The Resurrection of the Romanovs (43 page)

Later, much would be made of a single comment by Otto Meyer, one of Franziska’s teachers in Hygendorf. She had been, he said, “rather more limited than intelligent.”
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This was certainly descriptive, but was it accurate? Franziska began her education in 1902, at a grammar school in Glischnitz where her family was then living; continued when her parents moved to Schwarz Dammerkow; and ended her primary education at the village school in Hygendorf.
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Then, in autumn 1908, she entered the equivalent of seventh grade at Hygendorf’s Upper School, following the usual regimen of arithmetic, composition, German, German history, natural sciences, and religion. Here, as Otto Meyer’s own son Richard recalled, Franziska “always did very good in school. She spoke well, and learned everything she could. She often received recognition for her performance from the School Rector.”
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Another schoolmate, Charlotte Meyer, remembered her as “an extremely good student,” while her sister Gertrude related that Franziska had “learned quickly,” that her school reports “were excellent,” and that she continued her education in autumn 1910 on entering the Abbey School at Tannen-bei-Bütow, half a mile north of Hygendorf. Franziska was such a good student, in fact, that she completed her ninth-grade studies in fewer than six months, winning a certificate of graduation far ahead of her classmates.
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It certainly wasn’t proof that Franziska was particularly brilliant, but her continued education, the memories of her sister and her classmates, and her early graduation all undermine Otto Meyer’s description of her as more “limited than intelligent.” Without doubt she possessed a good memory and—more important to her later claim—a clear aptitude for languages. Her first language was Kashubian, used by 90 percent of those in the areas around Borowilhas and Hygendorf.
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Kashubian was a linguistic peculiarity: passed down from the Baltic Slavs who had settled in Pomerania, it was part of the Western Slavic Group of languages but had been heavily influenced over the centuries by inclusion of German, Swedish, and Polish words and phrases, a mixture that made it distinct and often unintelligible to outsiders.
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Was it Kashubian that German-speakers later heard Franziska mutter in her sleep, the strange, Slavic-sounding language that some took for Russian?

“Polish,” the duke of Leuchtenberg once insisted of Anna Anderson in a letter to Olga Alexandrovna, “she absolutely does not speak, nor can she understand it.”
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But, as with so many other things concerning the claimant, the duke was wrong, for Polish was Franziska’s second language. This wasn’t surprising for the area in which she lived; indeed, given that 80 percent of Kashubians in the area spoke Polish as their second language, it would have been extremely odd had Franziska not been among them.
29
Kashubians, noted a nineteenth-century ethnographic study of the region, easily understood Polish, and regularly read Polish newspapers and magazines.
30

Franziska, recalled two of her siblings, learned Polish early, though her brother Felix thought that she had spoken very little of the language.
31
A few childhood friends later said that she had been fluent, while in 1927 her mother, Marianna, was using Polish as her everyday language.
32
Franziska clearly knew the language. In 1921 Dalldorf nurse Thea Malinovsky joked and chatted in Polish with Fraulein Unbekannt: rather confusingly, she thought that the patient both understood “some of what I said” and “did not speak the language.” If the latter was true, why did Malinovsky continuously use the language with Franziska?
33
Then there were stories, none terribly compelling, that during her stay with the von Kleists Franziska had cried out in Polish.
34
It became a point of contention with those who supported Franziska’s claim to be Anastasia, this familiarity with Polish, presumably in the belief that it explained her understanding of spoken Russian and her inability to reply in the language.
35

Then there was German, Franziska’s third language. She spoke, said her brother Felix, “good German.” At first this was Plattedeutsch, or Low German, the common German spoken by most middle and lower classes. In school, though, she learned Hochdeutsch, or High German; this was the more refined German employed in Berlin and throughout the provinces in official institutions. In the early years of her claim, at least, Franziska impressed everyone—Malinovsky, Nobel, Rathlef-Keilmann—with her “impeccable,” “very well chosen,” “formal,” and “good” German.
36
Only later, when it became apparent that Anastasia had not been nearly as fluent in the language, did Franziska’s capabilities in German suddenly and inexplicably deteriorate.

Franziska’s secondary education, unique in her family, was not the only curiosity in these years. Anton, recalled Richard Meyer, doted on Franziska, spoiled her openly, and “treated her differently” than her siblings, and even his own wife. It was a bit of indulgence so obvious that even the neighbors whispered of it. Marianna and the other children wore clothing she made; Franziska, though, had pretty dresses, hats, and shoes. “All of her things,” said Meyer, purchased by Anton, were from “the better shops” in Bütow.
37
Franziska, her sister Gertrude recalled, hated the regular agricultural work—plowing, planting, and harvesting—imposed by farm life, so Anton simply excused her from the tasks he expected of his other children. Thus free, she would disappear with a book. “I often saw her reading,” Gertrude said.
38

It all took a toll within the family. Franziska, Richard Meyer remembered, confused her siblings; she was somehow alienated from them, and they in turn “treated her as an oddity.”
39
Anton, Meyer noted, “Did no work. Rather, he was always in the taverns, carousing and getting drunk.”
40
He was inebriated so often, apparently, that his neighbors in Hygendorf openly referred to him as the
Dorftrinker
(village drinker).
41
And increasingly Marianna seemed to despise her husband, and her eldest daughter, Franziska, too; there were loud arguments accompanied by Marianna’s hysterical, screamed accusations, scenes so nasty, so frequent, and so public that village children greeted her appearance with cries of “Witch!”
42

This blatant indulgence of Franziska, the alcoholic father, the embittered wife and resentful mother—what did they all mean? Hygendorf was no different from any other small village: neighbors delighted in gossip, and rumors spread through the streets like mud in the heavy spring rains. And the rumors that later surfaced hinted at possible incest.
43
There was, to be sure, nothing definitive, though a weighty and terrible collection of circumstantial evidence lends some support to such a grim hypothesis. Incest often occurred in provincial families with lower economic and educational opportunities. Most abusers were fathers preying on their eldest daughters. The fathers were often alcoholics, believed themselves marginalized by society, and shared little intimacy with their wives, who tended to be the dominant marital partner. Abuse most often occurred well into a marriage, after the wife had given birth to multiple children and came to be viewed as less sexually desirable than her younger daughters. Fathers who abused often favored and indulged their victims, seeking to win compliance and affection through manipulation; mothers, on the other hand, often had fractured relationships with their abused daughters, as if blaming them for their own victimization.
44

This catalog of circumstances echoes the few known facts of the highly charged emotional triangle among Anton, Marianna, and Franziska, and there was more. Victims of incest often become reclusive, abandoning previous friendships and suffering significant changes in personality and behavior as they struggle with profound emotional wounds. With the most sacred bonds of trust shattered, and unable to escape a hostile and brutalizing environment, victims may withdraw, attempting to dissociate themselves from traumatic experiences. The creation of a “safe place,” a new, alternative reality promising eventual salvation, brings temporary comfort, though years of guilt, shame, anger, and repression often later surface and plague adult survivors in the form of severe emotional disorders.
45

And this, at least, is precisely what happened with Franziska in these years. Not only was there the inexplicable favoritism by her father, and a growing strain with her mother, but also her entire personality abruptly changed. Soon, recalled her friend Martha Schrock, Franziska distanced herself from her former circle of acquaintances; she took no interest in their usual pursuits, in dances at the village grange, in flirtations with the sons of local farmers. Instead, Schrock said, “she displayed a pretentious manner” in the way she acted, as if she were no longer part of this ordinary world.
46
“She had nothing in common with the young people of the village,” remembered Richard Meyer; the differences were so noticeable, he said, that even her friends and neighbors used to talk about it, and “wondered why such a person as Franziska was born to such a family.”
47
Her behavior, he added, “was affected, though without any impression of grace.”
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It became a common theme running through the few descriptions of the teenaged Franziska: she wanted nothing to do with her family or with her former friends, and seemed focused on isolating herself, on envisioning herself in “better circles,” on escaping the world around her.
49
Gertrude later took issue with such ideas. “I wouldn’t say that Franziska was especially stuck up,” she declared, “or that she put on airs.” She termed her “a girl, like all other girls.”
50
Yet even Gertrude qualified this with the word “especially,” suggesting that others had been correct in their assessments.

This was the strange young woman, withdrawn, at odds with her mother, an anomaly to her siblings, consumed with escape, who became an enigma even to those who knew her in Hygendorf. Whatever the truth about the ugly whispers, whatever circumstances shaped her personality, whatever problems plagued her, Franziska was a lonely, confused, and conflicted figure: at best, she was caught between the world of her birth and her aspirations, between the realities of Hygendorf and the possibilities her education revealed. She seemed disconnected, apart, at war with the arrogance and fragility that later dominated her character.

Then, in 1911, just as Franziska completed her secondary education, Anton fell ill. Whether this was a relief or a worry, the practicalities were the same, as he took to his bed, unable to walk, increasingly unable to breathe. It was tuberculosis, the same disease later to plague Franziska.
51
On April 13, 1912, Anton died in Hygendorf at age seventy.
52

Franziska was just fifteen when Anton died. The widowed, forty-six-year-old Marianna now had to care for the farm and for the three youngest children. Perhaps the situation between mother and daughter had already deteriorated beyond repair, or perhaps it was what happened next that irrevocably shattered any last familial feelings. For by now there was a second change in Franziska: provincial Hygendorf, remembered Richard Meyer, now condemned her as “fast,” a girl with a forward reputation.
53
Whatever the causes—an improper sexuality or Franziska simply straining against the confines of village life as she matured into a young woman—the result was the same. Meyer termed her “a vulgar, insolent girl,” someone he deemed “a man’s woman,” with all of the insinuations that accompanied such a turn of phrase. “You could,” he said on learning of her claim to be Anastasia, “imagine her ending up in the gutter, but between satin sheets? Never!”
54

This change, this forward manner, reached a crisis in the autumn of 1913 when, after a respectable, year-long period of mourning, the widowed Marianna married a local man named Knopf.
55
A conflict had been simmering between Franziska and her mother, over bitter feelings, over Anton’s indulgence of his eldest daughter; with rumors sweeping Hygendorf, Marianna may have worried that Franziska was too closely following in her wayward father’s footsteps. That a certain chill, a certain resentment, existed, is clear: there had, Marianna later said, “been enough talk about Franziska” among her neighbors in Hygendorf.
56
The animosity between mother and daughter finally seems to have erupted when Herr Knopf entered the farmhouse. Was Marianna simply tired of Franziska’s antics, of her reputation? Or was she perhaps, as was later quietly hinted, worried about the security of her domestic life, about the abilities of either her new husband or her headstrong daughter to withstand temptation?
57

Within a few months, some accumulated worry, some confluence of events led Marianna to send Franziska away from Hygendorf. It was not Franziska’s decision. She may have welcomed the chance to escape provincial life, but there also may have been a sense of exile, of rejection, as if, no matter what had actually happened between Franziska and her father, between Franziska and Herr Knopf, no matter what the perceived threat, no matter the truth of her “fast” reputation, she was being punished, condemned. She had never before left the area surrounding Bütow. Now Franziska was suddenly sent to live in distant Berlin, a naive seventeen-year-old provincial girl with little practical experience or money. She had no relatives, friends, or acquaintances in the German capital, knew no one, in fact, as she anticipated the unknown. On February 2, 1914, she stepped from a third-class train carriage at Berlin’s Ostbahnhof, the first steps that would carry her into the pages of history.
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