ALTHOUGH THE DIRECTOR OF THE DAHLEM archive in West Berlin had not been very agreeable when I had gone there at the start of my quest in 1973, I decided to go back there a few years later with some of the documents that I now had in my possession. I thought that if I could show him that it was possible to find material, even if it was buried behind the Iron Curtain, he might be inspired to dig a little deeper in his own files. To my delight I discovered that the director I had met previously had retired and been replaced by a gentle man named Dr. Eckart Henning, who responded to my story with all the amazement and enthusiasm I could have hoped for.
“I think they must have a love affair with you to give you access to all this,” he laughed as I spread copies of some of the documents before him. “This is unheard of; we have no record of them doing this for anyone before. Do you have any idea how many Americans come over trying to prove they have a connection to the royal Hohenzollern family, hoping to get some of the status and perhaps even some of the money? They all get turned away at the door, but you they have invited in to their parlor. Do you know anything about the legacy of August’s grandfather, Frederick William I?”
“A little,” I replied.
“Well, Prince August had agreed not to leave any legitimate heirs. At the end of his life, much of his wealth was returned to the crown. It was a stipulation in Frederick William I’s original will that the legacy August received could only be inherited by those who left legitimate heirs.
“I assume you know that we do have some papers here on the Gottschalk family and Prince August?” he asked. “They were apparently hidden in a drawer. We do not know by whom.”
“No,” I said, feeling even more bewildered. Was there no end to the layers of historical subterfuge that my poor family had been subjected to? “Your predecessor told us there was nothing here about Prince August, and certainly not about the Gottschalks. In fact he told me he had never heard of the name. Why would he say that if it wasn’t true?”
“I have no idea, but I will arrange for you to see these papers,” Dr. Henning said helpfully. “Please come with me, I’ll fetch them now.”
He made a call and a few minutes later led Ken and me to a private room, where we found a set of papers laid out before us on a table.
“These are all we have on the Prince August,” he explained before leaving Ken and me to go back to our studies, just as we had done in Merseburg, as hungry as ever for new information.
“This is extraordinary,” I said after a few minutes, waving a piece of paper in the air. “It’s Isadore Gottschalk, August’s tailor again. According to this he sued August in the 1820s. His daughter, Friederike Gottschalk, is accusing August of seducing her. She claims she was visiting the prince to collect a debt owed to her cousin, Goldman, who was an actor. Apparently Louis Ferdinand, August’s brother, borrowed money from the actor just before he was killed at Saalfield in 1806. Friederike went to the Bellevue Palace to see the prince for settlement of his late brother’s debt. It seems her father, Isadore Gottschalk, had been thrown into a debtor’s prison and she needed the money in order to secure a release.”
If a man as well born and wealthy as Louis Ferdinand had borrowed money from a humble actor, it would suggest that Louis Ferdinand was leading a fairly dissolute life. In his own defense, August denied completely the Gottschalk girl’s accusation that he had forced himself on her at the meeting. As evidence in his defense, he was able to prove that she had returned the next day for a second visit. He claimed that when she first came to him, imploring him to honor his late brother’s debt, he had told her to come back the next day to receive some money. He claimed that she then framed him and accused him of seduction in order to create a scandal and fleece him of a great deal more money than his brother’s original debt. If that was the case, then the girl’s plan worked perfectly because, according to the file now in front of me, although the allegation was unproven the king still commanded August to settle his brother’s outstanding debt and to pay a further sum in order to avoid the scandal getting more out of control. Given the prince’s vulnerability because of this and his attraction to the young ladies of Berlin, it is understandable that he was easy prey for such allegations and that the Gottschalk girl might have seen an opportunity to extract money from a man who was well known for his love of life.
Friederike Gottschalk went on to give birth to a daughter who she claimed was the product of the alleged seduction, a mentally handicapped girl called Agnes. August was not willing to accept that the child was his without a fight, and his spies found out that at the same time she was paying him the two visits, she was also frequenting nearby army camps and it was said that she had been sleeping around with the soldiers. It was a story that would have delighted the tabloid editors of today.
August never admitted anything, but there was a record of his making financial provision for Agnes to be looked after for the whole of her life. It would not be unheard of for someone like the prince to help out a man like Isadore Gottschalk out of the goodness of his heart, even if he didn’t have a guilty conscience. The fact was, aside from the accusations that surely must have angered him, it was clear to August that his old tailor was in dire financial straits in a debtors’ prison. It would have been obvious that Isadore couldn’t possibly afford to pay for the upbringing of his daughter’s disabled child. August may simply have felt sorry for him.
This new information was making me even more confused. If the Gottschalks had been angry enough at August to level such accusations at him, how did Emilie’s daughter end up bearing their name? We were gathering more and more pieces to the jigsaw, but still none of them seemed to fit together to create a coherent picture of what might have happened.