his book is a guide by a member of the aristocratic Old Poor for prospective members of what he calls the Nouveau Pauvre.

The Old Poor, he writes, know how to live on a shoestring with style and dignity, never buying anything new and holding tight to old possessions such as rickety furniture and chipped crockery.

"My childhood memories are of my mother recovering cheap Ikea furniture with remnants of old but elegant upholstery she had salvaged from a broken-down sofa," he says, for example. The result was a chair that looked like a priceless antique but that didn't collapse under a person's weight like a real antique would.

He remembers envying other boys whose middle-class parents bought them flashy new toys and clothes.

Shying away from such bourgeois extravagance, his parents gave him hand-me-down clothes and cheap toys that required no batteries - but lots of imagination.

"And I recall that my father never really liked a teapot until it had developed a crack," von Sternburg remembers. "Then he said it finally had character."

He tells the story of his old uncle, Count Zsigmond Nyary, who lived in Budapest.

"The most elegant apartment I've ever been in was the tiny, two-room flat that Uncle Zsigmond lived in with his wife and four children in Communist-ruled Hungary," he says. Being aristocrats, the Nyarys had been allocated the worst apartment in the worst part of town.

"But the Nyarys' apartment was proof that taste and style can prevail in even the more dire circumstances. At night the place was wall-to-wall mattresses. But come morning, there was much shifting of furniture and the place was transformed into an elegant salon for receiving guests," he recalls fondly.

Uncle Zsigmond, who only ever wore two suits (a brown one during the day and a blue serge in the evening) didn't have two cups that matched and most were chipped. Even so, his thin tea and instant coffee were served with such Old World grace and charm that "you felt you were guest of honour in a grand country manor house".

He also tells the story of a distant Russian relation who, after the Bolshevik revolution, ended up sweeping streets in Paris - and loved it.

"He viewed it as a kind of aristocratic game, like cards or the hunt, the goal being to finish the street within a given time," he says. "While other streetsweepers moaned, he appreciated the cavalcade of life on a Parisian street."

Then there is the tale of the impoverished British gentleman who became a butler.

"He had grown up having English butlers wait on him so he required no training to become the perfect one, much in demand," he writes.

Taking his cue from those "poor relations", von Schoenburg was able to make the transition from having a regular salary to being one of the longterm unemployed.

He learned to view his modest apartment as being "bigger than a 1 000-dollar-a-night suite in most hotels and with a full kitchen to boot".

He learned the joys of not being stuck in traffic jams and not having to look for parking spaces - which is a cinch if you can't afford a car.

"I realised I didn't need a subscription to Atlantic Monthly and several daily papers, nor did I need broadband cable, nor did I need a cellphone that downloads other people's home movies," he said.

He also learned to appreciate vacations at home.

"Who wants to go to S Moritz anyway?" he writes. "It's overrun with vulgar New-Money Russians. Nobody with real class would be caught dead there now."

"Most of all," he writes, "I learned the veracity of that old saying. The best things in life really are free. Enjoying them without wishing you had lots of stuff, now, that takes real class."

Uncle Zsigmond would be proud. - Sapa-dpa

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