Background
A member of the Bismarck family, she is the great-great-granddaughter of Chancellor Otto, Prince of Bismarck, and great-granddaughter of Foreign Secretary Herbert, Prince of Bismarck.
A member of the Bismarck family, she is the great-great-granddaughter of Chancellor Otto, Prince of Bismarck, and great-granddaughter of Foreign Secretary Herbert, Prince of Bismarck.
She is the wife of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the former German Minister of Defence. She is also a descendant of Robert Whitehead, the inventor of the torpedo, and diplomat Alexander, Count of Hoyos. Stephanie zu Guttenberg is the only daughter of Andreas Graf von Bismarck-Schönhausen and Charlotte Kinberg, a Swedish interior architect with partial Dutch/German ancestry.
She has two older half-siblings on her mother"s side.
Guttenberg grew up bilingual, and in addition to her native German and Swedish, she speaks English, French and Italian. They have two daughters, born in 2001 and 2002.
She has been President of the German section of Innocence in Danger, an organisation combating child abuse, protecting the rights of children on the Internet, and working to restrict the spread of child pornography. In September 2010, she published the book Schaut nicht weg! Was wir gegen sexuellen Missbrauch tun müssen, co-written with Anne-Ev Ustorf.
On 24 January 2011, Stephanie zu Guttenberg became Patron of the Deutsche Multiple Sklerose Gesellschaft in Bavaria.