WE WERE AGAIN GETTING NOWHERE WITH our questions, and, only too aware of how little time we had left in the archive, we put aside our speculations for the moment and went back to reading. I was excited to have discovered that Emilie von Ostrowska was in fact my great-great-grandmother, and I was now being whisked back more than a century to the actual scene where the incredible love story between Emilie and August started.
Berlin must have been full of stories about the balls that August threw, with much gossiping about the daughters of officers and the pretty girls from Berlin he invited. He was the first to introduce the waltz to Berlin and would invite members of the public in to watch the dancing.
La Notte, his famous chef, was reported to lay on sumptuous buffets for the guests. I imagined myself being there. It was 1832 and I was in the prince’s grand ballroom, at one of his most lavish balls. I had now actually arrived at the place and time where they met, there at the heart of Berlin’s social scene, in the fabulous Wilhelmstrasse Palace designed by the famous architect and painter, Karl Schinkel. I was meeting the young Fraulein Ostrowska for the first time.
It may well have been the first high society event that Emilie had ever attended, and we knew from having read so much about August’s domestic arrangements that it would have been a dazzling affair. The grand staircase would have been lavishly decorated with flowers, and white silk blinds would have been lowered in front of the mighty windows. There would have been three sparkling crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, their light multiplied by the mirrors on the walls in between the lapis lazuli pillars. The side walls of the room were lined with crimson sofas, and two open mahogany doors would have displayed the great dining room where fleets of servants put their finishing touches to the small round tables where the guests would later be taking supper, the violet tones of the walls set off by the white of the tables and chairs. More tables and sideboards had been set up in adjoining rooms to ensure that everyone could be seated. They would all be laid out with silver from the royal plate room as well as with a hundred of August’s own silver plates; the Blue Room, its walls covered in luminous silk interwoven with small yellow stars, its sofas and chairs upholstered in white silk, and the State Room with its crimson damask walls and heavy white curtains.
I imagined the crowds of partygoers as they strolled from room to room, drinking in the intricate decorative details. One room was dominated by a life-sized portrait of a woman we had already read about, the famous beauty, Juliette Récamier, one of the few women who had been able to hold the prince’s affections for many years, despite rejecting him as a lover. Most of the sophisticated crowd would have heard the rumors and smiled discreetly to one another when they saw the portrait.
It would have been hard for any young girl to resist being swept off her feet by the attentions of such a famous man in such glamorous surroundings. Prince August was not only one of the wealthiest men ever to have lived in Europe, he was also a war hero and a larger-than-life character. It would be the equivalent these days of one of Hollywood’s most famous and established stars setting his sights on a star-struck young actress attending her first adult party.
I could imagine all too clearly how worried Major Ostrowski must have been when watching his beautiful daughter happily dancing the night away with a handsome prince, a powerful and celebrated man in his early fifties who had already been married twice. By all accounts August’s interest in Emilie was matched by her interest in him, so her father would have been able to see that August was clearly sweeping the young girl off her feet. In Major Ostrowski’s eyes, Emilie would still have been little more than a child, and yet he would suddenly have been forced to see her as a woman who could turn the head of a dangerous and exciting man, a man who could demand whatever he wanted. Was the major wishing he hadn’t allowed Emilie to attend the ball that night? If I had been him, I couldn’t say now, with my hand on my heart, that that thought wouldn’t have been foremost in my mind.
I could also imagine the king’s great displeasure with the idea of his major’s daughter being seduced by a man whose personal lifestyle he did not approve, however much he might admire his skills as a soldier and leader.
Perhaps if she had had a mother to go to for advice, Emilie would have been persuaded to be more circumspect about giving away her love, and her life, to a man with August’s long and colorful history. It is unlikely however, that her father, a military man, could easily have known how to find the words to advise a fifteen-year-old daughter on such delicate and private matters involving a Hohenzollern prince.
As we learned more, Ken and I soon realized that Emilie had lost her heart almost the first moment the prince asked her to dance that night in Berlin by the light of thousands of flickering candles. It was also obvious that for different reasons August was just as smitten with Emilie as she was with him. He was a lover of all the good things in life, including beautiful women, which was another reason why he was not liked by the more conservative members of the royal court, like Furst Wittgenstein. It seemed that the moment he set eyes on Emilie, August was unable to stop himself from pursuing her, even though he must have known from the beginning that a liaison with a man like himself was likely to be fraught with complications for a young girl.
But he was a man used to getting exactly what he wanted whenever he wanted it, and there didn’t seem to be much time between that first meeting and the moment when August and Emilie had set the whole of Berlin talking about their relationship. News traveled fast in those days and gossip was always rife, especially about the royal family. After lengthy negotiations with Major Ostrowski, Prince August announced to the world that he was going to marry Emilie.
The records contained an account by Prince Wilhelm, the son of King Frederick Wilhelm III, that told us that on the day the betrothal was announced Emilie emerged from her home in a beautiful white dress with a garland of lilies in her hair, looking every inch a princess. She was carried to August in the golden coach he had sent to collect her. A small crowd of onlookers had gathered outside his house in Jaegerstrasse, a normally private and secluded residence, to witness her arrival. It must have seemed that Emilie was going to live a life straight out of a fairy tale.
I still couldn’t understand why such a romantic and dramatic story had been buried so deeply in the vaults at Merseburg and only whispered about in our own family. Surely it must have been widely talked and written about by commentators at the time? The one last thing I had to do that night was to tell the boys that we had found Emilie. Phoning from the East was very difficult, so I proudly put the news down on a postcard. I knew just how excited they would be.
I thought about my granny Anna, as I often did. Her terrible fate, it seemed, had been sealed that wedding day in nineteenth-century Prussia. But did she ever know the true identity of her grandmother, Emilie? She couldn’t have, since my father and Uncle Freddy didn’t seem to know either. I shuddered, because it had become clear to me that, for reasons I did not fully understand yet, there was no way Anna could have saved herself when the Nazis finally came for her.
Seeing that I was upset by the pictures in my imagination, Ken gently took my arm and signaled that it was time for us to leave for the night.