One Sunday afternoon, Czechs came to the family’s castle and told them that they had to leave immediately. Only given ten minutes to pack their belongings, they had to leave almost everything behind and were brought to a Koncentračni Tabor, a Czech concentration camp.
[...] Marie and her siblings attended the local Volksschule (board school) in Ering. In 1949, she changed to the Heimschule Kloster Wald in Baden-Wuerttemberg, a Benedictine boarding school which, to his day, is very popular with the German nobility. The school had been paid for by relatives and friends of the family who still owned properties.
[...] She planned on studying art history upon her return to Germany but her family did not have much money and thus could not afford to pay for long university studies. So instead she started to attend the Academy for Applied Arts at the University of Munich for six semesters and graduated with a diploma. Afterwards, she worked as a commercial graphic artists in Dachau near Munich until her engagement in 1965.
[...] In the summer of 1961, Countess Marie paid a visit to Liechtenstein's capital Vaduz to visit her aunt and uncle. While out and about with friends, she bumped into Princess Gina who invited them to come to the Schloss where the family lived as her sons were home on holiday and bored. Though Countess Marie and her friends weren't too thrilled at first because they thought that the princes were too young, they decided to visit anyway.
While Prince Hans-Adam II claims that it was love at first sight for him and that he knew from the minute that Countess Marie walked into the door that she would be his future wife, his chosen one wasn't so sure. Even though Countess Marie considered the Hereditary Prince to be nice and intelligent, she simply thought of him as a young boy. Born in 1945, Prince Hans-Adam is five years her junior.
[...] The couple raised their children on their own without the help of tutors or governesses mainly due to the fact that Hereditary Prince Hans-Adam did not like being raised by them. Instead, they only had a housekeeper and someone who would also take care of the children when the parents had to go away. Their four children attended local schools and lived in Liechtenstein until they graduated from high school.
In 1976, the Hereditary Princess became member of the board of the Liechtensteinische Gesellschaft für Umweltschutz (LGU), the country's society for environmental protection.
Taking over from her mother-in-law, Princess Marie was the president of the Society for Orthopaedic Aid between 1983 and 2005, since that year she has been its patron. She is also the president of the Liechtenstein Red Cross since 1985, an office she has also taken over from Princess Gina, and in addition patron of the Verband Liechtensteinischer Familienhilfen, a family support organisation, since 1990.
