The Resurrection of the Romanovs (16 page)

When not sleeping or sitting silently in her bed, Fraulein Unbekannt spent her days at Dalldorf reading. She liked to read. Patients had access to the institute’s library, which contained a number of books, illustrated magazines, and newspapers.
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A review of the asylum records showed that she read “newspapers and books” and that even from her hospital bed she “followed political events with some interest.”
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Malinovsky also remembered that Fraulein Unbekannt “read often,” including the works of several Russian authors that the nurse herself brought for the patient.
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And a fellow patient at Dalldorf recalled that although she would speak only German, Fraulein Unbekannt often asked for and received books in English and French, again presumably brought in for her by members of the asylum’s staff.
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The details of what happened next became a matter of some confusion. Later, none of the four Dalldorf nurses could quite recall exactly when Fraulein Unbekannt began to hint about her alleged identity or what had been said. It was a magazine that led to the intrigue, the October 23, 1921, issue of the popular German weekly periodical
Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung
. From the cover stared a ghostly echo of Russia’s recent troubled past, a large photograph of Grand Duchesses Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia Nikolaievna, all beautifully fragile and smiling wistfully for the camera of Pierre Gilliard shortly after the Revolution. “
Lebt eine Zarentochter?
” (Is One of the Tsar’s Daughters Alive?) the caption asked dramatically. Within, an account of the imperial family’s captivity and execution in Siberia ended with a dramatic flourish: “To this day, it has not been possible to definitively establish if, during the massacre, one of the Grand Duchesses, Anastasia, was not merely severely wounded, and if she remained alive.”
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One day, Bertha Walz showed the magazine to Emilie Barfknecht and to Fraulein Unbekannt. When the patient looked at the photographs, Walz said, her “behavior became quite altered.” The nurse pointed to one of the grand duchesses pictured, which one she could not recall, commenting on rumors that she had survived; but the patient “corrected me” and indicated that it was a different imperial daughter who had escaped.
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A photograph taken in Tobolsk, Barfknecht recalled, provoked Fraulein Unbekannt to comment that “in that house, the Tsar’s family had always been watched by soldiers, who very often were rough and displayed a lack of discipline.”
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Even more intriguingly, the patient showed Erna Buchholz an image of the Romanovs, saying, “I knew all of these people.”
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But it was Thea Malinovsky who heard the full story, or as much of it as Fraulein Unbekannt was willing to reveal. One night in the autumn of 1921, Malinovsky sat at her desk in Ward B. After the other patients had fallen asleep, she spotted Fraulein Unbekannt sitting up in her bed, staring at her. Suddenly the patient crept across the ward, took a chair beside the desk, and began to talk, slowly at first, mentioning nothing of particular importance, until she finally declared that she wanted to show the nurse something. “She went back to her bed and from beneath the mattress pulled out a copy of the
Berliner Illustrirte
,” Malinovsky remembered. “There was a picture of the Tsar’s family on the cover.” Fraulein Unbekannt handed the magazine to the nurse “and asked if I was struck by anything in the picture. I looked carefully at the picture, but had no idea what she meant. On closer examination, I noticed that Fraulein Unbekannt bore a certain resemblance to the Tsar’s youngest daughter. But I was careful not to indicate this to her.”
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The October 23, 1921, issue of the
Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung
.

Dissatisfied with this, Fraulein Unbekannt again pointed at Anastasia, urging Malinovsky to look more closely, but the nurse professed confusion. “Don’t you see any resemblance between the two of us?” the patient demanded. When Malinovsky admitted to this, Fraulein Unbekannt suddenly grew “very excited.” Uncertain what to do, the nurse asked if she was the grand duchess. The patient said nothing. It was, Malinovsky recalled, “as if she was stuck,” and uncertain what to say next. Then Fraulein Unbekannt’s “entire body shook” and her face “turned red with agitation” as she rewarded Malinovsky with a rush of details. Fraulein Unbekannt spoke of the murder of her family, of losing consciousness, and of waking in the back of a peasant cart, badly injured. A Polish soldier had saved her and spirited her out of Russia to Romania, selling pieces of jewelry concealed beneath her clothing along the way to pay expenses. At some point this man had brought her to Berlin, where she had been found in the Landwehr Canal. She was, she announced, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, Grand Duchess Anastasia.
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6

Fraulein Unbekannt

Anastasia: that was what Fraulein Unbekannt had said. It was a stunning, dramatic turn in the intrigue over this mysterious young woman’s identity. And one that might have remained a secret, as the patient wished when she swore the Dalldorf nurses to secrecy, but for the admission of a certain Marie Clara Peuthert to the asylum on December 18, 1921. Her thirty-three days at Dalldorf forever altered the course of Fraulein Unbekannt’s life and propelled her claim into the pages of history.
1
A highly strung, emotional woman of fifty, Peuthert, having suffered an attack of nerves, swept into Dalldorf trailing an air of intrigue and mystery in her wake.
2
Although German, she had lived in Russia, letting it be known that before the Revolution she had been employed in Moscow by the aristocratic Novikhov family as a house dressmaker.
3
While she had indeed once lived in Russia, there was some doubt about her real history, including claims that she had worked for German intelligence during World War I.
4
Peuthert soon befriended Fraulein Unbekannt and spent hours sharing intimacies with her in Dalldorf’s Ward B. Precisely what next occurred remains a mystery. Although the usual story has Peuthert confronting Fraulein Unbekannt and insisting that she has recognized her, this is not what happened, at least according to Peuthert. When prompted, she said, Fraulein Unbekannt “did not answer my questions as to her real name or descent,” though she did often speak about the Russian imperial family. She, too, showed Fraulein Unbekannt the October 1921 issue of the
Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung
, leafing through the pages and listening as she commented on the images from Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg. “In further conversations,” Peuthert recalled, “Fraulein Unbekannt dropped some hints that finally led me to believe that she was a rescued daughter of the Tsar.”
5

Peuthert was excited over this apparent discovery, recalled nurse Emilie Barfknecht, but Fraulein Unbekannt seemed distressed.
6
Peuthert mentioned no name, at least at this time. Barfknecht, though, thought Fraulein Unbekannt most resembled one grand duchess in particular; when she showed the photograph to the mysterious patient, Fraulein Unbekannt readily identified her as Anastasia.
7
But when Peuthert was released from the asylum on January 20, 1922, she began insisting that she had discovered a rescued Grand Duchess Tatiana. Sure that she had solved a great mystery, Peuthert was determined to find someone—anyone—who could confirm her beliefs.

A few months later, one Sunday afternoon, an émigré named Nicholas von Schwabe stood in the forecourt of Berlin’s Russian Orthodox cathedral on Unter den Linden, selling anti-Semitic pamphlets, when “an elderly, dark-haired, very poorly dressed woman” approached him. It was Peuthert. She eyed his collection of booklets and postcards before whispering that she possessed sensitive information on the Romanovs. After von Schwabe assured her that as a former staff captain in the Cuirassiers Life Guards Regiment of Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna he was completely trustworthy, Peuthert confessed, “In a Berlin lunatic asylum a person called Fraulein Unbekannt is kept, who greatly resembles Grand Duchess Tatiana. I am personally convinced that she is so.”
8

Von Schwabe was sufficiently intrigued to pursue the matter, and after another meeting with Peuthert and a discussion with a friend named Franz Jaenicke, the trio visited the asylum. It was Wednesday, March 8. When they approached the bed in Ward B, Fraulein Unbekannt pulled the sheet up to her face and turned to the wall; she was largely silent, insisting that she could not speak Russian. “She asked what I wanted,” von Schwabe recalled. He tried to befriend her, offering a copy of his magazine, but when shown a photograph of Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, she “looked at it a long time,” then declared, “I do not know that lady.”
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Later, said Emilie Barfknecht, Fraulein Unbekannt commented that the visitors had “shown her a picture of her grandmother.”
10

Despite these uncertainties, von Schwabe went straight to the Supreme Monarchist Council, alerting them to the possibility that a rescued Grand Duchess Tatiana was a patient at Dalldorf.
11
Formed in 1921 by Nicholas Markov, a former deputy in Russia’s parliament, the Duma, the Supreme Monarchist Council in Berlin acted as a center for émigré life and assistance; von Schwabe himself helped edit the council’s virulently anti-Semitic, promonarchist journal
Dvouglavy Orel
(
Double Eagle
) and other tracts alleging Masonic plots and a Jewish ritual murder of the Romanovs.
12
These publications, widely distributed and avidly believed within the émigré community, reflected the burgeoning mythology that wrapped the Romanovs in a mantle of martyrdom. For some, the idea of a grand duchess who miraculously survived the massacre in Ekaterinburg conflicted with anti-Soviet propaganda that portrayed the Bolsheviks, to a man, as ruthless and savage murderers. Others, though, were more receptive to the notion. According to tsarist law, Nicholas II’s daughters could only inherit the throne after all male members of the dynasty; in 1922 there were more than two dozen such male Romanovs who had survived the Revolution and escaped Russia. But what was in force before 1917 might, some speculated, no longer be valid; at the very least, within émigré circles filled with nostalgia for their martyred tsar and lost empire, a surviving grand duchess offered a sentimental figurehead around whom the community could rally, someone who, even if she held no actual power, certainly would wield enormous influence over political affairs and the social life of Russian exiles.

This was the dilemma now faced by the Supreme Monarchist Council in Berlin. In the end, though, filled with hope, and their emotions still raw from the tragedy of the Revolution, officials took Peuthert seriously, contacting Zenaide Tolstoy, an aristocratic lady who had lived at Tsarskoye Selo and been friendly with the imperial family. On Friday, March 10, accompanied by Schwabe and several others, Tolstoy called on the patient at Dalldorf, who greeted her visitors with a repeat performance of her earlier behavior, turning to the wall and attempting to conceal her features behind a sheet. When, eventually, she showed her face, Tolstoy thought that she detected some resemblance between the eyes of the patient and those of Nicholas II. Fraulein Unbekannt was agitated throughout the encounter, and when Tolstoy showed her postcards of the imperial family, signed photographs of the grand duchesses, and letters from the Romanovs, she apparently began to cry.
13
Tolstoy left the asylum saying she had recognized the patient as the second of Nicholas and Alexandra’s daughters. Later, though, once it became clear that Fraulein Unbekannt insisted that she was Anastasia, Tolstoy changed her mind, insisting that she now recognized her as the youngest grand duchess; after several months she abandoned even this position, rejecting her altogether, only to express doubts later.
14

As the second week of March 1922 began, word of Tolstoy’s recognition of a rescued Grand Duchess Tatiana at Dalldorf quickly spread through the Russian émigré community in Berlin, and the Supreme Monarchist Council had no reason to doubt her veracity. On March 11 they dispatched a former officer north to Kiel, where Empress Alexandra’s sister Princess Irene and her husband, Prince Heinrich of Prussia, lived at their estate, Hemmelmark. Also living here was Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, Alexandra’s former lady-in-waiting who had escaped the Bolsheviks and eventually made her way to Europe. Just four years had passed since Buxhoeveden had last seen the grand duchesses during the journey from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg, making the baroness one of those best placed to render a verdict on the claimant, and Princess Irene asked her to go to Berlin and assess the young woman at Dalldorf.
15

Peuthert somehow learned of the visit and ran to Dalldorf, shouting warnings. By the time the baroness arrived, Fraulein Unbekannt was nervously peering out from behind the sheet she held to her face. She turned to Peuthert and whispered a few questions in German. “I attempted to attract the young woman’s attention,” Buxhoeveden later said, “caressing her hair and speaking to her in English.” She called her “Darling” several times, but the claimant “made no reply, and I saw that she did not understand a word of what I had said,” nor was there “anything in her eyes to indicate that she had recognized me,” Buxhoeveden declared. She showed her an icon commemorating the Romanov Tercentenary in 1913, as well as a ring that had once belonged to Empress Alexandra, but “none of these things seemed to evoke in her the slightest recognition. She remained completely indifferent.” Attempting to save the situation, Peuthert stepped in, whispering to the patient, showing her photographs of the imperial family and prompting her rather obviously, “Tell me, isn’t that Mama?” But Fraulein Unbekannt seemed oblivious to these efforts, refusing to talk and redoubling her attempts to conceal her face.
16

Finally, in exasperation, Buxhoeveden grabbed the sheets and pulled them back so that she could fully examine the patient’s face. “There was some resemblance in her eyes and forehead to Grand Duchess Tatiana,” she recorded, “but this disappeared as soon as her full face was revealed.” She thought that the shape of the face and the features were wrong. “Her hair was lighter in color, some of her teeth were missing, and the ones that remained did not resemble those of the Grand Duchess.”
17
Despite repeated requests, Fraulein Unbekannt refused to leave her bed so that the baroness could judge her height. Finally, Buxhoeveden simply grabbed her and pulled the claimant to her feet. “Rather stupidly,” wrote Lord Mountbatten, Buxhoeveden then declared, “You can’t be Grand Duchess Tatiana, who was much taller than me. Only Grand Duchess Anastasia was shorter than me.”
18

With this, Buxhoeveden left Dalldorf. The claimant’s supporters later insisted that the baroness had rejected her too quickly, and that had she remained longer and studied her face she would have recognized the patient as Anastasia. This Buxhoeveden refuted, insisting that the claimant “did not in the least physically resemble” the youngest grand duchess.
19
Fraulein Unbekannt later complained that the encounter had been “dreadful”; she explained that she had refused to show her face or to speak because she was “ashamed of my past experiences.”
20
Buxhoeveden made no public statement; unaware of her rejection, many émigrés in Berlin considered the matter open, and soon the curious, the concerned, and the convinced flocked to Dalldorf to see for themselves the woman who might be their emperor’s daughter. At all times of the day, Malinovsky recalled, there was a constant crush of visitors around Fraulein Unbekannt’s bed, attempting to question her, staring at her, and showering her with candy, flowers, and books.
21

Among these visitors were Russian émigrés Baron Arthur von Kleist and his wife, Marie, alerted by their friend Madame Tolstoy to the possible grand duchess at Dalldorf. Before the Revolution, von Kleist had been an unimportant Tsarist bureaucrat, chief of a provincial police district in Poland.
22
They came to Fraulein Unbekannt with gifts and sat by her bed in Ward B to keep her company. At first, the baroness thought, the claimant was “very frightened,” and rarely spoke; when she did talk, it was in German, “with a somewhat foreign accent, Russian, or perhaps Polish,” said the baroness, “but it struck me as being more Russian than anything else.” In time, Fraulein Unbekannt seemed to trust the baroness, and the two women spent hours looking at the latest magazines, discussing the newest fashions.
23

Fewer than two weeks after Tolstoy’s first visit to Dalldorf, the von Kleists had requested that Fraulein Unbekannt be discharged into their care, “out of humanitarian reasons,” the baron explained, adding that he would see to her needs “according to my means.”
24
In the spring of 1922, word somehow reached Fraulein Unbekannt that officials were considering moving her from the protective cocoon she had established at Dalldorf to another asylum, in Brandenburg; panicked, she sent for von Schwabe and asked if she might live with the von Kleists.
25
Everyone was in agreement, although the baroness recalled that on hearing this, one asylum official “asked us if we knew what we were undertaking.” The baron assured the man that they believed in her identity and would assume responsibility for her expenses. On May 30, 1922, after 792 days, a “happy, radiant” Fraulein Unbekannt, as the baroness recalled, left Dalldorf and moved in with the aristocratic couple.
26

The von Kleists had never met Grand Duchess Anastasia, but they were certain that the young woman they welcomed into their home was indeed the youngest daughter of Nicholas II. Their luxurious apartment, which occupied the entire fourth floor of a building at 9 Nettelbeckstrasse in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, now became home to the enigmatic young woman from Dalldorf.
27
The von Kleists provided Fraulein Unbekannt with her own room, in a household staffed with servants, and clothing borrowed from their two married daughters, Frau Irmgard Freund and Frau Anna Reim (the two youngest von Kleist daughters, Irina and Gerda, still lived with their parents). At first Fraulein Unbekannt was largely left alone to do as she pleased, although soon enough an endless succession of Russian émigrés, former tsarist officers, dedicated monarchists, and the simply curious plagued the apartment, intent on seeing for themselves the supposed grand duchess.
28

From the first, the claimant despised such attention, often refusing to leave her bedroom if a crowd had assembled to see her; she even took most of her meals in private, and only rarely would she join the family at the dinner table.
29
Despite these tensions, she at first found life with the baron and his family quite tolerable. They bought her new dresses from Berlin’s most fashionable stores, and took her on outings to museums and to the Hohenzollern palaces in nearby Potsdam.
30
The numerous émigrés also brought her magazines, newspapers, and books about her presumed Romanov family, along with souvenir albums, photographs, and postcards, all of which she greatly treasured.
31
Nicholas von Schwabe recalled that she “constantly asked me to bring her photographs of the Imperial Family.”
32
Her compilation stretched to include Romanov aunts, uncles, and cousins, and also Empress Alexandra’s Hessian relatives and members of European royal families, all of which Fraulein Unbekannt kept in careful order. She could often be found sitting alone, these images spread out around her, as she studied faces for hours, although when visitors entered the room she would often shove the images beneath a blanket.
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