At a boarding school in Switzerland, he saw a 15-year-old boy propose to his 13-year-old girlfriend with a Cartier diamond ring; another colleague offered him a trip to New York with his jet private to the first to give”Pleases” (approve) a message I had posted on Facebook, and in pub The students competed to see who spent the most, displaying the bills at each table as if they were trophies. These are some of the experiences that Leonie von Ungern-Sternberg, a 29-year-old German, shares in her “Diaries of a Modern Baroness” on TikTok with the aim of showing that she is different, or that not all aristocrats are the same. He currently lives in Madrid, where he is studying an MBA (acronym for Masters in Business Administrationa postgraduate diploma) from IE Business School. She already knew the country, as well as the language, because as a child she lived for a while in Marbella, which her father was “in love” with, and because she had caregivers of Latin American origin – “my sister’s first language was Spanish, and at dinner I had to translate what she said so my parents could understand her” -. He also speaks English, German and Arabic.
Ask. He has more than 93,000 followers on TikTok. What is the profile of your audience and what do you offer them?
Answer. My last name is famous for good and bad reasons. I have ancestors who did terrible things and I thought, “What can I give back?” I decided that I could deny what is seen in the series The Bridgertonswhich have nothing to do with reality, and show that I am a normal woman, a student, a worker, who grew up with many privileges, but not because I belonged to the aristocracy, which today means nothing, but because of the culture they passed on to me. Knowledge must be democratized, education should never be a luxury. Nearly 70% of my audience is women, the majority from the US, and perhaps it has to do with the fact that people there are more politically divided than ever, with many imposing their opinions through networks like TikTok. People are hungry for context and that’s what I try to provide. Context helps open minds.
Q. Which stereotypes about the aristocracy would you say are real and which are just stereotypes, clichés that no longer correspond to reality?
R. Almost all European aristocratic families have lost everything at some point in history. My parents taught me that you can be left with nothing due to a war, a financial collapse, or anything else, and that the only thing that can never be taken away from you is what’s in your head. So the importance that the aristocracy places on education is real. Then there is the stereotype of the arrogant aristocrat, but it depends on each individual. I know many non-aristocratic people who are aristocrats and aristocrats who are not.
Q. How do you think you are similar to any other woman your age and how are you not?
R. I have the same things in my head as women my age. I’m about to turn 30, I want to start a family and I think a lot about what kind of work will allow me to find balance and how to be an independent woman, because a man can also want to steal everything from you. I am not like other women my age in that I grew up among many different cultures in different countries.
Q. On her TikTok account she denounced the social pressure on women to become mothers and how there were men who paid attention to their biological clock, counting the hours…
R. Yes! There are men who put pressure on you by telling you when you have to have children and who sometimes use this to delay women’s professional careers. There are also women who apply pressure. But I know many who have had babies at 45 and it’s phenomenal. If you also don’t want to have children. The problem is that women always seem to be doing something wrong: if you want to wait to have kids, you’re cold; If you want to have them soon, you are not ambitious enough… They will judge us no matter what we do, so the best thing is to ignore those judgments and go our own way.
Q. Do you consider yourself a feminist? Is this a topic that interests you?
R. Obviously.
Q. She also talked about what it’s like to flirt like an aristocrat and about a prince who tried to seduce her by praising the convenience of joining bloodlines. I ended up blocking it on all devices because it was annoying. Have you found many frogs among the nobility?
R. No. I had two boyfriends and neither of them were aristocrats. That prince simply had very different values from mine. Pay attention to the surname, the blood… it could have been valid 200 years ago, not now.
Q. Do you know any members of the Spanish royal family?
R. No. My circle here consists of my MBA classmates.
Q. And are you aware of the controversy generated by the memories of the king emeritus? He complained that he was the only Spaniard not to receive a pension after 40 years of service.
R. (Laughs). I hadn’t heard of it, the truth is that I’m not very interested in these topics.
Q. She stopped posting on TikTok for a while after a follower criticized her relationship with Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, known as “the Bloody Baron” or “the God of War.” You explained who you were and what you had done and the video went viral. How did you find out about his story? Did they tell you at home?
R. He was at school. One day a history teacher came to my desk with a book and said, “Look, one of your family.” I asked my mother later and she explained that, in fact, the damned baron was our relative.
Q. Is it weird to see your last name in a textbook?
R. Not so much. I have many relatives who appear in the books. What seemed strange to me, but for the better, was seeing myself inside The New York Times because of something I had done, my TikTok diaries. That day I felt butterflies in my stomach.
Q. He also has great-grandparents with a very different history from that of the bloodthirsty baron, victims of the Nazis.
R. YES. As a child I lived in the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, and I would come home crying because they would tell me, “You’re a Nazi because you’re German.” Then my mother told me the real story. My maternal great-grandparents helped their Jewish friends and made a pact: if the Nazis came after them, they would kill themselves so as not to have to give them information. They lived in a castle and when my great-grandfather saw the SS coming from the window, he shot my great-grandmother and then killed himself. My grandfather was 16 years old at the time. The Nazis took everything of value in the house and he fled with a backpack in which there were only souvenirs: a photo album and glasses that were 500 years old and had more sentimental than financial value. They are the only things we keep in the family from that moment. That’s my blood.
Q. And he says that later they captured his grandfather…
R. YES. He became a prisoner of war. He managed to escape many times, but they caught him again. He survived several shootings when he tried to escape. And I remember his body was full of bullet holes. They kept him alive because he spoke 10 languages: Russian, Czech, Polish, Estonian… and studied to be a surgeon. Once the war was over he returned to Hamburg with that backpack, and built himself from scratch. I’m very proud of him. This is the part of my story I like to remember, not the damned Baron.
Q. His family has almost 900 years of history. He says in his diaries that in 100 years everything was taken away from him twice: first by the Russians and then by the Nazis.
R. YES. The Nazis and before that the Russians when they arrived in Estonia. They chased away the nobles and my family had to flee. My grandfather didn’t want to speak Estonian anymore until the day he died because it hurt him a lot to remember the country he had to flee from.
Q. What’s the strangest question you’ve been asked on TikTok?
R. Probably the ones who ask me if I want to marry them. I guess it’s a joke, but I get a lot of requests (laughs).
Q. “I don’t want to project falsehoods.” On TikTok she spoke about the eating disorder she suffered from and which confined her to a wheelchair for a year. Is having an audience a responsibility?
R. Absolutely. I noticed that many girls asked me what I ate, what sport I did… and I decided to talk about my eating disorders. A girl sent me a 20-minute video telling me she had been having suicidal thoughts and hadn’t left the house in five years. Another person wrote to me to tell me that a friend of hers was going through this and to ask how I could help her. I made a video trying to explain what I would have done differently if I could go back. I felt we had opened up a space to share stories and that talking helped us all.
Q. He says he started working when he was 18 and held three jobs at once. What were they?
R. One was picking out counterfeit Hermès bags (as a child her mother tied her to the chair with designer scarves so she wouldn’t bend over) and Chanel in a second-hand shop. He also worked in the a start to build luxury brands and on weekends, as a waitress in a bar. It was a lot of fun.
Q. I didn’t need to work. Why did she do it and why was she a waitress?
R. When I finished high school, my parents told me I had to earn money to pay for my studies and I chose those jobs. I think it is very important to provide a service to someone and I want my children in the future to learn the same.
Q. He also worked as an artificial intelligence consultant. What exactly did he do and what did he learn from that world?
R. I have dedicated myself to analyzing how companies can interact with their customers in a more personal and human way. What I learned and continued to learn at the MBA, where they talked about the biases of the algorithm, the discrimination that Amazon made, for example, when hiring women or the racism of the police in the United States, is the problem that such a powerful machine poses from an ethical point of view. The big problem of the future is this: how to ensure that artificial intelligence is used without prejudice.
Q. Do you think society is aware of this problem?
R. At all. It is a battle between the United States and China, with Europe in the middle, lagging behind in many aspects. The problem Europe faces is how to maintain ethics and remain competitive on the market. China and the United States are designing AI according to their own interests and standards. We are in the middle.
Q. Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
R. I do not know. I don’t consider myself a influencerbut I think my goal is to become the voice of my generation.
