by Greg King
Unterlengenhardt, the Black Forest village that became Anderson’s home in 1949.
In 1936, the claimant was back with Frau Stahlberg, staying at her Pomeranian estate of Gut-Retzow when she met newspaper owner Paul Madsack and his wife, Gertrude; the couple was so taken with the claimant that they asked her to live with them, first at Deisterwald bei Barsinghausen and later in Hannover, where they provided her with a series of apartments.38 Here she remained through most of the Second World War, living through the uncertainties and food shortages and nightly air raid sirens that regularly sent her scurrying in terror. One night, an Allied bomb fell on her apartment house, erupting in a “sudden explosion and clouds of dust and rubble” that exploded around her. When she looked up, Anderson saw that the windows were shattered, the doors all blown off their hinges; she ran past “white-lit rooms” where people were “screaming and shrieking” as flames swept through the building; on the street, she abruptly stopped when she found her neighbor’s head, dead eyes staring. “The streets were on fire,” she recalled, “it was all black, but on fire, and I was running through burning streets.”39 Anderson barely escaped this conflagration, but her apartment was lost, and like others left homeless by the war, she slept where she could, in temporary shelters, in houses where friends of the Madsacks offered respite, and finally in the relatively isolated Schloss Winterstein, a Thuringen castle belonging to Princess Louisa of Saxe-Meiningen. But the arrival of Soviet troops near the end of the war sent her into a panic, and one night she secretly fled, running through forests and crossing rivers with the help of a friend until she reached the safety of a French-occupied zone.40
Anna Anderson, with Prince Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg, on the day she moved into her converted barracks at Unterlengenhardt.
Not until 1949 did Anderson finally obtain a home of her own. This was a single-story, ramshackle hut formerly used as a barracks by German soldiers, a few miles outside of the Black Forest village of Unterlengenhardt near Bad Liebenzell. Purchased and given to her by a supporter, this required extensive repairs before it could be occupied, and limited finances meant that only one room could be heated, but for the first time the woman whose claim had captivated the world had some measure of personal security. She quickly set about turning this haphazard assemblage of rooms into her own zealously guarded miniature kingdom: windows were boarded up to preclude the possibility that she could be spied upon; a tall batten-board and chain-link fence topped with barbed wire that shielded the compound from the adjacent road arose; and, in a final effort to protect her privacy, she adopted four immense wolfhounds, christened with unlikely names such as “Baby” and “Naughty,” and set them loose to patrol the grounds.41 Within, a succession of elderly aristocratic keepers and friends, including Baroness Monica von Miltitz and Frau Adele von Heydebrandt, cared for her daily needs, and Baron Ulrich von Gienath took charge of her financial affairs.42 It was a curious place: although one supporter had presented Anderson with an impressively carved bed that had once belonged to Queen Victoria’s family, she refused to sleep in it. The bed was given over to her dogs and to an ever-increasing swell of cats, while the claimant slept on a sofa in her sitting room, whose walls were adorned with portraits of Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra. There was clutter everywhere: piles of unopened and unanswered letters from the curious public; stacks of magazines and newspapers; dangerously uneven stacks of books that swayed on the uneven floor; and mountains of discarded clothing heaped upon bags of debris that eventually seeped out and permeated the little house with a rank odor.43 Within a decade, the hut had become a health hazard, and a new, prefabricated chalet was erected nearby for the claimant in 1960. Soon enough it, too, had become a crowded repository for the flotsam and jetsam of her fabled life.
The new chalet at Unterlengenhardt into which Anderson moved, 1960.
Visitors to the hut at Unterlengenhardt were never welcomed and rarely let inside, even when they were the claimant’s most dedicated supporters. “Although the interest of the people was mostly friendly and curious,” recalled Baroness von Miltitz, “they began to throng around her. Thousands of sightseers invaded our little village, anxious for a glimpse of the ‘mysterious Grand Duchess.’ Many motorists disregarded the sign outside the entrance forbidding traffic on this part of the road, and large buses came full of passengers who got out to stare at her grounds. They climbed trees, pressed against the fence, tried to vault the gate, peered through gaps in the hedge, threw stones, whistled, and called for her to come out.”44
Anderson in her garden at Unterlengenhardt.
They came—and would continue to come—because by this time, Anna Anderson was indeed a living legend, her claim an enigma promoted or denounced in numerous books and even motion pictures. The first film had come in 1928, during her stay in America, a sixty-minute silent feature produced in Hollywood and called Clothes Make the Woman. Starring Eve Southern as a surviving Anastasia, this followed Anderson’s tale only as far as the execution and her alleged rescue by a sympathetic soldier; more interested in appealing to imagination, the film then spun off into a true Hollywood twist, with a surviving Anastasia off to Los Angeles to portray herself in a new movie about her family’s murder.45 That same year brought a German production, Anastasia: Die Falsche Zarentochter (Anastasia: The Tsar’s False Daughter), apparently rushed onto screens to take advantage of the publicity over Rathlef-Keilmann’s book and the press furor over the claimant, and two more films followed in the 1930s: Secrets of the French Police, which offered up a poor Parisian flower girl as the victim of a sinister Russian general attempting to pass her off as the grand duchess, and Kampf und Anastasia, an unlikely German comedy short very loosely based on Anderson’s tale.46
Anderson at Unterlengenhardt.
The story fell victim to the more pressing concerns of the Second World War, but in 1954 it returned with a renewed and persistent vengeance that would last for the rest of her life. It all began with a play, a simple, three-act piece by French writer Marcelle Maurette titled Anastasia. The plot was straightforward: an amnesiac young woman named Anna is rescued from a suicide attempt in Berlin by a former White Russian general, Prince Sergei Bounine, who plans to fill her head with tales of the imperial family and pass her off as a surviving Anastasia to gain access to the Romanov fortune. Soon the destitute Anna is transformed into a woman of regal bearing, with a sure command of Anastasia’s life, including facts she seems to recall spontaneously. When meetings with former courtiers and aristocrats produce no definitive opinion, Bounine convinces Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna to receive his protégée. In the play’s emotional highlight, Anna casually recalls a terrible storm during a cruise aboard the imperial yacht; it is enough for the dowager empress, who embraces the young woman as her lost granddaughter.47
Anderson at Unterlengenhardt.
Guy Bolton translated and adapted the play, and Sir Laurence Olivier’s London production premiered to great acclaim; soon Anastasia moved to New York City, and a successful Broadway run with Viveca Lindfors as Anna and Eugenie Leontovitch as Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna. The public was again fascinated by the story, and Hollywood, quick to recognize the romantic potential in the mysterious story of a lost princess, announced plans for a major motion picture. Hearing this, Dr. Kurt Vermehren, one of Anderson’s lawyers, took the unprecedented step of negotiating with a German studio and director Falk Harnack to produce a rival film on the claimant’s life. Anastasia: Die Letze Zarentochter (Anastasia: The Last Tsar’s Daughter) abandoned the fictional premise of Maurette’s play, offering a narrative history of the story that included such real-life characters as Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, Harriet von Rathlef-Keilmann, Clara Peuthert, the duke of Leuchtenberg, and Gleb Botkin. Her performance as Anna Anderson won Lili Palmer a Best Actress Award at the 1957 Berlin Film Festival, but within a few months of its release it sank into obscurity, dwarfed by the steamroller that was Twentieth Century-Fox’s 1956 Technicolor epic Anastasia.48
Starring Helen Hayes as the dowager empress, Yul Brynner as Bounine, and Ingrid Bergman in the title role, Anastasia was a lavish, $3 million rendering of the Maurette-Bolton play, as much an unlikely love story between the claimant and her muse as it was the story of her struggle for identity. The film, which gave Bergman her second Best Actress Oscar, was an enormous sensation; even Olga Alexandrovna enjoyed it, deeming the movie “well done and quite exciting.”49 Exciting it certainly was for most people, and once again the narrow lanes of Unterlengenhardt were overrun with curious tourists, whose buses whisked them past Anderson’s ominous-looking compound to shops stocked with books on the Romanovs, pictures of the claimant, and even postcards of her little residence labeled “Anastasia Haus.”50 When two men arrived from Life magazine, Anderson—in exchange for a small fee—reluctantly granted an interview and posed for photographs in her impossibly crowded sitting room, but she found the experience disturbingly intrusive. The men, she complained, had been “like mice in every corner,” poking through her hut and constantly asking her to smile for their pictures.51
Anderson at Unterlengenhardt, 1960.
It was all, Anderson said, “like in a prison. I am a good business attraction for them—that Anastasia is living here means for all these cold business men good money, for it is very interesting for strangers to see the poor ape in the barrack. More I am not for nobody.”52 Yet her self-imposed seclusion only stoked public interest: Who, really, was this enigmatic, middle-aged woman? Had surviving Romanov relatives knowingly rejected a surviving Anastasia? What languages did she really speak? How had she come by her scars? And if not Anastasia, how did she know so many obscure, intimate details about imperial life? This was the power of the myth laid down by Rathlef-Keilmann, a myth that had been challenged but that remained intact, a myth that the public refused to surrender. Too many words, photographs, and films had seeped into imaginations; for much of the world, whether proved or not, Anna Anderson had now become Anastasia.
15
Émigrés at War
It was building, slowly building, in these years, the intrigue over Anderson’s claim, an intrigue renewed by the books and films and new onslaught of unwelcome attention. And still Romanov relatives argued and fought, not just about her identity but also about how to deal with her claim and with each other. Only two members of the family had actually met and accepted her as Anastasia: Princess Xenia Georgievna and Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, both in 1928. The grand duke, immersed in his own inquiry, had met the claimant at the Palais Hotel in Paris before she sailed for America. Alexander Spiridovich, former head of Nicholas II’s Court Chancellery, saw Andrei stumble from the room, greatly agitated, “upset, and profoundly moved. He had tears in his eyes. For him, there was no doubt.”1 He seems to have based his opinion merely on observation, for at their first meeting Anderson apparently refused to speak or to answer any of Andrei’s questions, hiding her face behind a sheet for most of the encounter; only later, as he bid her farewell, was the grand duke rewarded with a few German sentences.2
“I had the opportunity,” Andrei reported to Serge Botkin, “to observe and judge the invalid closely over two days, and I can categorically state that there is no doubt in my mind that she is Grand Duchess Anastasia. It is out of the question not to recognize her. Naturally, the years and her suffering have left their mark, though not as much as I had imagined. Her face is profoundly sad, but when she smiles, she is, without doubt, Anastasia.”3 And to his cousin Olga Alexandrovna he wrote, “I recognized her immediately, and further observation only confirmed my first impression. I really have no doubt on this: she is Anastasia.”4 By this time, though, the grand duchess had long abandoned any initial hint of ambiguity, and she rejected Andrei’s pleas to meet the claimant again. Anderson’s opponents complained that Andrei was in no position to offer such a definite opinion on the subject, that as Nicholas II’s cousin his contact with Anastasia had been minimal, and that too many years had passed; her supporters countered by pointing out that the grand duke had served as a personal adjutant to the tsar and thus had regularly been on duty at Tsarskoye Selo throughout the First World War. In truth, both sides were correct. Andrei had seen a teenaged Anastasia roughly a dozen times in the last few years before the Revolution, many times in passing, and rarely when he was asked to join the imperial family for luncheon, tea, or dinner. Did this limited and periodic exposure leave him in a position to adequately assess the claimant? Apparently not, at least according to the grand duke himself, who had initially rejected the idea of meeting her by explaining to Tatiana Botkin, “I can’t trust my personal impressions. I wasn’t close enough to the tsar’s children to be able to identify Anastasia.”5
Perhaps by 1928 the grand duke’s own investigation had led him to abandon his previous caution, or in embracing Rathlef-Keilmann’s evidence he was ready to be convinced. He made no statement, though the public learned of his opinion when the duke of Leuchtenberg published a private letter Andrei had sent him describing the favorable meeting in Paris. When Rathlef-Keilmann’s book was published, it also included a lengthy letter Andrei had written to her editor, printed as a preface that outlined all points in Anderson’s favor. “Her reminiscences, so far as I have been able to examine them,” he declared rather inaccurately, “yield a description, clear in every respect, of actual facts. Everything that she recalls is an absolutely accurate description of the life of the Imperial Family, including details that have never appeared in the Press. My own opinion is that the things that the patient remembers are such as only the Grand Duchess herself could recall.” He noted a “striking similarity” physically between the claimant and Anastasia, as well as what he called “the general family resemblance, which is in some respects of almost greater importance than a personal likeness.”6
So infuriated was Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich by these developments that he immediately summoned his brother and demanded an explanation. Andrei admitted to recognizing the claimant, whom Kirill had branded “an adventuress,” but apparently denied that he had in any way authorized publication of any of his private correspondence. “Obviously,” Kirill wrote, “my brother was used.”7 Whether this was true or not, Kirill ordered his brother to stop his investigation; by this time, Andrei had grown disgusted with Gleb Botkin’s tactics and readily bowed out, never uttering another public word about the claimant. In 1955, though, just a year before his death, he wrote a curious letter to his cousin Olga Alexandrovna: “I had always believed you to be angry with me owing to the Tchaikovsky Affair. This would have saddened me even more. My love for you is too great to cause any such pain. . . . As things now stand, I have never formally stated my opinion on the matter, because I have never entirely been convinced. . . . The mystery remains unsolved. . . . I’m incapable of resolving this question.”8
Andrei’s son Vladimir commented that the grand duke “had been struck by a clear family resemblance. Sometimes, however, the detailed investigation, with its occasionally contradictory elements, did make him have doubts, and I can attest that in his files there is nothing that would prove one way or another whether the unknown woman is the daughter of Emperor Nicholas II. My father could never have sworn an oath either way in this case, being convinced that, like anyone, he could be mistaken.”9 But Prince Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg, one of Anderson’s most loyal supporters, thought that such revisions were merely attempts “to heal the quarrel” between Andrei and Olga over the claimant. He told case historian Brien Horan, “I saw Uncle Andrei shortly before his death and from the way he spoke about her, I had the impression that he still believed in her. I think his true opinion was his recognition of Anastasia after their rendezvous in 1928. It was a completely straightforward recognition based entirely on his personal impressions and on his research, and it was as yet uninfluenced by outside forces, such as his brother Kirill’s order to withdraw from the case.”10 And Ki
rill’s daughter Princess Kira recalled that before his death, her Uncle Andrei “had tried to convince me that she was Anastasia.”11
Kira wasn’t convinced. Only seven at the time of the Revolution, she had no real memories of Anastasia; when she finally met Anderson in 1952, she said, rather snobbishly, that she “was not a lady.” Her English, she said, “was not the English that was spoken in the family,” but rather seemed heavily accented—either Slavic or Polish, Kira thought. The idea that they might be cousins, Kira said, was “repulsive.”12 But it was true, insisted Kira’s mother-in-law. This was Crown Princess Cecilie of Prussia, a woman with her own ties to the Romanovs: her mother, Grand Duchess Anastasia Mikhailovna, was a second cousin to Nicholas II and sister-in-law to his sister Xenia Alexandrovna. Cecilie first met Anderson in the 1920s; although she thought there was some vague resemblance, she hadn’t really known Anastasia, and besides, all of the relatives seemed so sure that she wasn’t genuine. But she followed the case in the press with some interest, and in 1952 visited Anderson at Unterlengenhardt. After several meetings, she said, “I am convinced that she is the Emperor’s youngest daughter. Now that she is a mature woman, I can occasionally detect in her the features of her mother. But more pointedly, her behavior and cordial manner suggest to me an intimate familiarity and past association that bonds those of common origin together.”13
Kira later suggested, not very helpfully, that her mother-in-law had been mentally unstable, but it was a pointless exercise to ascribe recognitions in Anderson’s favor as the manifestation of some undiagnosed psychosis shared by her supporters, as some of the more unkind critics insinuated.14 People seized upon the slightest coincidence—Marianne Nilov, widow of the imperial yacht’s captain, apparently thought the claimant had the same eyes as Nicholas II, the same way of laughing as Anastasia, while two of her husband’s former officers on the Standart, Baron George Taube and Vassili Woitinsky, found nothing at all in her to remind them of the grand duchess.15 And many were genuinely convinced, and their conviction rested not on some imaginary delusion or elusively subjective factor, but rather on what they took for Anderson’s inexplicable knowledge. Such was the case with Ivan Arapov, a former patient in Anastasia’s hospital at Tsarskoye Selo. After reading of Anderson’s claim, he suggested that her American lawyer Edward Fallows ask if she recalled his name. “Does he limp?” Anderson asked. When Fallows said no, she insisted that the only Arapov known to her had limped; when Arapov heard this, he explained that he had been shot in the leg and had indeed limped during his stay in the hospital at Tsarskoye Selo. Later Arapov met Anderson in Berlin and pronounced her genuine.16