Catherine Radziwill

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Catherine Radziwill (born Jekaterina Adamowna Rschewuskaja, Polish Katarzyna Rzewuska ; born March 30, 1858 in St. Petersburg , Russian Empire , † May 12, 1941 in New York City ) was a Polish-Russian aristocrat and writer.

Catherine Radziwill

Life

Katharina (called Kaśia) Rzewuska's father was a Polish aristocrat, descendant of Wacław Rzewuski and adjutant general of Tsar Nicholas I , her mother Anna Dmitrijewna Daschkowa came from the Vorontsov-Daschkow family. She grew up on the family estate in Ukraine and in St. Petersburg. When she was nine she was sent to Paris to live with two aunts , one was Ewelina Hańska , Honoré de Balzac's widow , and the other, Karolina Rzewuska , wife of the writer Jules Lacroix . She got to know the upper class life in the salons of the Empire .

At the age of fifteen Catherine was married to the Polish-Prussian aristocrat Prince Adam Karl Wilhelm Radziwiłł (born 1845), son of General Wilhelm von Radziwill . They had seven children, five of whom reached adulthood.

Giovanni Boldini : Catherine Radziwill

Kaśia Radziwiłł was a striking figure, she had pitch black hair, ivory skin and liked to wear evening dresses made of bright red satin. As a result of her marriage, she frequented the courts of Berlin, St. Petersburg and Vienna and made friends with members of the royal family and with the German Crown Princess Victoria .

She was interested in politics and wrote articles under the title Société berlinoise under the name Comte Paul Vasili in the Paris newspaper Nouvelle Revue published by Juliette Adam ; she did not discover the pseudonym until 1918. The articles in the style of letters to a young diplomat , which also appeared in the book as an English translation, eradicated the Berlin gossip and mocked life at the court of the German emperor, which was popular in anti-Germany France. Catherine Radziwill also addressed the anti-Semitic prejudices of her readers.

Wilhelm Radziwill was sent to the Tsar's court as a Prussian diplomat in 1888, and the family now lived in St. Petersburg. Despite the lack of money, they rented a large house there and held lavish parties, including the wedding of their 18-year-old daughter Wanda to Prince Gebhard Leberecht Blücher von Wahlstatt, who was 41 years old . Catherine, who had seen the social and political events in Prussia with a liberal attitude , changed her basic political attitude and sharply criticized the liberal reform efforts in Russia. She won the friendship of the politician Konstantin Pobedonoszew and the support of Tsar Alexander III. After Tsar Nikolaus ascended to the throne in 1894, however, she stood in isolation at court and, since her marriage was no longer intact, suffered from financial difficulties, which from then on was a permanent condition for her. In the mid-1890s she published the books "La Cour de Berlin", "La Cour de Vienne" and "La Cour de Saint-Petersbourg" under the pseudonym Comte Paul Vasili . Because of their rich, indiscreet knowledge of details, the books could only have been written by someone who was extremely familiar with these courts; Despite all research, the authorship came to light only after Catherine's divorce. She also wrote a key novel about the Radziwills under her own name. After a gang of counterfeiters was discovered in the basement of her house, she was forced to leave St. Petersburg.

In 1899 she found out when the British multimillionaire and Governor Cecil Rhodes was returning from London to South Africa and booked the passage on the same ship to make advances. She knew how to beguile him so much that he donated the money to found a newspaper in Cape Town , which, however, made losses. Rhodes sent her back to Europe, and with the book The Resurrection of Peter (1900) she wrote a hymn of praise to the British, which was directed against the novel trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner , who had scourged the colonialist practices of Rhodes. In 1900 she landed again in South Africa, where she fraudulently obtained money by forging checks with Rhodes' signature; He paid for the first one, but gave her a warning, but when she repeated the same thing she had to serve 16 months of a two-year sentence in prison. She was able to use her time in prison to write the autobiographical book My Recollections , which was sold in 1904 with some success. Then she had to return to London, where the gossip press had gleefully reported about the princess's misconduct.

Catherine Radziwill

In 1906 Wilhelm Radziwill divorced her, whose entire fortune she had squandered. In 1909 she married the considerably younger engineer Karl Emile Kolb-Danvin (1874–1933), son of the German horticultural engineer Max Kolb , and moved again to St. Petersburg. She had the revelatory story Behind the Veil of the Russian Court printed under the pseudonym Paul Vasili , in which she divulged the secret hemophilia of Tsarevich Alexei Romanov . A second autobiographical book, Memoirs of Forty Years (1914), in which the African episode was hidden, was also published. During the First World War, the couple lived in Stockholm , where they wrote a number of other revelatory stories about the European nobility. During a trip to the USA in 1917, she decided to stay in America. She was granted entry to Ellis Island by lying that she was not the princess convicted in Cape Town. In 1922, her second husband divorced her.

Catherine Radziwill played a role in the discussion about the first authorship of the anti-Semitic martial protocol Protocols of the Elders of Zion , which was not conclusively resolved even in later years . The font spread rapidly after the First World War, and in the United States the content was also made known through articles in Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent newspaper and his book The International Jew . In 1921, in a private lecture to Felix M. Warburg and Louis Marshall of the American Jewish Committee , Radziwill claimed that the 1904/05 Protocols had been compiled by Matwei Golowinski and Ivan Manassewitsch-Manujlow on the instructions of Pyotr Ratschkowski , chief of the Ochrana tsarist secret police in Paris have been. She then had this published in an exclusive interview with the American Hebrew . In fact, a publication of the protocols can be dated as early as 1902/03. In testimony in the Bern Trial in 1936, Radziwill's information was used in the plaintiff's report despite the warning from Herman Bernstein .

In New York, Mrs. Kolb, as she was now called, lived off her training salespeople in good manners. She died there at the age of 83.

Paul Vasili

  • The different spelling Vassili has not (yet) been clarified here.
  • The writings that can be bibliographed at KVK and WorldCat also contain “Court Reports” from Vienna and London as well as other titles not listed here. These may be writings by other authors, which Juliette Adam's publishing house published according to the tried and tested model.

Fonts (selection)

  • Paul Vasili: La Société de Berlin: augmenté de lettres inédites . Nouvelle Revue, Paris 1884. English translation New York, 1884 and London, 1885
    • Court and society in Berlin . Grimm, Budapest 1884
    • Paul Vassili: Court and Society in Berlin 1884: [the scandal book from France] . Berlin-Story-Verlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-929829-53-2
  • Paul Vasili: La Société de Saint-Pétersbourg: augmenté de lettres inédites. 1886
  • Paul Vasili: La Sainté Russie; la cour, l'armée, le clerge, la bourgeoisie et le peuple. 1890
  • The Resurrection of Peter. A Reply to Olive Carpenter . 1900
  • My Recollections , 1904
    • My memories . Translation of Freifrau by Beppina Weinbach. H. Schmidt & C. Günther, Leipzig 1905
  • Paul Vasili: Behind the Veil at the Russian Court . London 1913
    • Tsar Nicholas II in his true form: as one of his courtiers describes him . After d. engl. Original. "Behind the veil" by Count Wasili. Translation of Siegfried Baske. Butsch, Berlin 1916
  • France from behind the Veil . 1914
  • The Austrian Court From Within . Frederick A. Stokes, New York 1914 (1916)
  • The Royal Marriage Market of Europe . New York 1915
  • Sovereigns and Statesmen of Europe , 1916
  • Because it was Written . Novel. 1916
  • The Black Dwarf of Vienna, and other weird stories , 1916
  • Germany under Three Emperors , 1917
  • Russia's Decline and Fall: The Secret History of a Great Debacle . London 1918
  • Rasputin and the Russian Revolution . New York 1918
  • Cecil Rhodes, man and empire-maker , 1918
  • Confessions of the Czarina . London 1918
  • The Firebrand of Bolshevism; The True Story of the Bolsheviki and the Forces That Directed Them . Boston 1919
  • The disillusions of a crown princess; being the story of the courtship and married life of Cecile, ex-crown princess of Germany . John Lane, London 1919
  • Secrets of Dethroned Royalty . John Lane, London 1920
  • Those I Remember , 1924
  • Juanita Helm Floyd: Les femmes dans la vie de Balzac. with 17 letters inédites de Madame Hanska . Translation of the letters into French and a preface by Catherine Radziwill. Plon, Paris 1926
  • The Intimate Life of the Last Tsarina , 1929
  • Child of Pity: The Little Prince Rides Away , 1930
  • Nicholas II: The Last of the Tsars , 1931
  • The Taint of the Romanovs . Cassell, London 1931
  • It Really Happened; To Autobiography by Princess Catherine Radziwiłł , 1932
  • The Empress Frederick , 1934.

literature

  • Michael Hagemeister : The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in court. The Bern Trial 1933–1937 and the «Anti-Semitic International» . Chronos, Zurich 2017. Short biography on page 560
  • Michael Hagemeister : "Everything is just deceit and lies"? Facts and Fiction in the Life of Catherine Radziwill . In: Agnieszka Brockmann; Maria Smyshliaeva; Rafal Zytyniec; Jekatherina Lebedewa (Ed.): Cultural boundaries: Festschrift for Christa Ebert on her 65th birthday . Frank & Timme, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-86596-323-9 , pp. 290-300
  • Brian Roberts : Cecil Rhodes and the princess . Hamilton, London 1969, ISBN 0-241-01603-7

Fiction

  • Linda Rodriguez McRobbie: Good princesses get into fairy tales, bad ones write history: from Olga, the Wild, to Empress Sisi and Gloria von Thurn und Taxis . Translation from the English Katharina Volk. Illustrated by Douglas Smith. btb, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-442-75447-2 . Chapter The Stalker Princess
  • Leda Farrant: The Princess from St. Petersburg: The Life and Times of Princess Catherine Radziwiłł . 2000

Web links

Commons : Katarzyna Radziwiłłowa  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Voronzow-Daschkow, see Jekaterina Romanowna Voronzowa-Daschkowa
  2. ↑ The biographical information follows the information from Michael Hagemeister, 2012 and 2017
  3. ^ Alfons Clary-Aldringen : Stories of an old Austrian. Ullstein, Frankfurt 1977, ISBN 3-550-07474-3 , pages 58-61: "The bad aunt."
  4. ↑ Alfons Clary-Aldringen, ibid., P 59
  5. ↑ Alfons Clary-Aldringen, ibid., P. 61
personal data
SURNAME Radziwill, Catherine
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rzhevuskaya, Ekaterina Adamovna; Rzewuska, Katarzyna (Polish)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian-American aristocrat and writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 30, 1858
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Petersburg
DATE OF DEATH May 12, 1941
Place of death New York City