The Resurrection of the Romanovs (46 page)

Later, there would be many questions about this period in Franziska’s life, not the least of which was how she managed to avoid being turned out into the streets. “When she lived with us,” Doris recalled, “she was essentially dependent on Mother’s charity.” “Little Mother Wingender,” as one newspaper later dubbed her, proved so accommodating, in fact, that she turned her young daughters Doris and Luise out of their room, forcing Doris to sleep in a chair and Luise on a sofa or mattress in the sitting room so that Franziska could have a private room.
67
Though she later insisted that she had felt sorry for Franziska, sympathy only extends so far.

Doris remembered the Franziska of this period as “promiscuous and vulgar,” a woman who “had many boyfriends.”
68
And yet, according to Doris, Franziska rarely left her room, and even more rarely the apartment. She had no friends, but she was “promiscuous and vulgar,” and “had many boyfriends,” and all within the privacy of the Winger apartment, the privacy of her bedroom? Doris never used the word “prostitute,” but she may as well have done so.

The Berlin of autumn 1918 was a desperate place, the sidewalks filled, said one resident, with “heartbroken women,” deprivation firmly etched in “faces like masks, blue with cold and drawn with hunger.”
69
In October, there were riots in the streets; by November, Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated and the country was in chaos. And in the midst of this, there was nothing unusual in occasional prostitution: war widows, the unemployed, struggling workers, and young mothers all proved susceptible to the decision, which postponed starvation or life on the streets. Later rumors hinted that Franziska may have occasionally resorted to prostitution.

Was this why Franziska needed the privacy of her own bedroom? Was this how she managed to remain in the Wingender apartment without any apparent financial resources?

By the spring of 1919, Franziska was back at Gut-Friederikenhof, where she remained working through the autumn.
70
The seasonal work ended in November: on the twentieth of that month she went to a local police station and filled out an
Abmeldung
, the personal identification card the government required of all citizens; this listed her name, age, and place of birth, and gave the Wingender apartment at 17 Neue Hochstrasse as her permanent address.
71
Later it would be erroneously reported that Franziska had returned to Pomerania; Gertrude, however, was clear that none of Franziska’s family ever saw her again after she left for Berlin in the spring of 1918.
72

By 1920, twenty-three-year-old Franziska had lived a life of alienation and hardship. The young girl from the provinces who had been indulged and allowed an education, who had developed grandiose airs and envisioned a life of opportunity, had become a woman immersed in tragedy. She had endured a nomadic childhood, an alcoholic father, a distant mother, and a swirl of unpleasant rumors in Hygendorf; sent away to Berlin, she had lost her fiancé, inexplicably become ill, accidentally killed a man, suffered a breakdown, and been involuntarily committed and declared insane. When she returned home in 1917 her mother seemed to want nothing to do with her; attempts to make her own way at Gut-Friederikenhof apparently ended in a violent assault; and despair may have driven her to prostitution. She had no friends, no hope, and no future; events spiraled out of control, each crisis heaping emotional burdens atop an already fragile personality as she became a helpless witness to the strange and brutal dance that had become her life.

All of the elements were in place: the shattered, fragmented personality, the scars, the gift for languages, the sharp mind, the grandiose airs and belief in her abilities, and the overwhelming despair—the elements that Franziska carried with her that February day in 1920 when she left the Wingender apartment, when she wandered the streets of Berlin until darkness came. Standing atop the Bendler Bridge that night, she plunged into the waters of the Landwehr Canal, attempting to forever bury her tortured past.

21

The Myth Unravels

And so, with her leap into the Landwehr Canal, Franziska Schanzkowska disappeared, emerging from the waters as Fraulein Unbekannt and the central figure in one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary myths. And the questions begin in earnest: Why were authorities in Berlin unable to identify her? Why did she make her claim? Was she responsible for her actions? How did she manage to assimilate so much seemingly impressive knowledge? How did she convince so many who had known Anastasia that she was the grand duchess? In short, how did Franziska Schanzkowska, this humble provincial farm girl, this “insane” factory worker, this “Polish peasant,” transform herself into so believable a claimant, so compelling a legend?

First, though, her silence: at both Elisabeth Hospital and at Dalldorf, she refused to reveal her name and, when questioned by doctors, turned to the wall or tried to cover her head—an echo of her behavior on being involuntarily committed to the Berlin-Schöneberg Asylum. In 1920, she admitted only to being a worker, tellingly adding that her family was dead.
1
The Franziska who had tried to kill herself had no real life and no future. Now, again under state care, and as long as her real identity remained a mystery, she ensured her care: she did not have to labor for hours, did not have to worry about standing in the cold for hours to obtain food, did not have to concern herself with the exigencies of life in a tumultuous postwar Berlin. The birth of Fraulein Unbekannt echoed Franziska’s own desperate desire to escape the squalid reality of her life.

Why did Franziska’s true identity remain a mystery? The Wingenders waited twenty-two days to report that she had gone missing; perhaps she had come and gone before, but something in this prolonged absence eventually led Anna Wingender to search her room. What she found was alarming: Franziska’s purse, an odd item for her to have left behind, and in it her health insurance card, No. 1956, dated April 8, 1918—the same day on which she had begun her job at Gut-Friederikenhof—her work permit, and her identification card, issued in November 1919. On March 15, Doris Wingender went to the local police precinct and reported Franziska missing.
2
Even then, no one could agree on the details—a point of some contention later, when Anderson’s supporters suggested that her identity as Franziska Schanzkowska had simply been invented. At first, Doris thought that her mother’s boarder had gone missing on January 15, then later amended this to February 15, and finally, and with suspect precision, to 11:55 a.m. on February 17, the day upon which Franziska had thrown herself into the Landwehr Canal. Later, Doris explained that she had determined the correct date only after looking at the unused coupons in the ration book Franziska had left behind; she never clarified her error with police, she said, as “things were chaotic and took too long.”
3
Her sister Luise, just twelve in February 1920, was, perhaps not surprisingly given her youth, even less certain, suggesting that Franziska had disappeared several weeks later, sometime in March, though she later admitted that she was mistaken.
4
The police collected these details and noted in their report that Franziska had “left for parts unknown.
5

Sometime before her suicide attempt, Franziska mailed a birthday card to her brother Felix; his birthday, curiously, fell on February 17—the same day on which Franziska jumped into the Landwehr Canal. She apologized that it was late, and Felix later thought he had received it two weeks after his birthday; if Franziska was Fraulein Unbekannt, under observation at Elisabeth Hospital since February 17, how then had she mailed the card? Although her supporters suggested this as evidence that Anderson was not Franziska, Felix was only guessing; he had not kept the envelope, and only seven years later did he try to recall precisely when he had received what was, at the time, simply an unremarkable birthday message.
6
Franziska’s family only learned that she was missing at the end of March. “Mother was very upset,” Gertrude remembered. “No one knew where Franziska had gone.”
7

The Berlin Police never managed to identify Franziska as Fraulein Unbekannt because, contrary to stories of a widespread and determined investigation, they actually seem to have put little effort into pursuing the mysterious patient’s identity.
8
Nor, for that matter, did the city’s hospitals and asylums seem to take much notice of the police bulletins, at least not if Dalldorf was any example. Franziska had spent four months at Dalldorf in 1917, yet in 1920 no one was able to identify her as a former patient. Does this suggest that Franziska wasn’t Fraulein Unbekannt? In fact, the answer to this apparent conundrum is surprisingly simple: with a dozen buildings, multiple wards, a rotating staff of hundreds, and more than fifteen hundred patients at any one time, no one in 1920 remembered Franziska, and why would they? In 1917, she had been just another unimportant patient; no one had any reason to recall her or the months she spent there. But her 1917 stay at Dalldorf lays waste to the idea that the Berlin Police were thorough in investigating Fraulein Unbekannt’s identity; clearly no one even bothered to search the records of the city’s largest asylum. Nor, for that matter, did the Berlin Police treat the matter as a priority; by the middle of March 1920, they already had in their files a report on the missing Franziska Schanzkowska, a report they apparently never bothered to consult. Had they done so, they would undoubtedly have learned Fraulein Unbekannt’s identity.
9

But there was something more here, another aspect to this inability to identify Fraulein Unbekannt that perhaps offers some insight into why she tried to kill herself. No one ever came forward to claim the mysterious patient; even the friendly “Little Mother Wingender” waited three weeks to report Franziska missing. She had no friends to miss her, no friends to identify her, not even former coworkers or mere acquaintances—evidence of just how little impression Franziska had made in anyone else’s life. She had existed on the very edges of society, unremarkable and unimportant. To Franziska, suicide was more attractive than another day of uncertain, dispossessed anonymity in a life filled with pain.

And this same need to escape her former life, this desire to find at least some brief respite, drove Franziska into silence, into the safe persona of Fraulein Unbekannt and, finally, to her claim. The genesis of such an extraordinary modern myth, the forces that shaped her decision to declare that she was Anastasia—surely there was some monumental, telling moment of personal epiphany to neatly explain it all? The idea apparently first came to her at Dalldorf, in the institution’s library, when she found the newspapers that, as Malinovsky recalled, were full of stories about the Romanovs and their presumed executions.
10
And then she found the magazine that changed her life, the October 23, 1921, issue of the
Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung
, with its extensive article on the last days of the imperial family and haunting photographs of the beautiful grand duchesses, its rumors that Anastasia had survived, and speculation that she had been spirited out of Russia.

Perhaps at first it was mere interest that drove her to take the magazine out of the library and keep it beneath her mattress, but interest soon turned to obsession as she read of this tantalizing mystery, this bewitching saga of romance and revolution, love and death. It must have been powerfully evocative to a mind seeking diversion that autumn of 1921, and diversion is almost certainly how it began, for, as unlikely as it might seem, Franziska apparently wanted nothing more than a few extra attentions, a few privileges granted to a woman who might be a grand duchess, and the nurses at Dalldorf responded, bringing her little gifts and books, and treating her “humanely and attentively,” as Malinovsky recalled.
11
For presumably the first time in her life, Franziska was the center of attention, viewed as someone special and treated with respect, though it was a lie she attempted, in pledging the nurses to silence, to confine to the undemanding parameters of her ward at Dalldorf. In these early days, no one pressed her for particulars, and who at the asylum could definitively refute her?

It all came from Franziska’s imagination and from Franziska’s imagination only, despite later assertions that Clara Peuthert had somehow engineered the entire claim.
12
Such views presumably stemmed from misconceptions about Franziska: that as a crude “Polish peasant” she lacked the education to absorb information and learn languages; that as a provincial farm girl she was entirely lacking in the manners needed to appear convincing; that as an “insane” factory worker she didn’t posses the mental acumen to sustain what became a lifelong charade. But both Thea Malinovsky and Emilie Barfknecht recalled that Franziska had confided her “secret” to them before Peuthert’s admission to Dalldorf.
13
Nor, for that matter, was there any truth in another idea, that Franziska, inspired by the issue of the
Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung
, first claimed to be Tatiana and only later insisted that she was Anastasia after Baroness Buxhoeveden commented that she was too short to be the second of Nicholas and Alexandra’s daughters.
14
The article detailed extensive rumors only of a surviving Anastasia, while Peuthert insisted that she had discovered Tatiana at Dalldorf. Had the two women colluded, surely they would have gotten their stories straight and both followed the narrative laid down in the magazine; for that matter, given that the magazine played a pivotal role in shaping Franziska’s claim, why would she ignore its talk of Anastasia? The accusations, such as they were, made no sense.

Franziska may have had little knowledge of precisely how many Russian émigrés were in Berlin, or how many of Anastasia’s close relatives were alive in Europe, but she must have been aware that people did exist who could presumably end her little adventure if the story gained circulation. Peuthert destroyed her attempts to limit the claim to Dalldorf, and the parade of visitors seeking to identify her threatened constant exposure, hence her behavior in turning to the wall or trying to hide her features when faced with those who had known Anastasia. Yet she was also intrigued by the attention: after von Schwabe visited her, Franziska sought out nurse Emilie Barfknecht. “With great excitement,” Barfknecht recalled, “she asked whether she really resembled one of the Tsar’s daughters.”
15
Perhaps this suggested the choice she made, for what was the alternative? Admitting to her identity, and returning to a future of hard labor, a dingy room with the Wingenders, rejection by her mother, the uncertainty of life in Weimar Berlin—these were the very things that had led to her suicide attempt.

And so Franziska declared that she was Anastasia, and moved in with the von Kleist family, into a luxurious apartment where servants catered to her needs and her hosts provided her with clothing, food, and medical care. For the first time in her life, she didn’t have to worry about immediate concerns; as long as her claim generated interest, as long as her actual identity remained a mystery, she would be cared for and insulated from the brutality of her former subsistence. She occupied the center of a fragile universe of her own construction, a world so precariously balanced on deception that any misstep could irrevocably end her scheme. What had seemingly begun as nothing more than a lark, a ploy for attention, had spiraled into a complex tissue of lies. With every encounter, every false declaration, every insistence on her identity as Anastasia, Franziska was trapping herself in an inescapable reality. At any moment, her charade might be exposed, her gambit revealed, her real identity brought to light.

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