The Resurrection of the Romanovs (48 page)

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 the 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.

What of those who met Franziska? How to explain away all of those apparently compelling recognitions? There was, in her approach, something so simple yet so brilliant that few took notice of it, for she had an undoubted skill in immediately evaluating those she met. Those deemed sympathetic were usually granted extended interviews that allowed her to respond to perceived desires; those suspected of posing a threat, though, were most often met with silence, and by her complete withdrawal from the situation. When she faced encounters deemed too challenging, Franziska frequently drew upon her fragile health, excusing herself from attempting to answer questions and thus preventing disaster. She could speak or maintain her silence as circumstance dictated. And when faced with unknown visitors, she consistently attempted to ferret out names and information from those around her, as happened in the encounters with Tatiana Botkin, Anatole Mordvinov, and Felix Dassel.

The problem is that none of the recognitions of Franziska as Anastasia were particularly compelling. Discount those who never met the claimant and only judged her based on examination of photographs or from anecdotal information to reject her, such as former nanny Margaretta Eagar and piano teacher Alexander Conrad; discount those who never had any real involvement with Anastasia and rejected her, such as Princess Kira of Prussia and Prince Felix Yusupov; and discount those who had at best fleeting or distant encounters with the real grand duchess and accepted the claimant, such as Crown Princess Cecilie of Prussia, Maria Rasputin, and former ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska—do this, and we’re left with a fairly weighty and impressive list of rejections: Baroness Buxhoeveden; Princess Irene of Prussia (despite allegations that she later had second thoughts); Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna; Princess Nina Chavchavadze, sister of Princess Xenia Georgievna; Princess Vera Konstantinova; the Gilliards—
both
of them, as we now know; tutor Charles Sidney Gibbes; Maria von Hesse and her daughter Darya, Countess Hollenstein (who undoubtedly
had
known Anastasia better and seen her more often than someone such as Crown Princess Cecilie); and former courtiers Nicholas Sablin, Admiral Federov, Anatole Mordvinov, Baron George Taube, and Vassili Woitinsky. Missing from the list is Alexei Volkov, whose supposedly contradictory impressions and views render his opinion problematic.

Fifteen names. There were, of course, others, but these fifteen all had varying personal interactions over a period of time with Anastasia, and all met and rejected Franziska. And, on the opposite side of the spectrum, we find Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich; Princess Xenia Georgievna; Prince Sigismund of Prussia; Madame Lili Dehn; Madame Zenaide Tolstoy; Tatiana Botkin; Gleb Botkin; and the two wounded officers from the hospital at Tsarskoye Selo, Felix Dassel and Ivan Arapov. After the DNA results, the question is no longer, did these nine individuals know Anastasia better than those who opposed the claimant? but rather, what convinced them that Franziska was Anastasia?

That a certain emotional dynamic was at play here cannot be denied—take the shifting views of Zenaide Tolstoy, for example, who first believed the claimant was Tatiana. Under ordinary circumstances, at home in Russia, as a visitor to the Alexander Palace and before the trauma of the Revolution, Madame Tolstoy would certainly have been able to accurately distinguish between Tatiana and Anastasia. Like so many other émigrés, though, she had passed through tumultuous circumstances to find herself in a foreign country, called upon after the passage of time to render an emotional verdict in a heartrending case, and at a time when rumor and hope prevailed over events in Ekaterinburg. There was, among many devastated and dispossessed émigrés, desperation for the old order that made them particularly susceptible to the idea of a miraculously rescued member of the imperial family. They came to Franziska wounded and scarred, relying on subjective memories often governed by a desire to find in her a living remnant of what had been lost in the wake of the Revolution. Is this how one explains the opinion of Grand Duke Andrei, who admitted, in words that impeach the value of his recognition, “I can’t trust my personal impressions. I wasn’t close enough to the tsar’s children to be able to identify Anastasia”?
44
Or the views of Princess Xenia Georgievna, who viewed the claimant through a fog of memory and who took eight years of studied manners, languages, and accumulated knowledge to be indications that she was indeed Anastasia?

Dassel and Arapov may well have been convinced that Franziska was Anastasia, though they certainly hadn’t known her better than Olga Alexandrovna, Gilliard, or Baroness Buxhoeveden. They seem to have taken anecdotal information as evidence—something particularly problematic in Dassel’s case, given the publication of his memoirs of life at the hospital five months before he even met the claimant. Accumulated information, too, played a role in recognitions by Lili Dehn and by Prince Sigismund, even though two thirds of the answers to the latter’s famous eighteen questions could be found in a mere two books, and it took Franziska five days to provide the answers—and even then she didn’t get them all right, contrary to the mythology that developed around her claim.

What of Tatiana and Gleb Botkin? Both freely admitted that they were never intimates of the grand duchesses, their personal interactions restricted to a few meetings over a five-year period.
45
Given their limited personal involvement with Anastasia, they both relied on intuitive belief, perceived physical similarities, and what they took as intimate knowledge in recognizing Franziska; even so, both admitted that they were
forced
to search for physical similarities, as the claimant simply looked different, particularly around the mouth and nose, from Anastasia.
46
Both had lost their father in the Ekaterinburg massacre, a circumstance that may have shaped the emotional prism through which they hopefully viewed any purported survivor, but nothing suggests that either was not genuinely convinced that Franziska was Anastasia. They simply happened to be wrong.

There was no simple, single formula to Franziska’s efforts; rather, her success stemmed from her natural abilities and talents, from her desire to secure a future for herself, from her interest in surrounding herself with just enough intrigue that she could forever exist in the ether of perpetual uncertainty. With her deft mind and, when she elected to use it, winning, fragile charm, she emerges not as a gifted actress or a mere adventuress, but rather a determined woman of exceptional gifts, gifts she used to deceive everyone in her life but that carried Franziska into the pages of history.

22

Into the Pages of History

One march evening in 1927, Doris Wingender sat in a café on Berlin’s Hausvogteiplatz, sipping coffee and flipping through a month-old copy of the popular illustrated paper
Die Woche
when she spotted a small photograph. It was of dubious quality, a bit grainy, but the face staring back at Doris, the face of the woman who said she was Grand Duchess Anastasia, was clearly that of Franziska.
1
Excited, Doris rushed back to the apartment on Neue Hochstrasse and woke her sister Luise. “She showed me the newspaper story, and asked if I recognized the person in the picture,” Luise recalled. “As soon as I saw the photograph, I knew it was Franziska.”
2
At the time, Anna Wingender lived in Gleiwitz, and the following day Doris rushed to her mother, newspaper in hand. Anna, too, immediately recognized the claimant as Franziska, as did her eldest daughter, Kathe Wypyrczyk.
3

Ever sharp for financial opportunities, Anna Wingender urged Doris to approach the editors of the Scherl Press in Berlin, which published
Die Woche
, and find out how much they would pay for an exclusive story unmasking their now famous former boarder.
4
It was either March 13 or 14, editor Fritz Lücke later recalled, when Doris arrived at his offices. Saying that she had recognized the claimant from the photograph in
Die Woche
and knew her real identity, she boldly asked what her story would be worth to the paper. “I sensed disaster,” Lücke said. “If she went to one of our competitors down the street with her story it would have been catastrophic. We had to keep her, and so I offered her 1,500 Marks, on condition that she proved her story and agreed to an encounter with the claimant.” Wingender accepted; the contracts were signed on March 15, and Doris began to tell Lücke all she knew of the curious Franziska; of how she had simply vanished one day without explanation; and how she had just as suddenly reappeared in the summer of 1922, saying that she had been living with a Russian family “who apparently mistook her for someone else.”
5

Then a curious twist: the Scherl Press also owned the
Berliner Nachtausgabe
, whose publication of Rathlef-Keilmann’s articles on the claimant had brought protests from Ernst Ludwig’s former marshal Count von Hardenberg in Darmstadt. Lücke now answered their concerns with word of Wingender’s recognition, and Darmstadt offered the services of Martin Knopf, a private bank detective in Berlin, to assist in the investigation.
6
In fact, it was Knopf who now took charge; to fund the inquiry, as Lücke later admitted, Darmstadt sent the Scherl Press between 20,000 and 25,000 marks (approximately $140,000–150,000 in 2011).
7

Armed with a name, Knopf searched Berlin for records of the young woman from Hygendorf.
8
He found the registry card from November 1919, listing Franziska’s address at 17 Neue Hochstrasse, and Darmstadt commissioned a handwriting comparison with a sample written by the claimant; this concluded, rather problematically, given that it rested exclusively on the formation of a single letter, that the handwriting was identical.
9
A few long-standing tenants in the building on Neue Hochstrasse identified photographs of the claimant as Franziska, and Knopf met with the von Kleists, who, he said, “had both immediately recognized” the articles of clothing the claimant had left with Doris Wingender in 1922 as items they had purchased for Frau Tchaikovsky.
10

Events now moved quickly. Knopf discovered that Franziska’s family was still alive, and on March 22, he arrived in Hygendorf.
11
At the time, Gertrude, Valerian, and Maria Juliana all lived with their mother, Marianna, and her second husband. The
Berliner Nachtausgabe
gave a dramatic—and occasionally inaccurate—accounting of this meeting to its readers: “The widow Schanzkowsky lays listlessly in her crude bed . . . seriously ill. The two sisters, Gertrude and Maria, enter. They have heard nothing of Franziska since February of 1920, when she disappeared without any word. The dying mother’s eyes light up when shown a photograph of the claimant Frau Tchaikovsky. ‘Yes, that is my daughter,’ she says. ‘But she has probably been dead many years.’ The sisters also immediately recognize Franziska.”
12
Knopf later confirmed the identifications, as did Gertrude, though the detective found Franziska’s mother “oddly cold” on learning that she was still alive. “We don’t need her back here,” Marianna told him. It was clear, Knopf noted, that the mother “wanted nothing to do” with her infamous daughter.
13
“We were so happy,” Gertrude said, “to think that Franziska was still alive.”
14
Yet Knopf couldn’t convince any of the family to travel to Seeon to meet her; they did, though, hand him a photograph, the image of Franziska said to have been taken in 1916.
15
By the time it was reproduced in the
Berliner Nachtausgabe
, it had been “heavily retouched,” recalled one reporter. “The Chinese white on the light parts was thick; the mouth had been retouched thickly, almost to the point of encrustation, so that the mouth appeared heavy and wide.”
16

Maria Juliana, Franziska’s youngest sister.

Unmasked!
screamed the headline in the Tuesday, April 5, 1927 edition of the
Berliner Nachtausgabe
. Investigation into the claimant, the paper declared, “Has brought sensational results. Without prejudice, and beyond all doubt, our research has answered the question, ‘Is she Anastasia or not Anastasia?’ finally and for all time.” She was, the article announced, “the worker Franziska Schanzkowska.” With this discovery, the
Nachtausgabe
declared, “One of the greatest enigmas of our time has finally been brought to an end.”
17
Over the next ten days, the paper laid out the case: Franziska’s background; her time with the Wingenders; the 1922 disappearance; and handwriting and photographic comparisons.
18
“It is a tragedy all the greater,” the paper editorialized, “as we can now see the artful game this woman has played; we now know that this woman is a liar.”
19

Letter from Anna Anderson to Herluf Zahle, with a superimposed example of “Borowilhas” written on her November 1919 registry card, and used to compare the formation of the letter
s
.

The paper arranged a confrontation between the claimant and Doris Wingender, who arrived at Seeon with Knopf and Lücke on the same cold, rainy Tuesday morning that the
Berliner Nachtausgabe
broke the story.
20
Told to expect an old acquaintance, the claimant was reclining on a sofa when the visitors entered her room.
21
“Good day, Franziska,” said Doris.
22
With “a horrified look,” Franziska bolted up, covering her face with a handkerchief and screaming “in a wild rage,”
“Das soll rausgehen! Das soll rausgehen!”
(That must go out! That must go out!)
23

For a moment, Doris stood silent, uncertain what to do as Franziska continued to scream; Doris finally left the room, declaring that she had recognized “without any doubt” the claimant as her mother’s former boarder.
24
Everything about her was the same: the same face, the same peculiar accent, the same habit of hiding her mouth—in short, “nothing distinguished her from the Franziska I had formerly known.”
25

Now it was Knopf’s turn. “Good day, Fraulein Schanzkowska!” he said to the claimant, who sat in stunned silence as the duke of Leuchtenberg and Lücke looked on. He had gone to Hygendorf and met her family, he told her; her sisters and her mother, who was sick, had identified her photograph. And Knopf had a message from Anna Wingender: Franziska was welcome to return to the apartment in Berlin, she had told the detective; they had even kept her few meager belongings. Franziska seemed frozen, nervously watching Knopf as he spoke.
26

“Wingender . . .” Franziska finally offered. “I . . . do . . . not . . . know . . . that . . . name!”
27
Then, suddenly, her shock apparently gave way to the crushing reality of what had occurred that morning. A few unexpected minutes shattered her artificial universe and destroyed all her efforts. Franziska had spent five years carefully re-creating herself as a plausible Anastasia; her rewards were tangible, her needs tended to, and she lived in a Bavarian castle as the guest of an aristocratic Romanov relative. For five years she had done her best to avoid dangerous encounters such as the one that played itself out that Tuesday morning. What would now happen? Would she be cast off, forced back into the despair of her hopeless former life? Or worse, would authorities charge her with fraud?

Franziska must have been convinced that her charade was at an end, for she turned to the duke and asked in a low voice, “And did you really believe that you had given shelter to the daughter of your Tsar?” It was a devastating admission of her deliberate fraud, but the duke followed this confession with something even more unbelievable: “Even Franziska Schanzkowska,” he told her, “may stay at my house. I have never known for certain if you are the Tsar’s daughter or not. I have only treated you with the sympathy one should have for a sick person.” Hearing this, the
Nachtausgabe
reported, Franziska suddenly gave “a small, ironic smile,” safe in the knowledge that the duke of Leuchtenberg would continue to protect her.
28

Seeon was in an uproar. Faith Lavington, ruminating on the claimant’s outburst on seeing Wingender, recorded in her diary, “This was a queer thing, to say the least, for one would scarcely greet an unknown person in such a fashion.” While waiting for Lücke and Knopf, Doris sat in the drawing room, sipping a cup of tea from a samovar and speaking to Duchess Olga of Leuchtenberg. “Please tell her to return to us,” Doris said to the duchess. “She still has a room and her clothing ready, and we would be very happy to have her back with us again.” To the duchess’s daughter Nathalia, Doris explained, “You know that Franziska always imagined that she was someone better than she really was. She was always very careful to keep her appearance, and took pride in her small, beautiful hands.” Looking at the photograph of Franziska in the
Nachtausgabe
, Nathalia confessed to Lavington, her “heart sank, for the likeness is unmistakable.”
29

And then an even more bizarre scene was enacted: the duke now joined the group, and despite the claimant’s admission, he was more convinced than ever that she really was Anastasia. Doris insisted that there wasn’t any doubt, but Leuchtenberg interrupted, saying that he was sure his guest was the grand duchess because she knew how a samovar was used. This was too much for Knopf: turning to Doris, he asked if she, too, could work the contraption. When she answered that she could, the detective said, “So, Your Highness, she must also be a Grand Duchess!”
30

This bit of mockery made no impression on the duke, who was soon publicly insisting that the confrontation with Wingender “had resulted in no evidence against the invalid; quite the contrary, it convinced me that she was not the missing Schanzkowska.”
31
To Rathlef-Keilmann he declared that the results of the encounter “were absolutely negative. The witness Wingender stared at the invalid, who was lying in bed, in silence and bewilderment, as it is only possible to look at a stranger whom one sees for the first time. She quite obviously neither recognized her nor addressed her by name.”
32

This wasn’t just wrong, it was inexplicable; his refusal to admit that Doris had actually identified the claimant, correctly or not, renders the duke a singularly unreliable witness. His denials may have given Franziska some temporary comfort; with such supporters—not merely the willfully naive but also those who blatantly lied about the particulars of her case—she may have hoped to ride out the “unmasking” storm, thinking it would all soon be forgotten. And then, as had happened when Peuthert carried her tale through Berlin, those who believed she was a grand duchess continued to force the issue. This time, it was Rathlef-Keilmann, intent on exposing what she believed to be an elaborate hoax engineered by Gilliard, the Wingenders, Lücke, and Knopf on orders from Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse to discredit the claimant. She found Franziska’s brother Felix, who was working as a miner at Ammendorf-bei-Halle in the Ruhr Valley, and asked him to meet the claimant; he had not seen Franziska since the winter of 1917–1918, and it took some persuasion before he agreed to Rathlef-Keilmann’s proposal. He would come, he said, only if he wouldn’t be held responsible for his sister’s actions or her care; even so, he would say only what his mother had directed him to say.
33