EVEN AFTER FINDING HER GRAVE, I never gave up my searching or my wondering about Charlotte’s early years. In fact, in many ways it increased my feeling that I had a personal obligation to uncover the truth. I felt certain that the answers must be lying somewhere, if I could just find out where. Perseverance had paid off so many times over the years that I couldn’t give up now, that wasn’t an option.
I wasn’t alone in my preoccupations, as I had Dr. Henning in Berlin and his enthusiastic wife, Herzeleide, who was head librarian at the archive in Dahlem. In fact, she and her husband both became close friends during those later years, taking the quest as personally as I did. Herzeleide would pick up information such as postcards, pictures, anything that crossed her path, and send it to me in England. On our many trips to Berlin, Ken and I would go to their apartment for dinner and talk endlessly about our mutual passion.
By now, many years after our memorable week of research together in the East German archives, Herr Waldmann had risen to become its director. The Foreign Office’s intervention in the espionage case had saved the situation, and our relationship had continued uninterrupted. Herr Waldmann was certainly not a man to bear grudges, and I have absolutely no doubt that he had nothing to do with the request for Ken to spy. On several occasions, more than ten years after we had first visited him, he sent me more documents, including a very valuable one, a copy of August’s will, which had not been shown to us when we first visited Merseburg in 1973. It was an extraordinary discovery, full of detail that made for fascinating reading, knowing as we did by then most of the people named in it. This was the final piece of the puzzle.
Emilie, we could now see, had been provided with a substantial pension for life (1,500 taler a year, which was the same allowance she had been receiving while her husband was alive). She had also been left a portrait of herself, painted in 1838 by the court master Paul Mila. At the time, the king was on record as having commissioned separate portraits of the whole family, and a miniature, both in gilded frames. August was probably the one who included her among the family sitters, quite possibly without the king’s knowledge. The miniature was probably produced from that same sitting, as was the custom. This was the same picture that my family had kept safe for more than 170 years. When experts at the National Portrait Gallery examined it, they told me the head was painted by Mila, and the body by a student.
August’s will further stipulated that Emilie was also allowed to keep the silver that was already at her apartment on Jaegerstrasse where she had lived much of the time when he was away—a silver presentation tray and four plain silver candlesticks were also listed. There was no mention in the will of Agnes Gottschalk.
While trying to track down what had happened to Charlotte, I also wanted to trace any living descendants of August and his first two wives. With the help of the great genealogist Arthur Addington, I eventually managed to trace the family of Eduard von Waldenburg, the son of August’s first wife, Friederike von Waldenburg.
When I made contact, I discovered that just a few weeks before I got there Eduard’s grandson, Siegfried, had died; another link with the past severed forever. His widow, Jutta (who had been born as Princess von Alten), however, agreed to meet us. A well-built, Germanic-looking woman with jet-black hair, she seemed wary and suspicious of our motives for seeking her out and reluctant to give anything away. Despite whatever reservations she might have been harboring, however, she sat us down graciously amid the many books, pictures and ornaments she had inherited from her own and her husband’s families, and calmly listened to our story. As I talked, I passed the notebook over to her, and I saw that I had immediately caught her attention as she turned it over in her hands, stroking the gilt cover before opening it up and reading the inscription inside.
“Mein Gott!” she exclaimed, and from that moment she opened up, her story flowing forth like a river. What she told us explained completely why she had been so guarded when we first arrived. She admitted that her late husband, Siegfried, had been one of Hitler’s most admired generals. I was shocked. Our story had started with the battles against Napoleon and now we were hearing about how one of Prince August’s descendants had served the evil man who would drive us out of Germany and who, without a doubt, was responsible for Anna’s death. The family’s path became more perverse with every new twist we uncovered.
Apparently now relaxing in our company, Jutta brought out a secret stack of photographs and proudly laid them out in front of us, pointing out the ones that showed her husband standing beside the Führer in full uniform, like the trusted aide he must have been. It was unsettling to be looking at pictures of a man who had brought so much fear and horror to our own childhoods, who had caused so much death and destruction within our families. And even more unsettling to be talking to someone whose husband had not only been part of Hitler’s inner circle but who had also shared a great-grandfather with Anna, a woman who was almost certainly one of the millions murdered on the orders of the dictator in the picture. As Jutta talked, I couldn’t help remembering the night we listened as a family to Hitler coming to power, the day I proudly and innocently raised the Nazi flag and marched at the head of my class, and the sight of my grandmother’s figure disappearing from my eyes for the last time in the steam on the railway platform in Prague.
Jutta went on to tell us how her son-in-law, a captain in the army named von Wallenberg, had been one of the conspirators involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler with a bomb. I clearly remembered hearing of the incident in London. When the bomb first went off, it was announced on the radio that Hitler had been killed. As soon as they discovered that he had survived, Jutta’s daughter and son-in-law tried to escape from Germany in disguise, but failed. When von Wallenberg was caught, he was executed and hung on a meat hook.
“Nobody around here knows who I am,” Jutta admitted in a whisper, as if she still feared being overheard, even in the privacy of her own apartment. “I tell nothing to anyone, but you are different. I will tell you something I have never told anyone. This little notebook would definitely have belonged to Prince August. It would have been part of a set of his visitors’ books that Siegfried inherited. I recognize it. It is the same design. We buried the whole collection in the woods on our estate in East Prussia when the Russians stormed in at the end of the war. We were fleeing for our lives and only just managed to escape, so we couldn’t take many possessions with us. And of course we were never able to go back for them, because after the war they were on the other side of the wall.”
We had brought a photograph of the notebook with us. “I will gladly sign the back of it,” she said and duly did so, by way of confirming the notebook’s provenance.
“You know,” she said, “August married Friederike morganatically. In Germany at that time, it was just a civil ceremony where the ring was placed on the bride’s other hand.”
That confirmed yet again what we had already discovered about the financial and inheritance agreements within the Hohenzollern family. I felt we were finally beginning to understand the full complexity and danger of the world that poor little Emilie von Ostrowska entered the night that she allowed Prince August to bewitch her at the ball in his palace. Jutta showed us a ribbon that she used to wear to functions, which had a medallion on it bearing a picture of August. It seemed strange to be shown by someone else a picture of a man I had now grown used to thinking of as being my great-great-grandfather. By the time we left Jutta’s home, we had become firm friends and had promised to stay in touch with anything new we might discover.
Despite the inevitable dead-ends that we continued to meet, we had made substantial progress overall. Encouraged by my successes, I delved further to try to find out if there were any descendants of August’s second wife, Auguste, still alive, but all my inquiries led nowhere. After several generations, it was beginning to look as if that strand of August’s family had ended. Then out of the blue, I received a letter from a Mrs. Ritchie, a lady who lived north of London and had heard about my story. Mrs. Ritchie turned out to be a revelation. She was the great-great-granddaughter of Prince August and Auguste von Prillwitz. Ken and I gladly accepted a generous lunch invitation to her home.
When we arrived there, we were met at the door by a charming lady who greeted me with the words, “Hello, cousin.” She took us on a guided tour of the house, introducing me to August’s paintings, which she had inherited from her mother. The dining room had been laid for lunch with the most beautiful silver, and a shiver went down my spine when Mrs. Ritchie told us the prince had once owned it. The silver was part of the same collection that Emilie inherited when her husband died, and we were actually going to eat with it. It gave a tiny, modest hint of the splendor in which our great-great-grandparents must once have lived.
Mrs. Ritchie confirmed that August and Auguste had been morganatically married as well, and that Auguste had developed cancer and died at around the time the prince met young Emilie and fell in love once again.
To be eating lunch surrounded by August’s possessions and hearing stories about the various members of the Prillwitz family who were depicted in the paintings on the walls was a wonderful experience. After spending so many years staring at dry, written accounts and descriptions, Mrs. Ritchie’s home brought the past to life before my eyes.
My searches in Berlin also led me to find descendants of the Ostrowskis, Egbert von Ostrowski, a lawyer and head of the family. He and his petite wife, Hildegard, lived in southern Germany. When I wrote to introduce myself to them, they immediately invited us to their home. When we got there, we found they were a warm and happy couple. Through sharing our mutual family histories we became close friends.
By that time I had managed to find out a little more from the Dahlem archive of what had happened to the tragic Emilie after she was widowed and parted from Charlotte. I could not imagine how she could have ever got together with another man, not to mention falling in love again. Despite that, or maybe because of her vulnerable position, I discovered that she married a Swiss count who owned an estate in West Prussia. As Emilie was on a pension, August’s estate was informed of her change of circumstances in writing.
Given what had happened to her over the previous few years, it seems likely that she was marrying for security rather than love, but whatever the reason, I learned from another archive that she later returned alone to Berlin, which suggests the marriage was not a success. I can’t help wondering whether that might have been because August had been the love of her life and no other man was likely to be able to live up to such a charismatic, powerful and romantic figure. I could certainly understand if that was the case, because I had fallen under his spell myself just by reading about him. The records showed that after leaving the count she returned to her late father’s home in Mohrenstrasse, where she lived with her sister Helena once more, just as she had when they were young girls.
As I grew to know Emilie, I understood that money wasn’t all that important to her, over and above the need to pay her way. She must have been in a very poor state by then, maybe because by marrying the count she had forfeited her right to a royal pension, and perhaps she even lost the will to live. It was heartbreaking for me when I found her death registered in West Berlin in 1865. She was only forty-eight years old and the entry reported that she had fallen ill and died at a local hospital, where she was taken by an “unknown man.” Her death notice registered her as a “divorced woman.” It was such a tragic end for the young girl who had sacrificed everything for the man she loved.
Being separated from her only child must have been a terrible blow for Emilie, and I would imagine that many women would find it hard to be happy ever again after an experience like that. Knowing that as an adult Charlotte definitely talked to my father and uncle about her memories of being with her natural parents when she was very small and of playing with her father on the floor of their apartment, there was no end to my frustration when I could still not find any records of her childhood anywhere. If Anna had ever known any more about her mother’s early years, she certainly didn’t confide it to me or to either of her sons. There was nothing to tell me that Charlotte had ever officially existed apart from her gravestone.
Just as I had with August and Charlotte, I felt I had to make a pilgrimage to Emilie’s place of rest when I discovered she was buried in the Ostrowski family grave in the Alte Friedhof.
“You’re lucky,” Dr. Henning informed me. “It’s the oldest cemetery in Berlin. It will still be there.”
But when we got there, Ken and I discovered to our horror that the cemetery had been dug up six months before to make way for a highway overpass. There was nothing left of the Ostrowski family tomb. It felt like a heartbreakingly desolate end to a sad life.
One day a short while later, Ken and I stopped by the National Galerie while on a visit to Berlin, on the off chance that they might have an oil painting of Prince August. I had been desperate to find a picture of him for a long time. I explained my connection to the man at the gallery.
“We have a Franz Kruger portrait right now down in our cellar,” he said. “It’s just come back from an exhibition.”
I felt my heartbeat quicken as he led us through a maze of corridors and staircases. Ten minutes later we were facing my great-great-grandfather, and I gazed at him in amazement. The handsome hero of our story inspired me, standing there tall and uniformed in front of me, in the Yellow Chamber of his Bellevue Palace. In the background was hanging a portrait of his beloved Juliette Récamier.
Every time I stumbled across a new connection to the prince, it felt like I was seeing an old friend, getting to know him a little bit more with each meeting.
“I have found your Prince August,” my friend, Ernest Lunn, announced happily over the phone to me on another occasion.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I have found another portrait of him.”
It turned out that the Wallace Collection, a museum on Manchester Square in London, was displaying a miniature painting of the prince by the French artist Jean-Baptiste Isabey. I immediately went and introduced myself. I met Mr. Larkworthy, who seemed quite captivated by my story and my connection to the miniature. He was very accommodating, saying we could come back to view the miniature in private, and maybe photograph it.
A few days later, armed with a camera, Ken, Anthony and I entered the upstairs room to see August beautifully displayed before us. Without telling me, Mr. Larkworthy had removed the back of the little portrait, and there exposed before us were five locks of August’s hair. It was simply breathtaking. The hair was auburn brown and not black as I had been led to believe. Mr. Larkworthy said that in the many years the little portrait had belonged to the museum it had never been opened up. It had certainly been a day to remember.