An American Princess

by Annejet van Der Zijl

  For her highborn husband, on the other hand, the Great Depression was one setback too many. Henry sought refuge in drinking and gambling as of old, and in peevishness he unleashed on his wife more and more frequently in public. He may have once come into the world with a proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, but no one could say he had been born under a lucky star.

  9

  The Fifth Man

  Rache, Rache, und nochmals Rache! Revenge, revenge, and once again revenge. That was what Henry and his brothers had sworn in 1924 as they revealed a monument in Ostritz, near Trebschen, for the Germans killed in the war. Revenge for the lost war, which they were convinced could have been won if the country hadn’t been sabotaged, inside out, by international Jewry. Revenge for the downfall of the German empire and their monarchy. And in particular revenge for the Treaty of Versailles, which had condemned their country to an existence as Europe’s hapless pauper.

  At the time, the United States was the only nation that had rejected the peace treaty signed in Versailles on June 28, 1919. The Americans felt, in part, that the reparations the Germans had to pay as instigators of the war were too draconian; the restrictions imposed on the country were too humiliating. They seemed to be the only ones to realize that you always have to give a person or a nation the opportunity to be a good loser.

  During the postwar years, it was mainly Americans who had dared to invest heavily in ravaged and traumatized Germany. Thanks to them, the German economy had slowly been able to scramble to its feet again over the course of the 1920s. But when those same Americans were forced to hastily recoup their money after the 1929 stock market crash, the bottom fell out of Germany’s still-fragile economic market. The Great Depression, which had spread across the planet like a viscous oil slick, hit the world hard but nowhere as hard as it did in Germany.

  Unemployment figures shot up, the government was powerless, and the battered country was hit by a paralyzing malaise in which extremist political ideals could easily take root—ideals such as those of Austrian-born Adolf Hitler, who in 1920 set up the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, in Munich, along with a group of other war vets. He said everything many Germans, embittered and robbed of their self-respect, wanted to hear: that the Jews were to blame for everything, that the Treaty of Versailles was criminal, and that the politicians of the Weimar Republic were traitors who had thrown away their country.

  At first, the German aristocracy wanted little to do with the noisy demagogue from Munich. But Hitler successfully managed to give the impression that the former elite would rise again to eminence under his rule and, more important, that he was their only hope to exorcise the Bolshevik threat from the east. From 1930 onward, more and more German aristocrats began to sign up as members of the NSDAP.

  Allene’s husband, Henry Reuss, was not yet a member—probably because he was a Freemason and the national socialist movement refused admission to that group’s members. But when the NSDAP became the largest party in 1932 and Adolf Hitler managed to secure the position of Reich chancellor, beginning a large-scale Nazification of Germany, Allene’s husband tried all kinds of ways to forge an alliance with his fatherland’s New Order.

  In November 1933, living temporarily in Berlin, Henry wrote a letter in which he offered to work as an unpaid volunteer for Hitler’s right hand, Heinrich Himmler, at the Schutzstaffel, the NSDAP’s paramilitary organization. “The SS liaison staff would suit me,” he wrote, “leaving aside my affinities with the SS.” He omitted to mention that the French government had asked him to remain in his own country for the time being because of his, for a diplomat, rather fanatically vented fascist ideas.

  Later Allene would tell her friends that it was mainly her husband’s political views that had led to the schism in their marriage. All totalitarian systems, whether communist or fascist, were alien to her—as a true-blue American and believer in a democratic republic, she couldn’t imagine any other political system. Henry even caused problems with the household staff. At a certain point, the staff, some of whom were Jewish, refused to wear livery with the Reuss coat of arms in protest of their employer’s virulent anti-Semitism.

  In any case, Henry’s overtures seemed to have little effect on the Nazis. Now that Hitler held absolute power in Germany, he no longer needed the aristocracy to make him or his party socially acceptable, and the letter sent in November 1933 was never answered. In August 1934—Hitler had made short shrift of practically all of his political opponents less than five weeks earlier during a series of political executions, the bloody “Night of the Long Knives”—Henry tried again. He offered to put the Trebschen estate at the disposal of the esteemed führer, whom he presumed must be tired by “his burdens and responsibilities of the state,” in order for him to catch his breath. The estate was relatively close to Berlin, Henry wrote temptingly, and yet remote enough to guarantee the leader of the German Reich privacy and peace and quiet. “It’s very quiet but the most important thing is that one sleeps wonderfully here!”

  The Nazis also disregarded this generous offer. And because Henry was no longer welcome in France or in the Rue Barbet, in the fall of 1934, out of desperation, he moved into his sister’s castle in Stonsdorf. There, to while away the hours, he painted a kind of Alpine landscape on the walls of the dining room, just as he’d decorated the drawing room in the Château de Suisnes.

  As was her custom, Allene traveled to New York in October for a couple of months to settle her affairs and see her friends. Contrary to previous years, she boarded the cruise liner without a husband, a detail the ever-alert American press hounds immediately noted. In particular, Maury Paul—the most famous society reporter of the period, feared for his sharp tongue—wrote openly in his Cholly Knickerbocker columns about the Reusses’ marital crisis, with clear knowledge of the affair:

  Henry had been a flat failure as a husband, judged from all angles, but Allene kept her nose tilted proudly and declined to confirm stories of marital discord.

  Head proudly held high or not, somewhere in that dark, crisis-ridden winter, Allene must have realized that the fairy tale in which she played an American princess was over. Although she clung to her revised birth year of 1876, in fact she was already several years past sixty, and all the beauty specialists, plastic surgeons, and couturiers in the world could no longer disguise the fact that the days when she was commonly recognized as a beauty were now consigned to the past. The illusion of being the kind of beloved wife she’d been to Anson had been destroyed by the many often-humiliating scenes she’d had with Henry. Her dream of becoming a mother again also lay in pieces. Although her stepson, Heiner, still accepted her care and attention, his sister, Marlisa, still treated her with icy contempt.

  To make matters worse, Allene’s brief illusion of finding happiness with Henry had cost her buckets of money. A divorce would undoubtedly cost much more—and this at the very moment when her finances were already under serious pressure from the economic crisis, which dragged on and by now had reduced half of America to poverty. Things were going so badly for the apartment complex on Park Avenue that its proprietors had been forced a year earlier to hand over the still mainly empty building to an insurance company, an event that transformed its owners into renters.

  But there was a reason Allene’s motto was “Courage all the time.” If there was one thing she could call herself a real expert in by now, it was cutting her losses. On July 26, 1935, Allene’s secretary in Paris, Alice Brown, announced that Allene and Henry were separating. For Henry, this was the perfect moment for a new start: not only had he been accepted as an NSDAP member almost two months earlier, but his eldest brother had died, leaving him Trebschen and whatever else remained in the family’s possession.

  As for Allene, she simply refused to comment. In fact, no comment was necessary. That summer and fall, she frequently appeared with a new companion at her side—one who was even younger and more handsome than the previo
us one—her eyebrows raised provocatively as in her younger years on Lake Chautauqua.

  In a certain sense, the man who would become Allene’s fifth and final husband was a kind of legacy from Henry. Or better still, from Trebschen, where Allene’s experiences had primarily been ungratifying. She had made friends with one of Henry’s neighbors, who was almost as much a pariah to the German aristocracy as she herself. Armgard zur Lippe-Biesterfeld lived in a rather dilapidated former hunting lodge on the Reckenwalde lake, a few miles from Trebschen. She was a fanatical horse lover and an avid smoker and was renowned for not giving a damn. A widow, she now always appeared in public with her five-years-younger horse trainer, a Russian exile by the name of Alexis Pantchoulidzew.

  “Tschuli” as the Reckenwalde horseman was known, came from a prominent Russian family and had trained at the Saint Petersburg Page Corps, the most elite military academy in czarist Russia. After the revolution in 1917 and the subsequent civil war, like many others, he had been forced to flee the country and had ended up with the zur Lippe family in 1922. The former students of the Page Corps were known to maintain close contact with each other in exile, and the chance is therefore great that he was the person who introduced Allene to Pavel Pavlovitch Kotzebue—or Paul, as he was known in French.

  Just like Tschuli, Paul had been in the Page Corps and after that had been employed in the czarist court as a cavalryman and bodyguard; both had fought on the side of the counterrevolutionaries in the civil war, and both—made destitute by the communist seizure of power—had been forced to seek refuge in Europe. But there was an unusual story attached to Paul, since in March 1917, right after the revolution, he had for a short time guarded none other than Nicholas II, the newly deposed czar. Allene may have been able to read about her future husband in 1917, since he had given an extensive interview about this to the New York Times.

  The reason the revolutionary government had entrusted thirty-three-year-old Paul Kotzebue with guarding the most important prisoner in the country in early March 1917 probably had something to do with a youthful error. Once, when he was still one of Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna’s bodyguards, Paul had appeared at a masked New Year’s ball dressed as a woman and turned the heads of all the men present. When the identity of the elegant guest who had jumped into a waiting sleigh just before midnight and disappeared without a trace was later revealed, he was fired from the court on the spot.

  Paul worked for a few years as personal assistant to Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, who was murdered in 1911 by a political opponent. In 1912, Nicholas II took pity on Paul and hired him again. He was appointed captain in the czar’s family’s favorite residence, the Alexander Palace, near Saint Petersburg. There he witnessed the glory days of Rasputin, a faith healer originally from Siberia whose help was called in regarding the poor health of Alexei, the heir to the throne. In those days, Russia abounded with rumors about the sexual debauchery of the miracle doctor—Rasputin held the view that in order to regret one’s sins, it was first necessary to have committed a lot of them—and the unhealthy power he exercised at court, particularly over the czarina.

  Meanwhile, the world war that had broken out in 1914 ended dramatically for the czarist empire, already exhausted from its earlier war with Japan. The underfed and barely armed Russian soldiers didn’t stand a chance against the slick German fighting machine, and dissatisfaction with the czarist administration and hatred of Rasputin grew by the day. On the night of December 29–30, 1916, a group of aristocrats tried to turn the tide by murdering the faith healer, to the deep sorrow of the czar and his family. Alexandra had him declared a saint, and Nicholas II carried the monk’s embalmed body in his own arms to its last resting place in a chapel on the outskirts of the palace gardens.

  But Rasputin’s death came too late to restore the trust of the Russian population in its leaders. A few weeks later, food riots broke out in Saint Petersburg, and soon afterward in the rest of the country, too. On March 15, 1917, Nicholas II found himself forced to give up the throne. Together with his family and a number of faithful followers, he waited for history to take its course in his residential palace, guarded by Paul, a man the provisional government felt would be sympathetic to the revolutionaries’ cause since he had once been fired from the czarina’s regimental guard.

  Later, various members of Nicholas II’s court would testify that this certainly wasn’t the case:

  The new War Minister, Guchkov appointed Captain Kotzebue of the Cavalry, Commandant of the Palace, hoping that he would act like a real jailer, as he had promised, but, Kotzebue, to his honor, accepted this post only that he might be able to come to the help of the prisoners and mitigate the hardships of their existence as far as possible. He allowed them to have uncensored correspondence, sent off telephone messages for them, bought for them secretly the things they needed.

  A reporter from the New York Times who, later that month, managed to penetrate the palace almost completely cut off from the outside world, noticed how respectfully the head jailer behaved toward his prisoners. While other guards made a sport of speaking as scornfully to the fallen monarch as possible—calling him “Citizen Nikolai Romanov” or “Little Nikolai”—Paul addressed him as “Former Emperor” and spoke with evident fondness of him and his family.

  The former emperor was in good health and relatively good spirits, despite occasional fits of crying, Paul told the reporter. He took daily walks in the garden with his wife’s ladies-in-waiting and made himself useful clearing snow, “which he enjoys greatly.” He also showed a boyish interest in everything written about him, in particular in the foreign press. Young Prince Alexei was in reasonable health but cried terribly when he heard his father had given up the throne. And the czarina was ill, although according to her empathetic guard it was mainly because her heart had been broken: “Her real malady is from the heart.”

  The American reporter was clearly impressed by the handsome Russian and described Paul as the height of civility and courtly manners: “Youthful and urbane, an officer of the guard type, speaking perfect French and English.” They got along so well together that they visited the improvised grave of Rasputin—“the unintending parent of the revolution,” in the journalist’s words—together. They found the chapel sullied and soiled, the rock face next to it covered in insulting inscriptions such as “Here lies Rasputin, foulest of men, the shame of the Romanov dynasty.”

  According to a family chronicle about the Kotzebues that was published later, this wasn’t in fact Paul’s first visit to the monk’s final resting place. An eyewitness would say that the revolutionary government had given him the rather unsavory task, earlier that month, of visiting the tomb with a yardstick to check whether the rumor about the legendary size of Rasputin’s member was true:

  Although the body had been embalmed, the stench was so strong that Count Kotzebue, an elegant officer (he later became count), who had been given this horrible task, told me he thought he would pass out.

  The interview with Paul that Allene may have read was published in the New York Times on March 27, 1917, under the headline “Ex-Czar, Guarded, Has Fits of Crying.” The article ended with the statement that security at the palace had been stepped up in connection with rumors about potential escape attempts by the czar. Indeed, members of the Kotzebue family later recounted that Paul had tried to bring Nicholas II, disguised as a palace guard, to safety.

  At the last minute—the boat that would have taken him to a steamship in the Gulf of Finland was ready and waiting on the Neva River—the former czar, who may have been a poor ruler but was a solid family man, decided that he couldn’t leave without his family. It was a decision that would cost him his life. The revolutionary government no longer trusted Paul and relieved him of his role at the end of March. In August 1917, the Romanovs were transported to Siberia. A little less than a year later, they were moved to Ekaterinburg, where they were executed in July 1918.

  At the time the czar’s family was being slaughtered, R
ussia was in the grips of a civil war that the Red Army would win in 1920, led by Communist Vladimir Lenin. Paul; his mother; his older sister, Marie; his older brother, Alexander; and Alexander’s wife (born Countess Tolstoy) were among the hundreds of thousands of czarists who fled their motherland.

  Like most exiles, the Kotzebues first settled in Berlin with the firm conviction that the international community would never tolerate the establishment of a socialist state and that they’d be able to return to their homeland at any moment. That hope evaporated in 1922, when the communist Soviet Union was founded and then recognized by one nation after the next. Paul and his sister—their mother had died in the meantime—left with the great stream of refugees for France, which had traditionally counted as a second homeland for Russian artists and aristocrats. Their brother ended up in Switzerland, where he was able to set up a banking company with what was left of the family fortune.

  During the 1920s and the first part of the ’30s, Paul and his sister seem to have led unremarkable lives in a modest apartment on the Avenue du Président-Wilson in Paris. Neither of them married, and neither of them played much of a role in the Russian exile community. As far as can be ascertained, Paul was in contact only with his former fellow students from the Page Corps. When the brother and sister went to New York in November 1934, they told the immigration service they were fifty and fifty-two years old, respectively, and without profession or nationality.