They met as children at Buckingham Palace, later at polo tournaments in Windsor: Prince Eduard von Anhalt, descendant of an old Germanic family, likes to talk about his family ties to his distant cousin, King Charles III.
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The 81-year-old aristocrat will be at the side of the press during the official visit of his illustrious relative to Berlin on Wednesday.
“I hope to be able to speak to him briefly at the ceremony in the Bundestag,” the lower house confides in the man who has made a name for himself in Germany as a society journalist and television commentator on events relating to the “Royal”. .
“I’m the only parent (of the Windsors) who gets in front of a camera and explains things in detail,” he said of the royal family during a meeting with AFP in the German capital.
This journalistic job, which he finally took on when his family felt that their castle and property in Saxony-Anhalt had been expropriated since the GDR, was “more important” than attending big celebrations.
During last year’s funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, which he was invited to attend, he said he decided to commentate for television.
Photo courtesy / AFP
King Charles III and Prince Eduard von Anhalt, here in the summer of 1987.
Invitations to Windsor
The relationship between his lineage – from the very old House of Ascania, which helped found Berlin – with the British royal family is certainly not the most direct.
The prince explains that she came from the marriage of his great-uncle Aribert von Anhalt, who died in 1933, to Princess Marie-Louise, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
It is this great aunt, who died in 1956, who after the war will invite her family to Windsor, about thirty kilometers from London, where the imposing British royal residence is located.
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“Back then we kids could go to Buckingham Palace, but my mother couldn’t because she was divorced,” he recalls.
If that rule still applied today, “Buckingham Palace would be practically empty,” he adds, laughing.
It was at one of these invitations that he met Charles, who was seven years his junior, “when we were still children”. During his many visits, often “incognito”, in Germany or on the island, “we meet several times” for polo tournaments.
And in the 1990s he agreed to become patron of Wörtlitzer Park in Saxony-Anhalt, the largest English garden in continental Europe, which he visited in 2019, the prince adds.
Photo John MACDOUGALL / AFP
French rose
He also remembers with emotion the moments he spent with Karl’s father, Prince Consort Philip, from a Danish-German line.
“He often organized events and was also happy to have German parents,” he says.
“He was very funny. For example, he taught me to drink French rosé because it is much easier for older men to digest than white wine,” he recalls.
He particularly praises Charles’s “social” character and refers to his long-standing commitment to the most disadvantaged.
If he was the longest-waiting heir before ascending the British throne, he was never “frustrated” about it, he assures us.
“He really enjoyed being the Prince of Wales because he could say whatever he wanted,” or almost. “If he is crowned king, he may only say what pleases the government.”
By choosing to go to France – even if that visit was postponed due to social unrest in France – and to Germany for his first visit abroad as king, he is nonetheless sending a message: that of the importance of his country’s relations, in his eyes Europe.
“Even if the family could never say that Brexit was not a good thing, I know they do not approve of it,” said the prince.