I COULD NOW BEGIN TO PICTURE much more clearly what must have happened at the start of Charlotte’s life. When they first found out that Emilie was pregnant, the king and Wittgenstein must have been furious, knowing that the rules of the morganatic marriage would have less power over the rights of a hereditary aristocrat like Emilie than they had had over Friederike and Auguste. The prince’s first two wives were only bestowed with titles by the king and thus had no claims to any inheritance. Even though she was so young and innocent, only twenty-one at the time of the conception, a pregnant Emilie posed a greater danger to the massive royal fortunes that had come to lie in her husband’s hands than either of her predecessors, and so did her unborn child, particularly if it turned out to be a boy.
For all we knew, of course, there may have been many other failed attempts on her life that were never documented. Poor Emilie was lucky indeed to have been allowed to live long enough to have her child. The fates, it seemed, were willing our family to survive.
When the child was born and found to be a girl, the couple’s enemies may well have relaxed a little, since it was unusual for a woman to get hold of a European throne, however strong her claim (although, of course, her male heirs could have claims). Such things did in fact happen, and Queen Victoria, a distant relative of both August and the king, had ascended the British throne only the year before. However small the chances, the king and Wittgenstein would still have been wary of the potential threat this baby girl posed.
August already knew about the very real attempts on Emilie’s life, and now he had a child to protect from his political enemies as well. He knew better than anyone that there were plenty of people who would have wanted Charlotte to disappear or meet with a tragic accident, and that there was plenty of money available to pay for such dark deeds without the trail of guilt leading back to the king or to Wittgenstein. His family history was littered with similar ruthless acts when thrones and great fortunes were at stake. The prince must therefore have decided right from the start that Charlotte needed to be given a different identity, even though he and Emilie intended to keep her with them and bring her up themselves. August was preparing a hiding place for her should she need it. To provide that false identity, he turned to the Jewish community, a people he had shown great loyalty to, particularly through his championing of Major Meno Burg.
He must have reasoned that a Jewish family would be guaranteed to be outside the political intrigues of the royal circle, particularly a humble family like the Gottschalks, with whom he already had a connection because of Isadore’s services to his family as a tailor and because of the claims he had fathered Isadore’s grandchild, Agnes. If Charlotte was to take their name legally, the chances of her ever being a threat to the royal family in those anti-Semitic times was almost guaranteed to disappear.
At some stage, August must have gone to see Isadore, with whom he must have patched up his previous difficulties, and suggested they concoct a plan together. August already knew enough about Isadore to judge whether he could trust him with this precious secret. He must have decided that he could. The Gottschalk family was also dependent on him for the continued support of Agnes as well as on his patronage of Isadore’s tailoring services, so it would have been in their interest to do as he asked of them.
Her father’s relatively premature death left little Charlotte in a state of limbo. She was legally registered as a Gottschalk, even though she had quite possibly never met the family personally, having been living with her biological mother and father despite her unusual legal status.
Wittgenstein almost certainly knew about the plan, even if August hadn’t informed him personally. He was good at collecting such information, and he would have taken advantage of the situation. He probably insisted and convinced the king that since Charlotte no longer had her father’s protection, Charlotte must go to live full-time with the Gottschalks. Wittgenstein would have reasoned that once she was accepted as being a Gottschalk, she would no longer be any threat to the king and all the issues and claims would be put to rest forever.
There is no doubt that the Crown provided Isadore Gottschalk with money to care for Charlotte, but it is also likely Isadore was given no choice in the matter. A Jewish family living in anti-Semitic Prussia at that time would not have been in a position to argue with a powerful figure like Prince Wittgenstein. The Gottschalks might even have seen it as an advantage to have a royal baby in the family.
I can only hope that the Gottschalks were kind to the little girl who was foisted on them by people who were in many ways their worst enemies. It must have been an appalling trauma for a little girl to lose her father and grandfather and then almost immediately be removed from her mother and her home and housed with complete strangers. She told her grandsons, my father and his brother, that she was a “duchess” when in reality she was a virtual orphan. Since she left no written memories beyond the pages that I had studied in such detail in her notebook, I have to accept that we will never know any more of the domestic details of how she fared in those early years of her life as a Gottschalk. Anything she eventually told the family apparently came out hesitatingly and cloaked in mystery, so the real story that Charlotte had to tell died with her. When Charlotte played games with her father the prince, she would never have known that her real identity had already been hidden for her own protection; she was far too young. If she knew enough as an adult to write to the king on her husband’s behalf, she must have found out later.
As he had written in the notebook, August was Emilie’s “protector.” With him gone, Emilie was virtually helpless to protect her little daughter or herself. She would have known from her own experiences that the threat of assassination was very real, and she must have felt she was being torn in two. Having lost her beloved husband, her father and her friend, Uhde, she must have wanted to cling to her daughter like never before. At the same time, she would have seen the grave danger to both her and the child if she had tried to fight the establishment and keep Charlotte after receiving Wittgenstein’s curt letter. Whatever the truth of the events that followed, Charlotte had undoubtedly been forced from her mother’s hands. How lonely the future must have looked to Emilie at the moment she lost her royal child to another family, where she would disappear from sight.
Finally, the entire picture was almost in focus. With the help of the letter from Emilie to the king, the falsely registered birth at the church registry, the entry book in Hamburg and the gravestone inscription, I could now trace where Charlotte had been in those early years, and I was now nearly ready to leave these people whom I had spent so many years tracking down and getting to know. Even I could see that there was probably nothing more that I would be able to learn of Emilie and Charlotte. It felt like it was time to leave them to rest in peace, and to do that I wanted to return to the place where the whole story started.
I wanted to find Wilhelmstrasse 65, the palace where August and Emilie met for the first time at the grand ball where they fell instantly in love and set in motion the whole story that would eventually lead to my life and the lives of my three sons. I expected to find that it had been turned into an office block or a hotel, or possibly a shopping arcade, but I hoped I would still be able to see at least some of its former glory.
But when I got to Wilhelmstrasse the palace wasn’t there. Where it should have been, there was just an empty gap in the buildings like an ugly missing tooth. Greatly disappointed to have been cheated of a glimpse of the magnificent building I had read so much about in the archives, my curiosity was piqued once more. What was it that had finally wiped it away? Had it been bombed during the war? What had happened to it? I went to look through the local records and found that August’s sister, Luise, and her husband, Prince Anton Radziwill, sold the palace to the king and the state after August’s death. What they could never have anticipated when they made that decision was the gruesome fate that lay in store for the beautiful building.
Over the following century the anti-Semitism of powerful people such as Wittgenstein grew darker and deeper, taking a firm hold on the hearts and minds of an increasingly angry and embittered people, eventually culminating in the rise of the Nazi Party and the events that led to the deaths of so many millions of Jews from families just like ours. When Adolf Hitler seized power, he requisitioned the palace at Wilhelmstrasse 65 to be part of his infamous chancellery complex. He occupied August’s palace and made it his feared Ministry of Justice. The terrible truth gradually dawned on me as I studied the pictures in the local archives. It was in the very ballroom that August and Emilie met for the first time that Hitler ratified the Final Solution, delivering a signature that led directly to the death of their granddaughter, Anna, my grandmother. Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia 110 years after the lovers’ first dance together.
Hitler was a fanatical admirer of Frederick the Great, and if he had known the full story of Anna’s ancestry and that she was the king’s great niece, surely he would never have sanctioned what happened to her, or would he have? He almost certainly knew that Jutta’s husband, one of his trusted generals, was a descendant of Prince August and admired him for it, but he would have known nothing about Anna and her line. She, like the rest of our family, was just part of a troublesome statistic in need of a solution.
The building that had grown to be one of the most infamous in European history had been symbolically destroyed by the Russians when they marched into Berlin at the end of the Second World War.
The palace may have vanished, but its original owner, the forgotten hero of the Napoleonic Wars, languished in the dungeons of history for far too long, lost to the many generations since his death 176 years ago. But now that the prince’s identity and reputation have been restored, he can take his rightful place as one of Napoleon’s greatest adversaries, whose passionate defense of the monarchies of Europe created a very modern Prussian hero for his time. It gives me great heart that Prince August, my great-great-grandfather, is enjoying a renaissance among so many folk across the world, since my discovery of a life hidden away by a Prussian king long, long ago.
I believed that I understood what had driven Emilie to make the decisions she did on the day she fell in love with the prince. But when she received the letter from Wittgenstein, the decision was made for her. Her beloved child was wrenched from her grasp and lost to the Gottschalks. Emilie was not a person ever to be motivated by the pursuit of power and wealth. I truly think that at that ball in Wilhelmstrasse, when she was still little more than a child, she fell deeply in love with one of the most charismatic men in the world at the time, and he with her. I believe it was love that kept them together against the odds for the next eleven years and led to them defying the king and creating a child of their own.
I understand what it feels like to be in love like that, because I too fell in love with one man and stayed happily married to him for forty-two years, until he died in 1990.
Emilie must have known from the beginning that if she agreed to a relationship with August she would be shunned by the royal court, even though she probably didn’t fully understand the implications at her age. And she would very quickly have been warned that a baby would have been most unwelcome in the royal establishment, but she went ahead with it anyway. It had been a truly great romance.
Shortly before he died, Ken told me he had enjoyed every moment of the hunt for August, Emilie and Charlotte, and that the years we spent working together on the search were the happiest of his life.