DESPITE ALL THE HELP WE WERE receiving from Dr. Henning, we were still none the wiser about Charlotte, and, as had happened before, the relationship between the prince and his tailor’s family appeared to be far more complicated than we could have imagined. It sometimes felt like every time we took one step forward we then had to take two back. My spirits would soar with every new bit of information that came my way, and then I would meet another brick wall.
While we were in Berlin, I had been wracking my brains to think where I might be able to find out more about what happened to Emilie and Charlotte in 1843, after August died. It was such a crucial time for all of them, and I was determined to find out more about it. So Ken and I went to another archive to look through the city’s address books from the nineteenth century, the precursors of modern-day telephone books. We were nonchalantly turning the pages, not really sure what we were looking for when a name leaped off the page at us. To my astonishment, listed there for all to see was Emilie, in her married name as “Frau” (Mrs.) von Ostrowska, just as she had described herself in her letter to the king. August had boldly decided that the whole world could know that she was married to him.
This must have been known and addressed during their married years together, just as she had told the king in her letter. Then, tense with excitement, I checked the next edition of the address book, published after August had died. Emilie’s listing was there again, but this time the effect of the Wittgenstein reply to her letter had taken hold and she was now being listed as “Fraulein” (Miss). In those four additional letters her link to August was officially erased forever. Her new status as an unmarried woman with a child was stark, and the ramifications would have been very frightening. Not only would this change have been humiliating, it would have meant that Emilie’s world was falling apart. The change had been made, and she would have had no choice but to accept the consequences. The king’s wishes had been carried out, and Emilie, stripped of her married status, must have found her position impossible.
That would have been the same year that Charlotte told my father and uncle everything in her life “changed completely.” It was hard to believe that any mother would voluntarily give up her only child, especially when she had just been widowed and was feeling very alone and vulnerable. So did that mean the establishment had put pressure on her to give the child away, just as callously as they had taken away her married status?
Whatever the reasons, it seemed that just after losing her husband, her father and her trusted friend, August’s secretary Uhde, Emilie must also have lost her only daughter and her last connection to her beloved husband and partner of eleven years. If that was what happened, then the cruelty of it was unbearable to even think about.
I was still having trouble working out what all this would have meant as far as my great-grandmother, Charlotte, was concerned. Had August secretly hoped to legitimize his descendants by marrying Emilie? Would that have been why the king was angry with them both?
“My great-grandmother just doesn’t seem to exist in the records,” I kept explaining to anyone who would listen. “All we know is that for some reason she was given the name of this Jewish family, Gottschalk, when in fact she was a Hohenzollern princess.”
As soon as we got back to London, we returned once more to studying the documents on the microfiches that Frau Steglitz had sent us, searching for clues that we might now be able to spot, armed with the new information we had unearthed in Berlin. I was still having trouble working out the financial situation within the Hohenzollern family, but I was coming to believe that it would prove to be crucial to solving the mystery. Dr. Henning had explained the whole thing to me in principle, but then I uncovered some letters in an archive that gave an account of an event that had occurred before any of August’s marriages at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Reading the papers, I realized that August’s mother, Princess Ferdinand, had unwittingly caused a problem for her son after Prince Heinrich, August’s uncle and a brother of Frederick the Great, died and left most of his private assets to his favorite nephew, August’s brother Louis Ferdinand. Princess Ferdinand had always adored August to the detriment of her two other sons, even reputedly having him sleep in her room with her when he was a boy. Many believed that it was her preference for him that had given him his over-developed sense of self-esteem and his famous obstinacy. When she was later told of Louis Ferdinand’s death, Princess Ferdinand’s first words were reportedly, “Thank God it wasn’t August.”
Their mother had always been scathing about the louche lifestyle of Louis Ferdinand, and was horrified at the thought of him coming into yet another huge fortune without sharing it with August. So she took the matter to the king, the financially strapped Frederick William III, asking him to intervene on August’s behalf and divide the money equally between the two brothers, so that August received a fair share of this inheritance.
However, when Princess Ferdinand requested the king’s intervention, his Majesty’s advisers went back to Frederick William I’s original bequest to his sons, Heinrich and Ferdinand (August’s father), and determined that the original inheritance consisted of Crown properties and many other assets that should have gone to their other brother, Frederick the Great, who was the new king at the time. As a result of his investigations, the reigning monarch, Frederick William III, saw to it that the entire bequest now fell into dispute. Apparently alarmed by the scale of the Crown’s wealth in the hands of August’s family, the king seized his chance by attempting to claw it back. So he replied to Princess Ferdinand by presenting both August and Louis Ferdinand with an agreement that he insisted the two brothers had to sign. That agreement prevented them from leaving legitimate heirs. The result of this would be that all the disputed assets now in the hands of their father, Ferdinand, would be returned to the Crown once both sons died.
The princess had made a grave error in judgment by bringing the matter to the king’s attention, not having imagined for a second that he would rake up something from so far in the past and try to seize the inheritance for himself. She must have been shocked at the result of her own actions. Had she simply bided her time until Louis Ferdinand’s death, the entire legacy of Frederick William I, a huge fortune, would have ended up with her favorite son’s heirs rather than going back to the Crown after his death. I would imagine August and his brother must have been deeply unhappy with her at the time, but it was too late for them to do anything about it. This whole financial situation must have added to the paranoia that the king and his advisors felt toward Emilie, fearing that if the young widow took her case to the lawyers, Charlotte might well end up with a claim to the Crown’s vast fortunes as well as a claim on succession, particularly if she bore a male heir. It was extraordinary to think that so much rested on the shoulders of one tiny, innocent baby girl. She could have had no idea how many generations of jealousy and ill-feeling between different branches of her famous family stretched back behind her.
So it was that much of the huge fortune that had been kept from Frederick the Great by his father (probably because he disapproved of his son’s homosexuality) finally ended up with August, with the supreme irony that because of his mother’s intervention none of his heirs would benefit.
I had already read about how badly Frederick the Great was treated by his tyrannical father, almost like a slave. It was no wonder, with such a terrible family history, that August had been nervous about what Wittgenstein might do to his bride. I knew August would have been the conservative Wittgenstein’s worst nightmare. The prince was wealthy, directly in line to the throne, popular with an army that had prospered under his modernization, and extremely liberal in his views compared with the king and his close advisors. August’s championing of the Jews horrified Wittgenstein, who was constantly fighting to maintain the iron grip of conservatism on Prussia.
My head had been whirling as I tried to take in all the machinations of this complicated family from which I now knew I had sprung. So many names and so many generations all intermingling, it was hard to get a clear picture beyond the fact that by the time the money reached August, it was a massive fortune, far bigger than the one controlled by the king himself. In those times money meant power, even more directly than it does today, which often led to bitter rivalries springing up within wealthy families and meant that thrones were always vulnerable.
One thing was crystal clear to me at this point. With August’s death, Emilie’s and Charlotte’s lives were in peril. There had already been a serious attempt on Emilie’s life, and with the possibility that Charlotte could make a legitimate claim to the Hohenzollern family fortune—and without August to protect her—her disappearance from historical records was almost inevitable.
The burning question for me remained: what had happened to Emilie and Charlotte?