The Resurrection of the Romanovs (45 page)

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 happened 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

Franziska spent most her time alone. There was, Doris said, “something reclusive” about her: “If she ever had any close, personal friends, I never knew of them. She seemed close only to my mother.” She “always seemed depressed. She was very devout, and often prayed, but she was someone who seemed burdened with grief. She usually dressed in black, heavy clothing, even in summer.”
63
Franziska borrowed books from Doris and her sister Luise—“novels and romances,” said Anna Wingender, which she “often read late into the night,” but this seemed to be her only interest.
64
Most of the time, though, Franziska “lay in her bed, her head turned to the wall,” Doris remembered, saying that she was usually “very bad tempered” and silent. “When we tried to speak to her, she refused to answer.”
65

Only Anna Wingender could penetrate this self-imposed barrier, though she, too, admitted that Franziska “could be so terribly difficult. Often, she would sit for hours beside the window, listening to me but refusing to answer any of my questions. She seemed lost, and I could see the pain in her eyes. And then, her personality would suddenly change, and she would try to behave properly, even attempting to anticipate all of my wishes.” Sometimes, though, Franziska spoke about her dreams: “She was always talking about how she wanted to be someone grand,” said Anna, “someone important.” And there was a curious air of affectation about her: Franziska spoke “unusually slowly and softly, and with great deliberation,” according to Anna. “Her speech and her accent were very strange.” It was so soft, Doris recalled, that Franziska’s voice was “almost a whisper.” Her German was “good, free of error,” though Doris, too, noted the strange accent, which she thought was “either West Prussian or Pomeranian.” This strange way of speaking, this curious accent, caused endless confusion when Franziska was pulled from the Landwehr Canal, with officials, doctors, and nurses variously referring to it as Slavic, Bavarian, North German, Polish, Russian, or Franconian.
66