Buy Your Way Into the Aristocracy

For €80,000 and up, you too can be a lord or lady

- Benedikt Kammel

Born into the rubble and deprivation of postwar Germany, Horst Koch wanted out of his small-town cocoon, and at age 21 found his way to a poker table, where he learned to empty the pockets of less experienced players. For decades, Koch says, he earned a handsome living playing cards in Baden-Baden, Aruba, and Las Vegas. Yet he always lusted after the kind of esteem that’s hard for even a champion five-card-stud player to earn at the table.

So when Koch in 2013 heard he might be able to buy an aristocratic title, he considered it a path to newfound respect and admiration. These days, humble Horst Koch is known— legally and in every other way—as Horst Walter Count von Hessen-Homburg. He has his own coat of arms and a gilded family history stretching back centuries.

And if you can stump up enough cash, he’d be happy to do the same for you. “Doors that were shut suddenly swing open, you meet different people, everything becomes easier,” says von Hessen-Homburg. “You get put through, and a no becomes a yes.”

The legal privileges of nobility were abolished in Germany a century ago, when Kaiser Wilhelm II’s monarchy collapsed after World War I. But former members of the upper class were permitted to carry a noble title as part of their name. Even today, the aristocracy benefits from the aura of its separate social strata—at least in the pages of glossy magazines and the imagination of many commoners.

The value of a title lies in part in its scarcity. About 0.1% of Germans are of noble descent, roughly 80,000 out of a population of almost 84 million. In the U.K. the number is closer to 0.01%. There are clear rules about who’s in the club: Typically you were born or married into gentility, and only men can legitimately pass their title on to spouses and offspring.