Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (76 page)

“A dead Habsburg is no good to anyone, whereas a live one, with a family, may yet be,” Strutt finally told her. It was enough. She smiled and took his hand.

“I will do all I can to help,” she replied. “We will leave under your orders and arrangements and trust you to avoid Karl’s having to abdicate.”
¹¹³⁹

The options for the family’s exile were limited, since most countries wanted nothing to do with the deposed dynasty. The years after World War I saw the birth of a number of national republics that had once been monarchies, and most of those wanted to distance themselves from royalty as much as possible. With much of Europe out of the question, the only real possibility left for the Habsburgs was Switzerland. When the moment came for Colonel Strutt to tell Charles he had no choice but to go into exile, the emperor looked him directly in the face and asked, “Only promise me that I shall leave as emperor and not as a thief in the night.” His face gravely serious, Strutt replied, “Sir, I promise.”
¹¹⁴⁰

After an exhausting political chess match, Strutt managed to secure a promise from Austrian chancellor Karl Renner that the Habsburgs could leave Austria unconditionally. On the afternoon of Sunday, March 23, Zita, Charles, their family, and a handful of retainers left Austria. At 10:00 a.m., the imperial family attended Mass in the chapel at Eckartsau. The deeply moving service was performed by the court bishop Seydl with Otto serving as altar boy. Once the Mass ended, the entire congregation broke out into the imperial anthem. This was especially poignant because it was “destined to be the last time it was sung before an Austrian Emperor, who sat with his family in the gallery.”
¹¹⁴¹
By the end of the song, everyone in the chapel was reduced to tears. The rest of the day was rife with emotion. As the children gathered their belongings, Zita packed her family’s most treasured possessions, which included a trunk of dazzling jewels. One of the most precious pieces the empress was taking with her was a six-row pearl necklace and chain of diamonds that had once belonged to Empress Maria Theresa.

At 6:35 p.m., Charles and Zita, locked arm in arm, descended down the grand staircase at Eckartsau to bid farewell to the last home their family had in Austria. Gathered on the ground floor for a tearful good-bye were the many servants, groundskeepers, and townspeople who had remained loyal to the imperial family throughout their struggle. At the sight of the emperor and empress, everyone fell to their knees in hushed reverence. Colonel Strutt observed in his journal that the “dignity of the Imperial couple at so heart-rending a moment was superlative.”
¹¹⁴²
The family filed into the automobiles for the twenty-minute drive to the train station at Kopfstetten.

Many of the Austrian people were deeply saddened by the departure of their imperial family. Joining the family in exile were a small group of servants and a number of Zita’s relatives, including her brothers, who had fought for Austria in the war, and her mother, the Duchess of Parma. When the motorcade arrived at Kopfstetten, Zita and her family were met by a crowd of nearly two thousand people, all in tears, waiting in the rain. Deeply moved, the emperor and empress took the time to shake hands with as many people as they could before Colonel Strutt implored them to board the train. There were twenty-five people in total aboard the train that night. As it lumbered its way through Austria, the reality of her family’s situation came crashing down on the empress. “My family has been exiled from France, Italy and Portugal,” she muttered to Strutt. “When I married I became an Austrian subject, and now I am an exile from Austria. Colonel Strutt, tell me to what country do I belong now?”
¹¹⁴³
There came no reply.

Nearly a day later, the train pulled into the station at Buchs in Switzerland. The first stop after disembarking was Wartegg, an old castle on Lake Constance that had once belonged to Zita’s father after his own exile from Parma. Waiting to greet Zita and her family were many of her Bourbon relatives, including her brothers Felix and Sixtus. From Wartegg, Charles sent a message to King George V.

My dear brother,

We have arrived on the hospitable soil of Switzerland with the military escort that the Government of Your Majesty has kindly placed at my disposal, I desire to express to you directly and without delay my feelings of gratitude which makes me feel the support and generosity of the British Empire in these cruel circumstances that I believe are only temporary.… I have nothing but praise, especially for the steps taken by Colonel Strutt, who has accompanied me thus far and whose character is full of fortitude and has been greatly appreciated by me.

Charles

Wartegg, 11 April 1919
¹¹⁴⁴

Wartegg offered the family a modicum of safety, but it was incredibly cramped. The castle became a rallying point for dozens of Habsburgs and Bourbons. The emperor’s mother, brother, and cousins arrived. Most of Zita’s family came too, including many of the half-siblings from her father’s first marriage. Every floor of the castle, including the attic, was occupied by exiled royals. The servants and staff who accompanied the imperial family were forced to find housing in nearby villages and hotels.

Crowded though Wartegg may have been, Zita was pleased to have so many relatives around. Her children had the chance to once again play in the castle gardens and enjoy life away from political upheaval. One visitor even played in the snow with the children and helped them build a snowman. Charles was offered the chance to take a moment to exhale after the tumult of the last year. As spring returned to Europe, the Habsburgs found their spirits temporarily lifted. But within a few weeks, the Swiss government began pressuring Charles to relocate his family further west, deeper within the country. The Swiss authorities were worried because Wartegg was just across the border from Austria. “From the balconies of Wartegg, the mountains of Vorarlberg seemed almost close enough to touch,” wrote one Habsburg biographer.
¹¹⁴⁵
The Swiss government had also received pressure from the Austrians who, on April 3, ratified the Habsburg Law. Designed to secure the country’s new republicanism, Charles and Zita were now forbidden from ever returning to Austria. The law also stripped them of their sovereignty and titles and forbade any members of the imperial dynasty outside of the immediate imperial family from setting foot on Austrian soil unless they formally renounced all their titles, styles, and claims to the throne.

Not wanting to aggravate the country that harbored them, Charles and Zita relocated their family to Villa Prangins on the shores of Lake Geneva. Their new home was an eclectic mixture of “Venetian-style watchtowers, French-style conical domes and Tudor-style chimney stacks.”
¹¹⁴⁶
Inside, it offered them more space than Wartegg. The family took over use of the entire ground floor. The second floor was used by the members of their court: Bishop Seydl, the family’s priest; Count Ledochowski, the emperor’s aide-de-camp; Zita’s ladies-in-waiting, the countesses Bellegarde and Kerssenbrock; and the court secretaries, barons von Schonta and Werkmann. The other two wings housed the domestic staff, consisting of a cook, a footman, and the maids.

The family moved into Prangins at the end of May 1919. On September 5, Zita went into labor with her sixth child, a son. Acknowledging their new humble circumstances, Charles and Zita named the boy Rudolf. The name was chosen in honor of Rudolf IV, the Swiss count who founded the Habsburgs: “The imperial family were returning to their humbler roots; this symbolised their new lifestyle, one in which, to all outward appearances, Karl was leading the existence of any prosperous Swiss country gentleman.”
¹¹⁴⁷
After Rudolf’s birth, the family settled down to a quiet life they had not known in years. Circumstances seemed to ease for Charles and Zita, but changes were in store. The political upheaval that would sweep across the former Austro-Hungarian empire was set to engulf the emperor and empress yet again. Once it was all over, their exile would be final and would mark the closing chapter of their life together.

24
The Quest for the Crown
 

(1919–20)

A
t Amerongen Castle in the Netherlands, Augusta Victoria was a shell of her former self. Her only consolation was being with her husband again. If Empress Zita was more like Queen Mary in her response to adversity, then Dona was a mirror of Tsarina Alexandra’s more melancholy personality in times of hardship. The former German empress’s health and psyche were shattered by her country’s revolution and the toppling of her family from the throne. Wilhelm became worried about his wife, who had more difficulty accepting their circumstances than anyone else at Amerongen. Dona lacked the faculty to adapt to new situations the way her husband could. Wilhelm “realized that, having originally come from humbler surroundings than Potsdam, she could not reconcile herself to living modestly again in Holland.” In the end, it was her pride, which was “nourished by her position as one of the great ladies of Europe” that “prevented her from accepting with resignation the topsy-turvydom” of postwar, republican Europe.
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From the day she arrived at Amerongen, Dona sequestered herself in the small suite of rooms that had been set aside for her use on the castle’s upper floor. Initially, the only person admitted into her presence was her lifelong friend and lady-in-waiting, Countess Keller. Somber, morose, and perennially depressed, the former empress and queen refused to participate in the little bit of court life that went on at Amerongen. Even when she ate her meals, she did so alone. One of the few pastimes she did partake in was letter writing. She wrote most often to her daughter, Sissy, who was still living with her in-laws at Gmunden. The former Duchess of Brunswick recalled that despite the difficult circumstances facing her mother, Dona wrote often and “always pleasantly.” But Sissy added gravely, “I could read between the lines the pressure she was under.” For the most part, letter writing was Dona’s sole activity. “Perhaps I would get some strength back if I had something to do in my own home,” she admitted. “Here, I always have melancholy thoughts and, at the most, letters to write.”
¹¹⁴⁹
Aside from continuing her correspondence, one activity she began to occupy herself with was knitting. She hand made hundreds of articles of clothing to be sent to children living in the poorest parts of Germany. These were later distributed by the Red Cross, of which she had once been the head. Only a handful of people ever saw her from day to day, and that was usually limited to her husband or Countess Keller, who continued to bring Dona her meals. The only visitors she received—beyond her family and staff—were children from the nearby village of Zuiderzee. Dona was always intrigued by these children, who often wore traditional, old-fashioned Dutch country attire.

While other royals who found themselves deposed after the war were enduring hardship and poverty, Wilhelm and Dona were afforded a degree of luxury. In addition to nearly fifty live-in servants who waited on them at Amerongen, over a hundred courtiers joined them in exile. Not all of them did so from honorable motives. Many accompanied the former monarchs out of fear of falling into insignificance with the collapse of the monarchy. Wilhelm and Dona were permitted to keep twenty-five train carts sent by the German government full of personal belongings, including furniture, an automobile, and a boat. In a surprisingly magnanimous gesture, the Germans also agreed to acknowledge a number of the Hohenzollerns’ privately owned properties in Berlin that were worth more than $2 million at the time. Wilhelm also had nearly $12 million tied up in stocks and bonds, though these would not be liquidated until 1926. When Wilhelm died years later, he was estimated to be worth 14 million German reichsmarks, or more than $62 million in today’s money.
¹¹⁵⁰
The assets that the Hohenzollerns brought with them into exile helped fund the semicontinuation of their daily routines. Meals were attended by no less than twenty people, Wilhelm and his aides took afternoon walks in the parks around Amerongen, and courtiers insisted on having all their expenses paid. Wilhelm and Dona made no effort to be optimistic about their circumstances. This was supremely ironic given the level of comfort they received, compared to Nicholas and Alexandra or Charles and Zita.

Dona’s bleak frame of mind led to her suffering from deep depression, which she blamed on the “catastrophe” that had befallen her family. According to one of the hangers-on at Amerongen, the overthrow of the Hohenzollerns “had been infinitely more shattering to her than to” Wilhelm.
¹¹⁵¹
“The revolution broke the Empress’s heart,” Wilhelm wrote in his memoirs. “She aged visibly from November, 1918, onward, and could not resist her bodily ills with the strength of before.”
¹¹⁵²
He reiterated this to their daughter: “She suffers dreadfully and her condition often makes me despair, especially when the pain overcomes her.”
¹¹⁵³
Her son Willy wrote that “she suffers severely, is physically ill, but will not give way; she knows only one thought, namely, the welfare of my father and of us all, and has only one wish, which is to lighten for us what we have to bear.”
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Wilhelm’s doctor made regular visits to examine her, but at nearly sixty two years old, Augusta Victoria was never again healthy after her heart attack. Courtiers at Amerongen knew their matriarch was not long for this world. One such individual who saw Dona on a handful of occasions left her reminiscences of the ex-empress in exile.

She was, as everyone knows, more interested in the hidden domestic life than in the public political one. She believed that the role [
sic
] of her husband was divinely ordained, and when the foundations of this her world were scattered she could only think it was because malign forces had triumphed. Thus
her
plight at least seemed pathetic to the onlookers at [Amerongen], and for a woman, distressed in mind and destitute of state, there was only human sympathy.
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As his wife glowered and shrank, Wilhelm became immersed in bitter resentment, blaming everyone around him for his failed reign. Writing to August von Mackensen, one of his former generals, he grandiosely decried his abdication as “the deepest, most disgusting shame ever perpetrated by a person in history, [which] the Germans have done to themselves.”
¹¹⁵⁶
Wilhelm’s behavior and growing victim mentality made him nearly unbearable to his own staff. Even his loyal aide-de-camp General Hans von Plessen wrote in his diary, “The Emperor has a cold heart towards everyone, even towards his children. He is ungrateful, had always acted, but never applied himself. He had never done any serious work.”
¹¹⁵⁷

By mid-1919, public attention shifted back to the Hohenzollerns. Perhaps because of Wilhelm’s very visible role during the war, he and his family became the subject of scrutiny and curiosity. Legal, political, and academic circles all began putting the former emperor, and also his eldest son, under a microscope. Numerous studies evaluating Wilhelm’s mental stability and fitness to rule were released, including
The Madness of Wilhelm II
,
Kaiser Wilhelm Periodically Insane!
, and
Wilhelm II as Cripple and Psychopath
.
¹¹⁵⁸

On the international stage, there were constant demands by foreign governments for Wilhelm’s extradition so that he could be tried for war crimes. This became an official objective during the Paris Peace Conference, with Article 227 of the final treaty stipulating that the “Allies and associated Powers publicly indict Wilhelm II von Hohenzollern, former Emperor of Germany, for the gravest violation of the international moral code and the sanctity of treaties.”
¹¹⁵⁹
A special international court to hear the case for extradition was to be convened, presided over by representatives of the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. David Lloyd George “suggested he be hanged.”
¹¹⁶⁰
The British press ran the headlines
HANG THE KAISER!
and
MAKE GERMANY PAY!
¹¹⁶¹
One newspaper showed a cartoon depicting a rope tied between the Eiffel Tower and Cleopatra’s Needle in London with Wilhelm suspended by his wrists. Lloyd George’s demands for Wilhelm’s extradition may have been, at least partly, only rhetoric. Britain was in the midst of an election at the time, and Lloyd George, determined to stay in office, found Germany an easy scapegoat. G. S. Viereck, an American journalist who became acquainted with Wilhelm and Dona in 1921, believed that “Lloyd George’s electioneering campaign was a daily torture to the Kaiserin and a chief cause of her ultimate death.”
¹¹⁶²

Other Allied leaders were going a step further in seeking accountability for the war. They demanded more than a thousand Germans be handed over and tried for war crimes, including Wilhelm’s eldest son and the infamous Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Others wanted to see the former emperor exiled permanently to Africa or South America, similar to the way Napoleon was exiled to Saint Helena. Dona was now more protective of her husband than ever. She knew that if he were extradited to Paris or London, he would almost certainly be executed. She was greatly relieved when Queen Wilhelmina refused to give him up, citing Dutch neutrality in the war and the fact that handing Wilhelm over “would have compromised Dutch sovereignty.”
¹¹⁶³
Wilhelm took public opinion toward him very personally. He considered visiting a plastic surgeon to have his appearance altered and later escaping unnoticed into the night. He thought about smuggling himself back into Germany to live out his days hiding on the country estate of his friend Princess Maria Christina of Salm-Salm. He also contemplated committing suicide. This last possibility resonated with the increasingly fatalistic Dona, who told him, “William, then we’ll go together into the beyond.”
¹¹⁶⁴

By January 1920, Wilhelm’s defeatist phase seems to have passed; so too did efforts to extradite him. On March 24, David Lloyd George washed his hands of the ex-emperor and declared he and his wife were solely the responsibility of the Netherlands. Wilhelm realized it was time to make a more permanent home, since Amerongen was intended to be only a temporary lodging while Wilhelm’s fate was decided. He bought a new home, Huis Doorn, three miles outside Amerongen. It belonged to Baroness Ella van Heemstra, the mother of Hollywood actress Audrey Hepburn. Doorn was an eighteenth-century manor house with its own tower and almost sixty hectares of forest surrounding it. What appealed to Wilhelm and Dona most, besides its rustic beauty, was that it offered them a level of privacy they had not experienced since they arrived in the Netherlands. Amerongen was full of curious spectators who were eager to catch a glimpse of the ex-emperor and his reclusive wife. The funds for the purchase of Doorn came from the sale of a number of the Hohenzollerns’ private yachts, including Dona’s beloved
Iduna
, upon which she had spent so much time traveling the Greek Isles.

While Wilhelm made the arrangements for their eventual move, Dona took charge of furnishing their new home before they moved in. For a brief period, she seemed to be her old self again. Perhaps the greatest contributing factor to this reprieve in her long illness was Sissy’s arrival for a visit in March 1920. The journey from Gmuden to Amerongen was a perilous one, the result of the increasing violence of the German Revolution. During a brief stop in Potsdam to visit her former homes, heavy fighting between monarchists and republicans in the streets made the city unsafe. Sissy’s husband was forced to return to Gmunden with their children for their own safety. “The journey was gruesome, for the revolt had spread westwards and I thought I would never see my husband and children again,” Sissy admitted in her memoirs. “However, the thought of my seriously ill mother drove me on.” When she finally arrived at Amerongen, Sissy wrote that the “joy of reunion with my parents was indescribable, but I was upset to see how … my mother’s illness had changed her imposing appearance.”
¹¹⁶⁵

By the time of her daughter’s visit, Dona was so weak that she could no longer climb the stairs at Amerongen and had to have a lift installed to allow her to move between floors. The presence of her daughter and the time she spent finding and placing furniture in Huis Doorn helped somewhat to reinvigorate Dona’s broken spirit. It also afforded her the opportunity to focus on something other than her family’s mounting problems. Her eldest son, Willy, had settled on Wieringen Island on the Baltic Sea where he took up a job as a tradesman. His wife, Cecilie, refused to join him, using the overthrow of the monarchy as the excuse she needed to finally separate from her adulterous husband. The marriages of Dona’s other sons, who had stayed in Germany as private citizens, collapsed. The childless Eitel-Fritz and Lotte were under constant scrutiny from both their family and the foreign press for lecherous affairs the couple was known to have. Early in their marriage, Wilhelm and Dona were furious when Lotte openly took a lover. Lotte, who had long since drifted apart from her mother-in-law, was called as a witness in a divorce trial where she announced of the accused, “our intimate relations continued even after my marriage to the Kaiser’s son.”
¹¹⁶⁶
By March 1919, the
New York Times
was reporting that Eitel-Fritz had begun the process of divorcing Lotte. The article also alleged that “the former Prince attempted to begin proceedings before the war [but] his father vetoed the plan.”
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