Noble Blood - All Germany Talking of It

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

In the winter of 1891, a group of 15 Prussian visited a hunting lodge in the woods for what was supposed to be an ice-skating party. Instead, it became an orgy. And then the anonymous letters began arriving. [Support Noble Blood on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/noblebloodtales. Noble Blood merch is available here: https://store.dftba.com/collections/noble-blood] Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. In January of 1891, a group of 15 prominent nobles and Prussian court elite left Berlin by Slayer for a weekend jaunt to Grunwald Castle in the woods to the west of the city. They were invited there by the Kaiser's sister, Princess Charlotte, and the idea was that they would all go and have an ice skating party before treating to the lodge for warm drinks and general merriment.

The party was a triumph, and when the skating was over, the group congregated before the fireplace at Grunvald, red-nosed and frost-bitten. They removed their wet tides. clothing and left them out to dry, and then the attendants of the skating party found that they could come up with a few fun ways of getting warm. The day after they all arrived back at their homes, every attendee of the skating trip to Grunwald received a letter in the mail. It had no return address and no signature. The handwriting was strange, someone writing in all-block letters to disguise their script or to make it appear as though someone else was writing it. Each letter contained

terrible accusations about the person's conduct that evening at Grunwald, lurid sexual accusations, complete with detailed illustrations, and pasted pornographic photographs. The letters contained specific details and nicknames that only inner members of the Kaiser Circle could possibly know, And to make matters worse, the accusations were all true. It had to have been someone who attended that skating party at Grunvald, but nobody knew who the letters were from. So began a scandal that spanned four years, arrests, but no finite answers. It's a scandal that proves that pettiness and anonymous gossip

have been along far longer than tabloids and social means. media. The story, which came to be known as the Cozze affair after the man who was eventually arrested for the letters, is a real-life version, albeit an X-rated one, of a Mrs. Whistledown from Bridgerton, or the eponymous blog from Gossip Girl. These letters are our one and only source into the lives of the Prussian elite. But the consequences leveled in the letters and around the letters themselves would eventually be deadly. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. As with any mystery, the first step is to introduce the characters involved,

or, depending on how you look at it, at the suspects. There were 15 people, nine men, and six women, who participated in, by what most accounts referred to as, an orgy, in which multiple people were involved in a number of both hetero and homosexual entanglements. But we'll get to those details a little bit later. For now, let's just start with one of the evening's attendees, Duke Ernst Gunther of Schleswig Holstein. Duke Ernst Gunther had a bit of a reputation, to say the least. He was nicknamed the ram for his sexual appetite, like a ram in spring.

And there's even a story about the Duke losing one of his elite military medals, the one that designated him as a knight of the black eagle, in the bed of a Berlin prostitute, who, to her credit, took it to the police. Duke Ernst's sister, Augusta, was married to Kaiser Wilhelm II, which made him the emperor's brother-in-law. Duke Ernst was married himself to a highly connected princess, but that didn't stop the Duke from his philandering ways. In fact, his high marriage and the even higher marriage of his sister made the Duke feel almost bulletproof. There seemed to be no act of misbehavior that his money and power couldn't get him out of. And a brief aside here for some noble blood family tree

connectivity, Duke Ernst Gunther's wife, Princess Dorothea, was the daughter of Prince Philip of Saxe, and Gotha, who had been one of the close friends of the crown prince Rudolph among the group who discovered his body at Maryland. And Princess Dorothea was also the granddaughter of Leopold II of Belgium, whom we spoke about in connection with his bloody genocidal practices in the Congo. But back to the actual attendees of this notorious ice skating party. There were, of course, present the Count and Count. Vannhøhnhao.

The Count, Friedrich von Hohenau, was notorious for his same-sex dalliances. But if anything, his wife was even more notorious in Prussian society. The countess, nicknamed Lutka, was taller than her husband by at least ahead. She was also his senior by four years, and in addition to being taller than her husband, she was also sportier,

better at riding horses, and better at finding male lovers. The countess would count among her paramours, the future Reichs Chancellor Max von Baden, and Herbert von Bismarck, a social secretary in the foreign ministry. And one of the countess's former lovers was also in attendance at the skating party. Friedrich Karl von Heson, whose affair with the Countess Horanau ended when he married the Emperor's younger sister, Marguerite.

which made Friedrich Karl von Hesn another of the Kaiser's brothers-in-law, but the opposite way, which there should be a different word for, him being married to one of the Kaiser's sisters and not because the Kaiser was married to one of his. All of this is to say it was an incredibly intimate, connected, and intertwined group of nobles

who were at Grunwald. But it wasn't just nobles at the party. There were also a handful of people, of prominent court bureaucrats, including Lebrecht von Coetze, the Chamberlain and Master of Ceremonies for the German Imperial Court. His name, Coet, has the unfortunate distinction of translating into the adjective form of the word puke in English, which means that if you, like me, are unable to speak German and are forced to rely on Google Translate for a number of primary sources, you will find that his name, Liebrecht von Coetze, translates in English to write from vomit.

In the years prior to the notorious get-together at Gruenwald, Coetze's life was improving rapidly. He had married a woman from an old Brandenburg noble family, and he continued to excel in his position as master of ceremonies. He had the close personal confidence of the Kaiser, and even though he wasn't a born noble himself, he inadvertently found himself closer to the inner circle of the court than many men with more prominent births, including another Chamberlain and Master of Ceremony,

who also was attending the party, a man named Carl von Schrader. Schrader, who had attended with his wife, wasn't alone in his jealousy of Coetze, but there was very little he could do other than wait and hope that eventually Cozzi might fall out of the Kaiser's favor. And then we round out our cast of characters with the party's host, Princess Charlotte of Prussia, the Kaiser's sister.

By the end of the 19th century, you probably would have been right if you guessed out of B'naiar that any random European prince or princess chosen at random was a descendant of Queen Victoria. Princess Charlotte of Prussia was the oldest daughter of Queen Victoria's oldest daughter, known as Vicky. From the time the Charlotte was born, she was a troublesome child, labeled over and over as difficult. She was underweight with a troublesome digestion and prone to screaming fits. Her mother, Vicky, wrote in her diary that Charlotte's, quote, little mind seems almost too active for her body.

She is so nervous and sensitive and so quick. Her sleep is not so sound as it should be, and she is so very thin. Charlotte also frequently tantrummed and bit her fingers. A letter to Vicky from Queen Victoria read, quote, Tell Charlotte I was appalled to hear of her biting things. Grandmama does not like naughty little girls. Vicky did not go easy on her daughter. Being difficult is one of the cardinal sins of being a princess,

and Charlotte suffered from another sin. She was plain. Her thinness was just one of a number of health issues she suffered from, including headaches and insomnia. Charlotte was a mediocre student without the ability to focus on tasks for any extended period of time. And by the time she was a teenager, her mother just seemed to have had no idea of what to do with her.

What was there to do with this moody, sullen daughter, whose behavior would cycle wildly between depression and extroversion? It's not a new phenomenon, a distant relationship between a teenage daughter and her mother, but it's not an easy one either, and the two simply didn't get along. When Charlotte socialized, she was flirtatious and a notorious gossip, causing trouble just to see what she could get away with. Her mother Vicky wrote that Charlotte was, quote, a wheedling little kitten who can be so loving whenever she wants something. As soon as Charlotte turned 16, she became engaged to the heir of the Duchy of Saxe Miningham.

The quickness of the marriage reveals just how eager Charlotte was to get out of her family's shadow, to be independent and to play grown-up, and, most importantly, to escape the constant needling of her critical mother. In adulthood, her more salacious, gossipy ways calmed down, but Charlotte was still a bon vivant, a drinker and heavy smoker, who seemed to devote more attention to her parties than to her only daughter. She was the perfect person to host a simple winter weekend in the country that would inevitably lead to debauchery. After the orgy at Grunvald, the letters started to arrive.

The letters were sent to everyone, addressing everyone who had attended the party in the cruelest and most pornographic terms. Allade von Schrader, the wife of one of the masters of ceremony, they said that she enjoyed lesbian affairs, and Prince Albrecht, he was a sodomite. Even Prussian nobles who hadn't attended the gathering, started to get mentioned in the letters. Prince Alexander of Prussia, 74 years old, was accused of, quote, the most disgraceful practices,

which are said to be the result of a weak and perverted mind. The letters included detailed drawings of genitalia and pornographic photos, which were pasted over with pictures of Noble's heads on the bodies of the actors. Princess Charlotte, was accused of numerous indiscretions, but by far the letter's harshest target

was the Countess Lottke-Hohen-Hau. The descriptors of her were downright nasty, the stuff of schoolyard taunts. Everyone got the letters, but for her they seemed personal. The letters said that the Countess Hohenhow quote, feels a tickle that cannot be controlled

when it is a matter of stealing a young wife's newlywerews. wed husband, and that she was, quote, known citywide for the fact that she throws herself on the neck of every prince and lifts up her skirt without being asked. These letters continued, tormenting and taunting the elite of Prussian society for four years. Over 400 anonymous letters were written, and they probably would have continued as a bafflement, a peculiarity and embarrassment. had they not eventually invoked the emperor. The letters never mentioned the Kaiser explicitly,

but they began to dance around him as a figure obliquely, with certain letters writing that he was tempted by the Countess von Hoenha, and that the Count had forced his wife to act coldly towards the Emperor as to not encourage his affections. The Emperor could not believe how presumptuous the Count would have been to tell his wife to act differently towards him. At a military review, he transferred the Count to Hanover, all but exiling him and the coquettish countess from court.

At this point, the emperor decided that these letters had gone on long enough. It was an embarrassing scandal that he wanted to keep under wraps, but more than that, he wanted it to end. Investigators were posted all over Berlin, monitoring post boxes, and waiting to see who would be depositing tell-tale letters. And then, in June 1894, the police made a shocking arrest. The Emperor's own personal Chamberlain, the Master of Ceremonies, Liebricht von Cozeth. Sure, he had been on the receiving end of some of the letters, but so had every single suspect.

Barron Schrader, the rival Chamberlain, was the one who assisted authorities with the evidence against Coetze. This was the smoking gun. At a fashionable club where officers suspected that the anonymous letters were being written, they found that the pattern on the inkbladder was similar to the traces on the inkbladder in Coetze's Master of Ceremony's office. It was flimsy evidence, but it was evidence. Kota had traveled to Berlin on Saturday morning from his home in Shreitzbusha in order to be at the ceremony for the laying of the cornerstone at a new cathedral at Lusdgarten the next day. But Kutze never made it to the ceremony. As soon as he arrived in Berlin, he was taken into custody.

It was all so sudden and so secret that even the prison officials didn't know they would be hosting such an exalted guest until a royal care of. arrived at the prison door of Lyndon Strauss. The New York Times wrote at the time, Even if the government were inclined to let the scandal drop, the time for such action is passed. The documents produced by the witnesses so far contain a great mass of disgusting and libelous letters, which certainly suggests the insanity of the writer.

Coetze must be tried and must be acquitted as mentally unsound, or innocent of the charges, or he must be punished as the foulest of slanderers. The arrest sent shockwaves throughout Prussian court and the world. It was written about not only in the New York Times, but newspapers across Europe. Coets' wife desperately tried to intercede on her husband's behalf by appealing, unsuccessfully, directly to the Kaiser. Cozzi's friends argued that he didn't have the drawings skills that would have been necessary to produce the fairly impressive pornographic doodles on the letters.

Some of Kotsie's friends said that maybe he was insane. Kota himself maintained that he was innocent. The New York Times covered the scandal at every step. In one article under the headline, All Germany is talking of it. The Times wrote, quote, Many think that Kota is merely a crank. They base their judgment of him on the,

the facts that a few of his ancestors have gone crazy, and that he often behaved eccentricly in his younger days. But fairly quickly after Coetze's arrest, most people came to the realization that he wasn't the anonymous writer. One cabinet member visited him in prison and said speaking with Cozzi made him more doubtful than ever of Cozzi's guilt. The ink-bladder evidence was thin at best, and most of the letters didn't even look like they could have come from Coets' hand. In prison, Coet was hosted in the best rooms of Lyndon Strauss, and the general who had arrested him had special orders for high-quality meals to be delivered specially to him daily. And then came the ultimate evidence of Coz's innocence. While he was in prison, the letters continued.

The New York Times wrote, Since his arrest, several foul missives have been delivered to the emperor's circle. They charge wives with unfaithfulness and husbands with debauchery. As a quick aside, the letters being explicit and, well, just gossipy, mean that most historians and no newspapers at the time

actually published their contents. The letters are mostly just described in euphemistic terms. The first and only source that I could find that was brave enough to actually share some of the dirty details was a German book written only in 2014 by Wolfgang Whipperman, which, if you care to read, was, at least for me, a fun adventure in pornographic auto-translate. The case against Coetze was collapsing. A handwriting expert was brought in who determined that Coet was not, in fact, the author, and that the letters may even have been written by a woman.

By now, word of the scandal was occupying every single club and living room. On April 10, 1895, the New York Times reported that the emperor confirmed the exoneration of Cozze after he was acquitted by court martial. But the real guilty party still wasn't found, and Cozze was furious at those who had destroyed his reputation with their slander. For Coetze, the scandal was not over. As soon as he was free, Coetze challenged the Hoff Marshal von Reichdak to a duel at dawn near the Haansee train station.

The terms of the duel had each man shoot as many times as necessary. It took eight gunshots, but eventually von Reichstag hit Coet with a bullet in the thigh. Emperor Wilhelm Wilhelmian, the second sent an ornate Easter egg to Coetze's sickbed while he recovered. For him, that was the end of this, but it wasn't the end for Coetze. On the advice of his lawyer, Coetze sued Baron Schrader for liable for what he believed was the fabrication of evidence that led to his arrest. But the case was dismissed from court and Cozze demanded satisfaction. Even though he had already been shot in the thigh, Coetze demanded another duel. This time with Baron Schrader, they would stand

10 paces apart and keep shooting, approaching the other, until one of them was disabled. On Good Friday, Cozze, who had already been found innocent of the letter-writing scandal, shot Schrader in the abdomen and killed him. Only months released from his first imprisonment, Cozze was sentenced to to another two years in prison for the death of Baron Schrader. The German government passed a harsh law against dueling, but three months later, the emperor pardoned Liebrich von Cochse. We still don't know who wrote the anonymous letters. It's possible that if they were given a more comprehensive examination today,

a scientific analysis could give us the answer, but the Kaiser and his family had tried for decades to keep the scandal as secret as possible. Alleging debaucheries was one thing. It was a far worse thing if common people realized that nobles were actually committing them. Coetze challenging his accusers to duels

was tragic, but maybe for the Kaiser, secretly a blessing. High society became so absorbed in the scandal of the duels that they forgot the scandal that preceded it. The problem with a king

trying to maintain nobility, emerges when it becomes apparent that those people who are born into privilege are no fundamentally better than the rest of us. Why do some people get to be dukes and duchesses, princes and kaisers? And how do they get to hold on to that power after the people below them find out that the nobles are just spending their time indulging in their basest human impulses? The power of a monarchy exists only as long as people, buy into the belief that either the king and his family were chosen by God, or if it's not that overt, that they embody certain noble ideals that make them worthy of leadership. That maybe because they have access to education and money in pedigree, they're somehow finer than the rest of us

in ways that are maybe even too subtle to articulate. But then 15 of them get drunk and get naked, and then one of them spends the next four years taunting all of them with petty adolescent gossip, and one realizes that maybe the wealthy and elite are just bored. Common people trapped in a gilded cage of their own making, devoid of purpose and devoid of the satisfaction that can only be gleaned from a hard day's work. The nobles are forced to invent these petty rivalries to fight duels in order to convince themselves that their lives serve the purpose of honor and, well, dignity. That's the story of the Coatesa affair, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a bit about the modern theories about who was behind the anonymous letters.

Everyone, I'm Ego Vodom. My next guest, you know from Stepbrothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with him one day. And I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.

Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be.

Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey there folks, Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes here. And we know there is a lot of news coming at you these days from the war with Iran to the ongoing Epstein fallout, government shutdowns, high profile trials. And what the hell is that Blake lively thing about anyway? We are on it every day, all day. Follow us, Amy and T.J. for news updates throughout the day.

Listen to Amy and T.J. on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So who was it? Who was the one who wrote those scandalous letters to the Prussian elite accusing them of all sorts of terrible things? The most prominent theory is that it was Duke Ernst Gunther, the scandalous brother-in-law of Wilhelm II. He was the type of person who was almost entirely capable of stirring up trouble, and he and the Kaiser did have a falling out that eventually led him to being banned from the palaces in Berlin and Potsdam. The ostensible reason was losing that black eagle medal in the bed of a prostitute. But who knows, he could have been guilty of, or at least suspected of, other crimes.

There's another dark horse theory about the anonymous letter writer, but it seems very unlikely. It is, I will say, so fundamentally appealing that I'm inclined to believe it, even without actual evidence. It's that the man behind these letters wasn't a man at all, but the Kaiser's sister, Princess Charlotte. Some even suggest that she only invited the 15 nobles to the ice skating party, come orgy, as a trap. She was famously prickly, a lifelong chain smoker and lover of scandal. The personality seems to fit. But there is also some evidence to the contrary.

Charlotte was a dear friend of Coetze's wife, Elizabeth, and after Coetze was wounded in his first duel, Charlotte wrote in a letter, Cozze at last pronounced free, but since yesterday badly wounded. His wife is so courageous and behaves admirably. The long ten-month strain must soon tell on her nerves, Dear thing, how I long to help and comfort her now. It's not a letter that Charlotte would have ever imagined would go on to the public record, so it doesn't read like she's trying to throw us off the scent, but who knows?

Maybe it was guilt speaking. Or maybe the letters were written in fits of mania, and when she calmed down, she was filled with contrition for the man who stepped in to take all of the literal and metaphorical fire. Princess Charlotte spent the twilight years of her life in treatment for psychosis in the spa town of Baden-Baden. Though, as you know, I am remiss to diagnose anyone with anything posthumously, historians do believe that her symptoms resembled porphyria. The same disorder suffered by her great-great-grandfather, the Mad King George III.

Noble Blood is a production of I-Heart Radio and Grimmin-Mild from Aaron Manky. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz, and produced by Aaron Manky, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble BloodTales.com.

For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. And I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo.

My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall, and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there.

Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.