by Greg King
And for those looking back at her claim, seeking some moment of personal epiphany, some time when Franziska made a clear and conscious decision to spend the rest of her life living a lie, that moment came in the summer of 1922, when she fled the von Kleist apartment one August morning and disappeared for four days. Because it is the pivotal moment in her claim, and an incident that later played a key role in exposing her, it is worthwhile to revisit the events of those days armed with Anna Anderson’s real identity.
Franziska left the von Kleist apartment sometime on the morning of Saturday, August 12, 1922.16 Baroness von Kleist suspected that she had run off to see Clara Peuthert, but a police inspection of the latter’s seedy apartment revealed no trace of the claimant, and Peuthert insisted that she hadn’t been there.17 Peuthert later insisted that Franziska had been with her at the time, had never left her apartment in these three days, an assertion picked up and repeated by Rathlef-Keilmann despite the fact that it was demonstrably untrue.18
In fact, Franziska had, for some inexplicable reason, returned to the Wingender flat at Neue Hochstrasse. Perhaps she had been drawn back to the apartment because it represented the only refuge she had known during her time in Berlin, and Frau Wingender had showed her kindness where others had regarded her with indifference. At about ten that Saturday morning, Doris Wingender answered a knock on the door and was startled to find Franziska standing on the threshold; no one had seen her since her sudden disappearance in February 1920. Franziska seemed well, and wore new and expensive clothing, “like a lady,” Doris said.19 But Franziska was confused and upset; in 1920, she said, she had met a wealthy gentleman; sometime later, a family of Russian émigrés took her into their Berlin apartment as they “mistook her for someone else,” someone important. It had, Franziska said, become too oppressive, so she had escaped; in her purse she carried roughly 150 marks (approximately $26.50 in 2011 currency), an envelope with postcards of the Russian imperial family, and a small gold swastika.20
Franziska spent that Saturday night at the Wingender apartment, although her movements over the next two days remain somewhat murky, and she may indeed have gone to visit Peuthert during this time.21 She finally left the Wingender flat on Monday afternoon, but not before asking Doris for some clothing to wear as a disguise. Doris gave her a dark blue skirt and matching jacket, and a hat adorned with yellow flowers; in exchange, Franziska left behind a mauve-colored dress, a camel hair coat, and some underwear that had been sewn with the initials AR.22
Later, this all became immensely important for those seeking to link Anna Anderson to Franziska Schanzkowska, and accusations and inconsistencies flew back and forth from supporters and opponents alike. Doris couldn’t quite recall when Franziska had returned, at first apparently suggesting it had been in early summer 1922; later this was supposedly altered to the less definitive “summer of 1922” to better coincide with the claimant’s disappearance from the von Kleists.23 The clothing involved became central to the issue: in 1927, when the items Franziska had left with Doris were shown to the von Kleists, the baron recognized the camel hair coat he had purchased for the claimant at Israel’s Department Store in Berlin. The baroness, too, identified the clothing, saying, “That’s the underwear I monogrammed myself,” a statement later confirmed by one of those present.24 Although the baroness supposedly later backed away from this identification, her sworn affidavit makes no mention of this, recording only that when Franziska was found after her disappearance “she was not wearing any of the clothing we had given to her.”25 Later, during the Hamburg trials, Doris Wingender submitted a photograph of herself in the clothing Franziska had left behind; on examination, the court discovered that she had erased a figure and drawn in buttons and a belt, though investigation determined that the alterations had probably been innocent and that it was “unlikely” that Wingender had knowingly submitted falsified evidence.26
“I feel so dirty!” Franziska had said, sobbing, to Baroness von Kleist when she was found. “I cannot look you in the eye!”27 “So dirty” because she had run away? Almost certainly not. The most likely answer is that the usually self-possessed Franziska had become overwhelmed at the magnitude of her charade. She must have recognized that hers was an extraordinarily tenuous position, that mystery was her greatest ally. Every confrontation, every question threatened the possibility that she could live in relative obscurity in a netherworld of uncertainty, where no one pressed to resolve her identity and she could remain an intriguing enigma. More than this, though, her remark to the baroness suggests that Franziska not only felt trapped in the situation she had created but also was ashamed of the knowing deception. It was a rare moment of self-reflection, an unspoken acknowledgment of the enormity of what she had done and its implications in the lives of those touched by her claim.
These four lost days in 1922 sealed Franziska’s fate. Here is the personal epiphany, the deliberate decision, the embarkation on a careful and controlled deceit that was to last the rest of Franziska’s life, for rather than own up to the charade, she now began a concerted effort to transform herself into a believable Anastasia. From her leap into the Landwehr Canal emerged the consoling light of a new identity, a second chance that her fevered brain seized as her only lifeline. In the Romanovs, a psychologically injured Franziska apparently discovered what her parents, her siblings, and the attentions of Anna Wingender could not provide: an idyllic family. Psychologically injured she certainly was, though the depression, morbidity, feelings of persecution, and extreme changes of mood in these years likely stemmed from the traumatic fusion of two warring identities, as Franziska willingly shed her previous life and struggled to achieve an emotional balance in her new role as Anastasia. One thing is clear: Franziska, as every doctor who examined her in these years agreed, was sane, if highly strung, and she knew exactly what she was doing. Yet those who condemned her as a mere “adventuress” failed to recognize just how desperately she needed to identify with her new persona, to embrace what, if true, would have been a horrendous past precisely because, for Franziska, it replaced a reality far worse than having survived the massacre in Ekaterinburg.
Continuation of the lie may have rescued an admittedly fragile young woman from the abyss, but it also trapped Franziska within a web of deceit from which she could never escape. And this, of course, explains what otherwise has seemed so inexplicable: her lack of cooperation with thus attempting to publicize her claim, to push for her asserted identity as Anastasia. No one stood to lose more than did Franziska if it was all revealed; she didn’t want meetings with former courtiers, didn’t welcome visits by even the most sympathetic of Anastasia’s acquaintances. In 1926, Dr. Nobel recorded that she often expressed a “fear of being discovered,” a confusing concern for a surviving Anastasia whose case had already received publicity, but a very real peril for Franziska Schanzkowska.28 Fear of revelation became a constant companion, ruling her actions and attitudes for the rest of her life.
Still, she did try, if not to prove that she was Anastasia, then at least to surround herself with an aura of plausibility. If she didn’t want to push for recognition, neither did she want to sink back into the misery that had been her former life. What she apparently wanted to create was not certainty, but rather enough intrigue that her actual identity remained a tantalizing mystery, intrigue that would ensure her continued care by those who supported her cause. Armed with this determination, she launched on her deliberate transformation, a transformation that brings us to the most intriguing questions of all: How did Franziska gain her impressive knowledge? How did she avoid revealing her humble origins, especially to her aristocratic hosts? How did she convince so many people who had known the real grand duchess that she was Anastasia? In short, how did she create an illusion so believable that it propelled her into legend? The answers are almost stunning in their simplicity. Beginning in 1922, in the aftermath of her temporary disappearance, and continuing on through the 1960s, Franziska undertook what literally became the r
ole of a lifetime, a part that required constant study; her early aptitude as a student, love of reading, and capacity for absorbing information coalesced into a powerful weapon to advance her charade, along with considerable charm and an ability to channel her painful past into an aura of tragic believability.
She began by relying on her memory, a memory she cunningly insisted was so damaged, so shattered, that she couldn’t read or write, couldn’t remember names, dates, faces, and places, couldn’t find “her” Russian or English. And cunning it certainly was; for all the talk of this struggle to remember, she revealed the lie to Nobel and Bonhoeffer, both of whom not only could find no organic cause for the alleged gaps in her memory, but who actually recorded just how good—in recalling precise names of doctors, nurses, and patients at Elisabeth Hospital and at Dalldorf—it really was.29 She fooled nearly everyone; the duke of Leuchtenberg thus gullibly insisted to Olga Alexandrovna that she couldn’t possibly possess the “dedication, comprehension, and perfect recall” he thought an impostor needed, although even he admitted—as the doctors confirmed—that she had “an extensive memory.”30
It began at Dalldorf, with the materials in the asylum library, with the newspapers that Malinovsky said were “full” of stories about the Romanovs, with the illustrated magazines that carried rumors of survival.31 Franziska, the asylum records noted, spent most of her days “reading newspapers and books,” following “political events with interest.”32 Malinovsky, too, brought her books—principally Russian literature—that she “read often.”33 This all would have been woefully short of intimate information on the Romanovs, but Franziska’s access to materials dramatically improved when she moved into the von Kleist apartment. The baron and his family, as well as the constant stream of émigré visitors, supplied her with books, memoirs, newspapers, souvenir albums, and illustrated magazines on the Romanovs—natural enough gifts for a young woman thought to be Anastasia, but invaluable sources for a claimant attempting to grow into the role. This included German editions of Gilliard’s memoirs; Nicholas II’s diary; the extensive wartime correspondence between the emperor and the empress; a copy of the Almanach de Gotha, a comprehensive register of royal families in Europe; a German translation of Tatiana Botkin’s memoirs; the English edition of Anna Vyrubova’s book; a number of special illustrated magazines and newspapers devoted to the Romanovs, their Siberian exile, and their assassination; pamphlets on the imperial family written by former courtiers; and even a romantic German novel whose plot involved the rescue of one of the grand duchesses from the Ipatiev House by a sympathetic guard.34 Then, too, Baron von Kleist often read aloud to her from various Russian books and émigré publications; armed with her knowledge of Polish and perhaps some rudimentary vocabulary picked up from the tsarist soldiers at Gut-Friederikenhof, she was clearly able to follow the main points, although all discussion of the contents took place, at her request, in German.35
The four Grand Duchesses, 1914, photo signed in French by Anastasia and reproduced in Gilliard’s first book, and later used by Franziska to copy her signature.
Franziska added to this assemblage of knowledge month by month, year by year, with more books, more magazines, and a growing collection of images: souvenir photographs, postcards, and varied illustrations of the imperial family, Empress Alexandra’s Hessian relatives, and other European royalty. She could often be found sitting alone, photographs spread out around her as she studied what was an impressive visual tool that gave her a growing familiarity with the faces of those whom she would be expected to know.36
And Franziska used the accumulated information to bolster her claim, plunging forward with deliberate calculation, as revealed by one particular incident in 1925. That year, before they had rejected her, the Gilliards received a Christmas card signed “Anastasie” by the claimant. “It is quite true,” Gilliard wrote to Rathlef-Keilmann, “that the signature greatly resembles that of Grand Duchess Anastasia when she was fourteen or fifteen years old. It is important to ascertain if the patient has seen the Grand Duchess’s signature on cards or in books.”37 Rathlef-Keilmann, though, insisted that not only had the claimant “never copied the signature of the Grand Duchess,” but also that she “had never even seen it.”38 This wasn’t true: in June 1925, Franziska had filled the margins of a magazine with random “A’ s” and attempts to duplicate Anastasia’s signature, presumably from a signed photograph in Gilliard’s book, in which the grand duchess had used the French variant of her name.39 And in the autumn of 1925, Zahle lent Rathlef-Keilmann a signed photograph of Anastasia that Alexandra Gilliard had let him borrow so she could show it to the claimant.40
Franziska’s practice efforts at copying Anastasia’s signature shown in No. 80.
Or take her rescue story: without doubt, Franziska derived all of the initial details from the October 23, 1921, issue of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. Not only did it provide an account of the imperial family’s captivity in Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg, as well as what was then believed of their executions, accompanied by numerous photographs, but also the magazine laid out, in a startling manner, precisely the tale Franziska offered: Anastasia, wounded during the shooting and fallen in a faint; a sympathetic soldier who discovered that she was still alive and rescued her; persistent rumors of Anastasia’s escape across Russia; and the jewelry sewn into the grand duchesses’ clothing that Franziska insisted had been used to finance her flight. And the article reported the case of a certain Mademoiselle Berditch, probably the first Anastasia claimant, who arrived in Paris in 1920 declaring that she was the grand duchess, wounded in the shooting, rescued by a soldier, and smuggled in a cart across Siberia into Europe.41
This is very nearly the story Franziska confessed to Malinovsky and to others, down to the inclusion of Paris as a destination—a detail, like the claim that Alexander Tchaikovsky had found some unnamed apparatus that she used to alter her appearance—that she later dropped from her tale. It also set the perimeters she would be forced to follow, often in the face of not only lack of evidence but also her own continuous amendments: had she envisioned the claim as anything more than mere diversion to pass her time at Dalldorf, Franziska certainly would have managed a more cogent and believable narrative that did not repeatedly contradict itself. Perhaps the rescue story also drew on Franziska’s own life: haste and lack of foresight may have led her to the name “Tchaikovsky,” but its similarity to her own surname suggests an inadvertent mingling of fact and fiction, as was her description of her alleged rescuer as the scion of minor Polish nobility—something certainly true of her own family.42
Information also came innocently to Franziska, from those who met the claimant, aristocrats, émigrés, former courtiers, and the merely curious. The simple human desire to assist a young woman many took to be a traumatized grand duchess almost certainly led many to become conduits of information as they spoke of the past, relating stories of life at the Russian court in misguided attempts to aid what she declared to be her shattered memory; this much Nicholas von Schwabe recalled during Franziska’s stay with him.43 Sometimes the efforts were overt, as when Peuthert, during the visit by Baroness Buxhoeveden, tried to prod the claimant, whispering in German and actually identifying figures in photographs for her. Other occasions required nothing of Franziska, as happened when she met Nicholas Sablin and Admiral Federov, when the two men openly reminisced about the Romanovs, their holidays, and various courtiers; it was a primer on the intimate life of the imperial family that required nothing of Franziska but her silent attention.
Franziska undoubtedly benefited from presumptions: only an aristocrat, it was presumed, would have her imperious manner and sense of entitlement; only an aristocrat would act in so ungrateful and uncooperative a manner with those attempting to help her; only an aristocrat would evince any interest in reading; only an aristocrat would know more than a single language (ignoring the fact that even as a young girl Franziska knew three); only an aristocrat would know how to play the piano (despite t
he fact that Franziska never demonstrated any real musical ability); only an aristocrat would know how to embroider (something Franziska undoubtedly learned, like all Kashubian girls); in short, only an aristocrat would behave as Franziska did. Shaped by class prejudices such views may have been, but still, how did Franziska manage to evoke a mien of aristocratic privilege? It is unlikely that she was an ill-mannered young woman, completely lacking in social skills, but how could the von Kleists or the duke of Leuchtenberg fail to spot the inadvertent gesture, the inexplicable lapse, that would have revealed the game?
As with so much of Franziska’s story, the answer is simple, for it is a misconception that, from the first, she played her role every hour, every day, for weeks, months, and years on end, and all under the harsh, unforgiving light of scrutiny. She was, to be sure, a keen observer of people and circumstances, with a talent for absorbing information and adopting it as her own, but she was careful to limit her exposure to potentially dangerous situations. In her months living with the von Kleists, for example, she rarely joined the family for meals, preferring to eat in the privacy of her bedroom—a pattern she repeated with the von Schwabes, at Seeon with the Leuchtenbergs, and at Kenwood with Princess Xenia Georgievna. Consider her request to Baron von Kleist that his family “not observe” the etiquette demanded of her presumed position; this undoubtedly alleviated some of the pressure upon her, and when she did join her hosts, she was silent more often than not, perhaps taking in behaviors around her and adjusting her own responses accordingly. Then, too, she could excuse herself from uncertain situations using the pretext of her ill health before committing any visible and obvious errors.