The Resurrection of the Romanovs

by Greg King

  Anderson, 1926.

  The chief interest in these accounts, though, is in some surprising revelations about Frau Tchaikovsky’s mental acumen and memory. She and her supporters always contended that the injuries to her head made recall a difficult and painful process, and that it was a constant struggle for her to remember details of her life. This explanation excused much—her refusal or inability to converse in Russian, in English, or in French, her apparent reluctance to answer queries about her past, her battle to recall names and faces and dates when pressed. She declared that she had forgotten how to tell time or count; that although she often played solitaire, she could not differentiate between the numbers; that she had to constantly remind herself how to dress; and even that the ability to write evaded her. Everything—languages, words, memories, and daily tasks—required extraordinary efforts and “constant practice, or else she forgets.”30 It was all further evidence, ran the story, that she must actually be Anastasia, for how could an impostor, a woman so physically and psychologically damaged, ever successfully commit to memory the multitude of trivial details about the life of the imperial family that Frau Tchaikovsky revealed?

  But was this true? The reports of Nobel and Bonhoeffer challenged this widely believed interpretation. Nobel noted that Frau Tchaikovsky asserted, quite falsely, that she had never read any books or magazines with stories about the Romanovs, something contradicted by the historical record. When she spoke of her alleged past as Anastasia, Nobel recorded, she did so “slowly, and with hesitation”; much of the time, however, she attributed her inability to answer questions to headaches or to her poor health. Nobel thought that she suffered from a diminished memory, saying, “Only concerning recent events is her recall normal.” Yet he contradicted this, recording how she often spoke spontaneously and in great detail about life at Tsarskoye Selo, cruises aboard the imperial yacht Standart, holidays in the Crimea, and about her time in Berlin. She possessed extraordinary recall of her stay at Dalldorf; according to Nobel, she recounted her experiences “correctly and without hesitation,” replete with such complex details as the names of the nurses and doctors who had cared for her; the names and illnesses of specific fellow patients; and even the dates on which certain events had occurred at the asylum. And there was something else: Nobel could find no organic cause for her apparent loss of memory or impaired abilities; rather than the result of physical trauma, he believed that such apparent difficulties were simply “a question of will.”31

  Bonhoeffer, too, noted that Frau Tchaikovsky could accurately recall “the names of her hospital wards, the names of her nurses, and even the names of some individuals” from her stays at the Elisabeth Hospital and at Dalldorf, along with numerous childhood memories. When pressed, though, she “often evades detailed questions by saying that it is too painful to discuss her memories, or that she is too ill to express herself.” She insisted, again quite falsely, that she could not read German, certainly an odd claim given all of the evidence to the contrary. He could find “no organic basis” for the apparent lapses in memory or in her recall of languages, writing that “none of the other expected symptoms that would accompany an injury to the cranial centers of communication are present.” He speculated that this reticence was mental rather than physical in nature, a deliberate, though he believed perhaps unconscious, ploy on her part, reflecting a desire to “suppress unpleasant experiences.”32

  What did this mean? If Nobel and Bonhoeffer were correct, the injuries to Frau Tchaikovsky’s head—injuries never as severe as portrayed by her supporters—played no role in her apparent inability to convincingly speak Russian, English, or French, or to recall certain memories. With this contention, at least, Eitel also agreed, for he, too, could find no physical impairment to her mental faculties and nothing in the injuries to her head that would affect her memory.33 If it was merely a question of “will,” as Nobel thought, was Frau Tchaikovsky consciously feigning difficulty with her memory, or was she genuinely plagued with some unknown mental condition that hampered her abilities? Supporters and opponents alike saw in this exactly what they expected to find—a damaged Anastasia or a deliberate fraud.

  These perceptions constantly hovered over Frau Tchaikovsky in these uncertain months, for no one around her really knew what to believe of her claim. The claimant herself was lonely, unhappy at Stillachhaus, believing that she had been abandoned by everyone, but she might have remained here, secluded and cared for, had not Gilliard again intervened. In the spring of 1927, he persuaded Count Kuno von Hardenberg to seek Frau Tchaikovsky’s expulsion from Bavaria, asserting that she was a criminal impostor.34 When Zahle learned of this, he appealed to Duke Georg of Leuchtenberg, a Russian émigré related to the Romanovs who lived in Bavaria, to intercede and protect her interests. The duke agreed, inviting the claimant to stay at Schloss Seeon, his country estate; his goal, he explained, was “to give her a refuge with a friendly Russian family” until her case could be resolved.35

  It took some negotiation before Frau Tchaikovsky agreed to this plan.36 “The Leuchtenbergs! What are the Leuchtenbergs?” she exclaimed on first hearing the suggestion, although Rathlef-Keilmann later insisted that she had immediately recognized the name and launched into a detailed genealogical recitation, something unsupported by the evidence.37 Although she was unhappy at Stillachhaus, she had endured a rootless existence, shuffled from one émigré to the next, from one hospital to another; she was tired, alone, and not at all certain what to expect of life at Seeon. Would she be left alone, cared for, and allowed to do as she wished? Or, as had happened during her time with the von Kleists, would she be put on show, questioned and queried by a constant stream of inquisitive, skeptical émigrés? But with threats of possible legal action, and nowhere else to go, she had little choice. Just after nightfall on the evening of March 1, 1927, she stepped from a train at the little village of Prien on the Chiemsee, where the duke of Leuchtenberg waited in the shadows. Sitting silently in the rear of a somewhat battered open touring car, she bounced and bumped as they sped over the frozen countryside, up low hills and down narrow country lanes before Schloss Seeon, its walls ghostly white in the moonlight, loomed out of the darkness, an uncertain sanctuary in the tumultuous uncertainty that was her life.

  11

  “A Sort of Weird Charm”

  Seeon, Frau Tchaikovsky would later say, “is the loveliest place in Germany.”1 Originally a Benedictine monastery founded in the tenth century, the white-walled, red-roofed complex sprawled serenely on a tree-shaded island at the edge of the alpine waters of the Klostersee. There were actually two churches here: the Chapel of St. Walburg, set in its own walled cemetery, and the large Church of St. Lambert, its sanctuary adorned with Renaissance frescoes and its two towers crowned with onion domes distinctive to both Bavaria and to imperial Russia. At the height of its eighteenth-century glory, Seeon witnessed frequent visits by Mozart, who composed several pieces dedicated to the abbey, but in 1803 the monastery was dissolved and the property was eventually purchased by the Leuchtenberg family. Over the years, the former monastic buildings were transformed into something resembling a comfortable country house.2 It was all a curious jumble of courtyards and cloisters, where large, impressive halls decorated with stucco reliefs and elaborate frescoes nestled side by side with rooms so crowded with bits of cast-off furniture and incongruous bric-a-brac that according to one visitor they resembled those in “a cheap German boardinghouse.”3

  If Frau Tchaikovsky worried that at Seeon she would be under constant surveillance and subject to relentless questioning, she must have been relieved to find that the Leuchtenberg family expected nothing from her. She stayed in room 20, at the top of a staircase guarded by a stuffed brown Siberian bear; she even took most of her meals in private.4 Her new hosts, wrote one visitor, were so “typically Russian” that they “could well have walked out of the pages” of some novel by Gogol or Chekhov.5 A tall and handsome man with a gray mustache and a rather disconcerting lisp, Georg
Nikolaievich de Beauharnais, duke of Leuchtenberg, was a great-grandson of Tsar Nicholas I and a descendant of Napoleon’s stepson Eugene de Beauharnais.6 Born in Rome in 1872, Georg had served in the Russian Imperial Guard and, in 1895, married Princess Olga Repnina-Volkonsky. After inheriting Seeon, the duke had moved his family to Bavaria, although they patriotically returned to Russia when war erupted in 1914; when the Revolution broke out three years later, they fled to Germany, living at Seeon on the edge of perpetual financial disaster despite their regal surroundings. With their money gone, they raided Seeon, selling a different jeweled Napoleonic sword or dusty volume from the library every month to keep the seemingly endless parade of creditors at bay.7

  The duke, recalled one acquaintance, gave the “impression of a very kindly but fidgety and rather timid man.” In contrast, Duchess Olga was a short, forceful woman, armed with seemingly unlimited energy and the personality of a “sergeant,” who confusingly, given their ordeal in Russia, seemed attracted to revolutionary politics.8 This curious couple lived at Seeon with their five children: Duke Dimitri (called Dima) and his wife, Catherine; Duchess Elena; Duchess Nathalia and her husband, Baron Vladimir Meller-Zakomelsky; Duchess Tamara; and Duke Konstantin.9 Despite his ties to the Romanovs, the duke had not been an intimate of Nicholas II, and his encounters with the imperial family had been infrequent; his wife had only rarely observed them from a distance at court ceremonies.10

  Frau Tchaikovsky, by her own choice, had little interaction with the Leuchtenberg family. The only member she saw with anything bordering on regularity was the duke, and even this was infrequent; at one point she refused to receive her host for more than a week.11 Not until June 18—Anastasia’s birthday—did she consent to join the family for a regular meal, and this was a rare exception.12 Four women at Seeon stepped in and acted as companions to the claimant: Agnes Wasserschleben, former matron from Stillachhaus, and three others who worked for the Leuchtenberg family: the English tutor Faith Lavington; music teacher Vera von Klemenz; and Maria Baumgarten, an elderly Russian émigré. Over the course of her eleven-month stay, the temperamental Frau Tchaikovsky succeeded in alienating all four with her constant changes of mood and frequent accusations of betrayal.13

  Aside from accidental encounters in the corridors, Tchaikovsky saw the entire family only twice in her first hundred days at Seeon, when she attended a church service and joined them for the Easter liturgy. This brought with it new controversies. For a Russian Orthodox grand duchess, the claimant had expressed surprisingly little interest in matters of faith, explaining not very convincingly that since the execution of the Romanovs she had been struggling with her conscience. In December 1925, during her stay at the Mommsen Clinic, she had for the first time attended services at the Russian Orthodox church on Berlin’s Nachodstrasse, joined by Rathlef-Keilmann; émigré writer Lev Urvantsov, who chaired a committee promoting her claim; and his sister-in-law Gertrude Spindler, who searched for evidence of her stay in Bucharest.14 After the service, Nicholas Markov, the head of Berlin’s Supreme Monarchist Council, quickly asserted that the claimant had crossed herself from left to right, in the Catholic rather than the Orthodox manner.15 On hearing of this, Rathlef-Keilmann, Urvantsov, and Spindler—all three supporters—protested, saying that the claimant had crossed herself correctly according to Orthodox practice.16

  No one knew quite what to believe or expect, and when Frau Tchaikovsky finally did join the family for services, everyone saw, in the end, confirmation of their own opinions. According to the duke of Leuchtenberg, after services a Russian priest with the rather unfortunate name Father Jakshitsch told him that the claimant was “definitely Orthodox” from her confession and behavior.17 The priest, however, deemed some of her religious “mannerisms” peculiar; this the duke explained away as an example of “the homely—one might say rustic—way in which the rites were administered in the Tsar’s household.”18 After the service, Frau Tchaikovsky excused any errors she had made, recalled the duke, by saying that she had “found it very difficult to follow the service” owing to her ill health.19

  Seeon.

  Others, though, were more skeptical. Baroness Nathalia Meller-Zakomelsky said that the claimant “appeared to struggle through the ritual. At times she seemed very knowledgeable about Orthodox rites, while at others her worship seemed to be a combination” of Orthodox and Catholic practices.20 Dimitri Leuchtenberg and his wife, Catherine, on the other hand, asserted that Frau Tchaikovsky had seemed “bewildered” during the service and had crossed herself “numerous times” in the Catholic manner.21 And Maria Hesse, widow of the former commander of the palace at Tsarskoye Selo, also observed the claimant during services at Seeon and declared, “She did not know at which prayer one should kneel. . . . In approaching for Holy Communion, she was completely lost; the priest had to prompt her to kiss the chalice and to make the sign of the Cross.” She added that the claimant had crossed herself throughout in both the Catholic and Orthodox manners.22

  It was not the only curiosity, for questions over Frau Tchaikovsky’s linguistic abilities reemerged during her stay at Seeon. Evidence of her familiarity with Russian was elusive. It was not a question of whether she could understand it—this much nearly everyone seemed to agree on—but that she would not speak it. There was, it is true, the statement from Dalldorf nurse Erna Buchholz that she had conversed with the claimant in the language in the summer of 1920; stories that she had called out in Russian while staying with the von Kleists, including the rather confusing secondhand account given by Dr. Schiller; and in December 1925 writer Lev Urvantsov said that she had replied to one of his comments in Russian, although the six words she used had parroted his own.23

  During her stay with the von Kleists, complaining of her damaged memory, Frau Tchaikovsky, it was said, had practiced her Russian with the baron and worked at writing out the Cyrillic alphabet.24 Something similar apparently happened at Lugano. “When I first came to know her,” Rathlef-Keilmann insisted, “she could neither write nor read.”25 This was clearly wrong: the records of her stay at Dalldorf, the statements from the nurses there, from the Schwabes, from the von Kleists—even from Clara Peuthert—all confirmed that the claimant had eagerly read numerous magazines, newspapers, and books.26 If this was all suspicious, what happened next seemed—at least to those skeptical of Frau Tchaikovsky’s claim—entirely too convenient. During their stay at Lugano, Rathlef-Keilmann spent her days helping the claimant study the Russian language, reading books and practicing the Cyrillic alphabet.27 Whether or not she was Anastasia, Frau Tchaikovsky was thus able to learn—or as her supporters believed, relearn—the language most important to her claim.

  And people were convinced that the claimant had to be Russian: Bonhoeffer reported her “Russian accent,” while Nobel described “a foreign accent, most probably Russian,” though these statements may have reflected perception more than fact.28 And then there was Dr. Theodor Eitel, who in 1926 had noted the claimant’s “typical Russian accent.”29 This fit perfectly with the idea that Frau Tchaikovsky was Anastasia, but the evidence wasn’t nearly as compelling as the legend suggested. Eitel’s remark on her “typical Russian accent” seemed intriguing, but it was, as the doctor admitted later, an error on his part. “In my understanding, he clarified in 1959, “her speech had an eastern cast. ‘Typically Russian’ was something I heard said often of it, but then, I spoke no Russian myself and thus could not say.”30 And Nobel may have believed that she carried a Russian accent, but he also believed that it was not her native language. He noted that while she could understand Russian when it was spoken, she seemed to go through “a laborious mental process” in translating phrases in her head to find the German expressions before she could offer any meaningful replies.31

  It all seemed just a little too ambiguous, too conflicted, to appear entirely convincing one way or the other. The duke of Leuchtenberg insisted that “She understands Russian quite well.”32 Yet he reached this judgment after hearing nothing mo
re than a few isolated words scattered over a few months. There was, for example, the occasion when she said to Duchess Olga, in decidedly ungrammatical Russian, “Thank you very much, all was very good.”33 Although Dimitri Leuchtenberg later asserted that during her time at Seeon the claimant “did not speak or understand Russian,” this was clearly not correct on either count.34 Dimitri’s brother Konstantin offered what was probably a more reliable summation of her capabilities in saying, “She cannot even speak Russian properly.”35

  German remained Frau Tchaikovsky’s language of choice. Until 1925, everyone—doctors, nurses, supporters, and detractors—all agreed that Frau Tchaikovsky spoke good German. In 1921 Malinovsky had called it “impeccable German,” Rathlef-Keilmann deemed it “very well chosen and formal German,” and Nobel flatly stated, “She speaks good German.”36 In the summer of 1925, when Alexei Volkov visited her at St. Mary’s Hospital, he was perplexed by not only her refusal to speak Russian but also, as Rathlef-Keilmann noted, her “exceptionally good German.” It was so good, Rathlef-Keilmann explained—“complete with the inflections unique to Berlin”—because “for the past five years she has lived in the city.”37

  And then, suddenly, in the aftermath of Volkov’s visit and the concerns he had voiced over Frau Tchaikovsky’s proficiency in the language, something strange happened: overnight the claimant’s German became atrocious.38 Ludwig Berg of St. Mary’s Hospital recalled that she “spoke German, but slowly, and she often had to search for her expressions. Her sentences were not always of German construction.”39 A year later, one supporter deemed her German “grammatically incorrect and of unusual construction,” while Eitel contended that she “spoke poor German, always in short sentences and with simple, one-syllable words and many grammatical errors.”40 The duke of Leuchtenberg insisted that her German was “so faulty that it is obviously not her native tongue,” while Faith Lavington, the English tutor at Seeon, insisted that the claimant “can only comprehend quite childish German.”41