by Greg King
The only known pre-1920 photograph of Franziska Schanzkowska.
Late that summer, Franziska’s fortunes improved considerably when she obtained a position at Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft, or AEG (later AEG Farben), a factory in Berlin.6 Mass conscription and the endless months of fighting had left Berlin’s factories undermanned, and women were quickly encouraged to enter the industrial arena. “Every German woman,” the state declared, “is a soldier in this economic war.”7 More than three million German women took such industrial jobs in the midst of the First World War, seizing the opportunity for steady employment at a time when insecurity had become a constant companion.8 Work in munitions factories was one of the few jobs with guaranteed wage increases; steady employment; and, perhaps most important, special ration privileges—extra coupons for flour, meat, and fat at a time when daily life in the city was beginning to fall apart.9
Gertrude Ellerik, Franziska’s sister.
The AEG factory where Franziska worked still stands in Berlin, a massive concrete and glass building at 71 Ackerstrasse, not far from the apartment on Neue Hochstrasse; ironically, much of the complex—built atop the remains of a slaughterhouse—had been designed by Peter Behrens, one of Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig’s favorite architects.10 Before the war, the factory produced dynamos and electrical motors; now it manufactured military matériel, including field telephones, airplane motors, machine guns, and munitions.11 Franziska worked on an assembly line, polishing live grenades, a potentially lethal occupation under often inadequate safety regulations: daily she was exposed to explosives and hazardous chemicals, in an environment where industrial accidents and even deaths were increasingly frequent.12
Then came the spring of 1916, “so warm and so bright,” recalled one Berliner, that it somehow seemed “out of tune and out of place” in a city “that still thinks it necessary to send hundreds of men each day to their deaths.”13 Franziska had met one of these men, a young soldier training in the German capital, and, accelerated by the urgency of uncertainty, romance soon gave way to an engagement—an engagement perhaps marked by the single photograph of Franziska—before deployment separated the couple.14 The name of the fiancé is lost to history, but not so his fate. He was sent to fight, not on the Western Front, as has previously been reported, but rather to the Eastern Front, joining in Germany’s Galician campaign. In the early summer of 1916, he died after being wounded in combat.15
A contemporary view of the former AEG factory in Berlin, where Franziska Schanzkowska worked and where she had her industrial accident in 1916.
It was a time of war, and such a blow cannot have been unexpected, but the death may have coincided with a crisis of more pressing and personal concern: sometime before 1920, Franziska was pregnant. This much she admitted, though she insisted that she had given birth to Alexander Tchaikovsky’s son after he raped her following the Ekaterinburg massacre, a story she may have invented to explain why a surviving Anastasia was no longer a virgin. In 1951, a gynecological examination in Germany revealed a distortion in the shape of her cervical opening; this change occurs naturally when a woman gives birth, but can also stem from a late-term miscarriage or abortion, or from an early, invasive abortion.16
Franziska’s family later insisted that she had never been pregnant or given birth, something true enough up to February 1914. Circumstantial evidence, though, suggests Franziska may have been pregnant in the summer of 1916, a period coinciding with her only known romantic relationship. There was a sudden and violent break with her sister Gertrude at the time, some argument serious enough that Franziska abruptly moved out of their shared room at 17 Neue Hochstrasse.17 Gertrude later tried to downplay the incident, admitting only to her sister’s sudden departure. “I don’t know why she moved,” Gertrude insisted, suggesting that perhaps Franziska “thought the rent was too high.”18 This isn’t convincing. The sisters had shared a room at Frau Peters’s for more than a year; both were employed by AEG at the time; and nothing suggests that Franziska was in any financial difficulty.
The decision was even more curious since Franziska didn’t even leave the building. Anna Wingender, the building manager, had a fourth-floor apartment where she lived with two of her daughters, thirteen-year-old Rosa Dorothea, known as Doris, and nine-year-old Luise (the oldest daughter, Kathe, lived elsewhere at the time).19 Later described as a “loving, maternal type,” Anna Wingender now came to the rescue. “I always felt sorry for Franziska,” she said, attempting to explain how the young woman from Hygendorf first came to live with her.20 Even after the move, relations between Franziska and Gertrude were strained; although only three floors separated them, Gertrude never once called on her sister.21
Doris Wingender, photographed during the Hamburg civil trial.
And this was all the more inexplicable because, as Gertrude later explained, Franziska suddenly fell ill. She was sick, weak, suffering from fainting spells and an inexplicable case of blood poisoning—symptoms certainly suggestive, first of a possible pregnancy and then of an invasive abortion.22 It isn’t a difficult scenario to envision: Franziska was alone, in the middle of an ongoing war, and facing an uncertain future. It wasn’t merely the stigma of being an unwed mother, for by 1916 the public largely viewed all potential mothers as burdensome, unproductive drains on scarce resources; limited rations, it was argued, were best saved for those actively engaged in the war effort.23 Pregnant women also lost their jobs, and losing a job at AEG meant the loss of privileged ration status as a munitions employee at a particularly desperate time. If Franziska was indeed pregnant, such considerations may have pushed her toward an abortion, a common enough occurrence in the Berlin of 1916 owing to wartime liaisons. Such a theory, at least, reconciles the evidence of her pregnancy with her sudden break with Gertrude, with her inexplicable move to the Wingender apartment, and with her illness and blood poisoning. And this fits in with what Franziska told Doris Wingender: that she had fallen out with her sister because Gertrude had been “telling tales” about her behavior to their mother back in Hygendorf.24
That August of 1916, ill, on edge, Franziska returned to work, laboring over grenades to kill Russian soldiers even as, a thousand miles east, Anastasia was busy at Tsarskoye Selo tending to her wounded officers. Then, on August 22, disaster struck. Franziska was on the line polishing a grenade when, suddenly ill, she fell to the concrete floor in a faint. The grenade rolled a short distance; when it hit the foot of the line foreman, it exploded, killing him in a shower of gore.25
Later, Franziska would call the Ekaterinburg massacre “an accident, a very bad accident.” This was an odd choice of words to describe brutal executions, but an apt depiction of the horror at the AEG factory in 1916, suggesting an inadvertent weaving of personal history with imagined fiction. “I fainted,” she said, “everything was blue, and I saw stars dancing and had a great rushing in the ears . . . my dresses were all bloody. All was full of blood.”26
Was this 1916 accident how Anna Anderson came by the scars she bore in 1920 when pulled from the Landwehr Canal? This, at least, is what her critics believed. Franziska’s family, though, contended that she had received no “scars,” no “distinguishing marks,” no “fractured skull,” “no head wounds,” and “no injury of any sort” during the explosion.27 In this they were very nearly correct, for Franziska had been fortunate: in fainting and falling to the floor, she protected herself from the worst effects of the explosion. An internal report on the incident, issued by AEG authorities on August 29, noted that Franziska had suffered only a few superficial cuts from flying shrapnel, to her head and extremities.28 This much was later confirmed by Gertrude, who could recall only that her sister had been struck “by shrapnel” on her feet, perhaps “on her heels.”29 The wounds observed on Anna Anderson in 1920 stemmed from another, previously unknown incidence of violence.
Though she had been cleared of any intentional responsibility for the accident, Franziska was let go from her job at AEG.30 Perhaps what next h
appened was inevitable, a mere continuation of that catastrophic summer of 1916, for Franziska suffered a nervous breakdown. Authorities reportedly found her confused, wandering the streets of Berlin, and took her into protective custody.31
Thus began a pattern she would repeat in 1920 following her suicide attempt, for at first Franziska refused to give her name, age, profession, or any details that would clarify her identity. When she finally did submit to questioning, doctors found her suffering from hysteria, depression, and an apparent inability to care for herself. Declared insane on September 19, 1916, and designated a ward of the German state, Franziska was committed, at government expense, to the Berlin-Schöneberg Asylum on the Hauptstrasse in the southwestern quarter of the city, where she would remain through the end of the year.32
This 1916 declaration of insanity reveals little about Franziska’s actual state of mind. At the time, she was clearly unable to cope with the accumulated tragedies that fell upon her already fragile shoulders. Her life as Anna Anderson was marked by depression, anxiety, hysteria, narcissism, unpredictable changes of mood, and feelings of persecution, a collection of symptoms suggestive of one or more behavioral disorders unknown to the psychiatric world of 1916. In particular, there are indications of a borderline personality struggling with what today might be classified as post-traumatic stress disorder, two conditions also observed with some regularity in adult survivors of incest.33 But while Franziska certainly suffered from and displayed a variety of psychological traumas, it is unlikely that she was actually clinically insane, as such a diagnosis would today be applied.
But even if her autumn 1916 breakdown was temporary, Franziska had real reasons for maintaining a certain mien of helplessness. By that winter, daily life for members of Berlin’s working class had become an ordeal. Rations were again cut, turnips replaced potatoes, and desperation drove people to cut slabs from horses that had died in the street and feed the meat to their starving families. Electricity was inconsistent, heating unreliable, and cholera and typhus raged through the city.34 The stay in the hospital relieved Franziska of such worries, and she was not alone: so many people claimed mental illness to win food and shelter that the government repeatedly set up review boards to protect the welfare system from such abuse.35
At the beginning of 1917, Franziska was transferred to the State Institute for Welfare and Care in Berlin’s Wittenau district, Dalldorf, where she would return in 1920.36 She stayed for four months. On May 19, 1917, authorities transferred Franziska to Landesheilanstalt Neuruppin, a state asylum some thirty miles northwest of Berlin.37 Here she was treated for what was officially described as “nervous shock”; her records from Neuruppin recorded her as “quiet.” She spent most of her time, the staff noted, sitting silently in her bed and occasionally reading; when confronted by doctors or nurses, however, she often turned to the wall, or tried to cover her head with a sheet, refusing to answer their questions—behavior she repeated at Elisabeth Hospital and at Dalldorf in 1920.38 Still, there seemed to be nothing particularly wrong with her—she was highly strung and prone to violent changes of mood, but keeping Franziska locked away indefinitely served no point. On October 22, 1917, she was released from Neuruppin into the care of her sister Gertrude, discharged as “incurably mad, but harmless,” a determination as equally problematic as the initial declaration of her insanity.39
Caring for Franziska, though, was beyond Gertrude’s concern or capabilities, and in December 1917 she took her back to Hygendorf. Nearly four years had passed since Marianna had sent her eldest daughter to Berlin; the Franziska who returned had been declared insane and committed against her will in three asylums, an emotionally volatile, damaged young woman. Whatever circumstances had led Marianna to exile her daughter, whatever bitterness had existed, now suddenly came rushing back. Franziska, Marianna later commented, “always thought she was too good for work” and had come home to “put her hand in our pocket again.”40 Rather than care for a clearly damaged Franziska, she instead, as Gertrude recalled, “sent her back out to work,” her “incurably mad” daughter, to labor in the chill winter on a nearby agricultural estate. It proved too much, and Franziska soon quit but, presumably out of necessity imposed by her mother’s dictates, she took a job as a waitress at the Herrschen Brewery in Bütow, an establishment patronized by German soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front against Russia.41 This meant a daily walk of thirty minutes from Hygendorf, through the January snow, but was at least preferable to agricultural work.42 During this job Franziska accidentally caught her hand in the coils of a dishwashing machine, a deep wound that sliced her middle left finger open. Although the wound healed, she was, as her mother recalled, left with a deep scar—the scar that she would later insist had come when a servant slammed a carriage door on her hand at Tsarskoye Selo.43
Exiled from the farmhouse to Berlin, exiled from the farmhouse to work—there was something altogether disturbing in Marianna’s overt lack of sympathy for her daughter, as if her mere presence was an unwelcome burden. Relations with her mother had always been difficult, but the four months Franziska spent at Hygendorf in 1918 must have reawakened every past bitter feeling between them as the last familial bonds fell away. When Franziska declared her intention to return to Berlin, Marianna made no effort to stop her, to step in and care for her damaged daughter.44 Although she would occasionally dispatch letters, Franziska never again returned home.45
By April 8, 1918, Franziska was again at work, this time as a laborer on the agricultural estate of Gut-Friederikenhof in the northern German province of Schleswig-Holstein.46 Here, Franziska worked in the asparagus fields, living in a brick dormitory on the estate along with other female laborers.47 Despite her dislike of such intensive labor, Franziska did well here; her manager remembered her as “an active and energetic employee.”48 She spent her days in the fields, working under the vigilant eyes of armed German soldiers—a necessity, for the estate also served as an internment camp for Russian prisoners of war seized in hostilities along the Eastern Front and forced to join the agricultural laborers. Over the next five months, Franziska labored alongside these tsarist soldiers for ten hours a day, six days a week, and some relationship developed, a relationship significant enough that Franziska later mentioned it to the Wingenders.49 Perhaps Franziska’s familiarity with Polish allowed her to understand some of their conversations; but continued exposure over the course of the summer may well have left her with a rudimentary Russian vocabulary, a vocabulary she later built upon in her claim as Anastasia.
And then, one day that early autumn of 1918, violence erupted. Franziska was working in the fields when, for reasons unknown, one of the tsarist soldiers attacked her using some farming tool.50 This previously unreported assault at Gut-Friederikenhof is the missing link in Franziska’s case, bridging the gap between the minor wounds she received in the 1916 AEG explosion and the more serious injuries observed when she was pulled from the Landwehr Canal in 1920. Such an attack—with a pitchfork, hoe, or shovel—could certainly have left her with fractured jaws, teeth loosened from blows to the face, and the scar above her ear, and account for the sharp object that had been driven through her foot. It also resolves the dilemma of reconciling the testimony of Franziska’s family that she bore no visible scars with the mute evidence observed on Anna Anderson, for she never told her mother or siblings of this attack, as Gertrude’s later statements made clear.51 Why she remained silent is not known. Perhaps her decision owed something to whatever led to the incident, or perhaps it stemmed from her mother’s unsympathetic reception when she had returned home in the fall of 1917. Apparently unable or unwilling to turn to her family for help, Franziska did the only thing she could: she returned to Berlin, to the Wingender apartment, to Anna Wingender, the one person who had at least provided her with care and a semblance of maternal affection.
The young woman who in just three years would claim to be Anastasia was almost twenty-two now. She had, recalled Anna Wingender’s daughter Doris, “a
Slavic face, with a thick nose, especially prominent, pouting lips, and reddish-brown hair.” Doris thought that Franziska had been “heavy and awkward,” and somewhat larger than herself, though she admitted she could not precisely recall her weight or height.52 She added that Franziska seemed “rather dirty, and she seldom bathed.”53 Anna Wingender especially remembered Franziska’s hair: “She had beautiful brown hair with a natural wave, and in the sunshine it glowed with an auburn sheen. She was very proud of her hair.”54
There were, Doris noted, wounds on the Franziska who reappeared in their apartment that autumn of 1918, especially “the one to her head.” Franziska, she said, “constantly complained of headaches, and my mother used to go out and get her powders from the pharmacy.”55 Franziska must have been miserable and in a great deal of pain, for Anna often found her alone, rubbing her temples and face and crying, “All the time my head hurts me so much!”56 Then there were her teeth, loose and damaged—presumably from the blows to the face she apparently received at Gut-Friederikenhof; Franziska, said Anna’s daughter Luise, was “very self-conscious” of her damaged teeth, especially those in her upper front jaw, black and at jagged angles.57 Both Doris and Luise recalled the curious way Franziska spoke, holding up her hands or a handkerchief in an attempt to hide her mouth, as she would do after her rescue from the Landwehr Canal.58 Doris even thought that Franziska was so embarrassed by this that she bought a partial set of false teeth to disguise the noticeable gaps when she opened her mouth.59 Doris did remember the scar on Franziska’s finger, and Kathe Wypyrzyk, the eldest of the Wingender daughters, spoke of a mark on her shoulder—the same mark Franziska later insisted had come from a cauterized mole.60 And Franziska, like Anastasia, had hallux valgus. Franziska, Anna Wingender said, “always tried to hide her bare feet,” which she recalled as “small, but ugly,” with “pronounced bunions that gave her a great deal of pain.”61 The condition was so bad, said Doris, that “it caused her shoes to become misshapen,” and even Franziska’s sister Gertrude remembered that the “joints of her toes had perhaps been a bit big.”62