The skeptical answer to this question is straightforward: the Schanzkowska family was a working-class German-Polish Catholic family suddenly thrust into an international media story about Russian royalty. They had nothing to gain from a definitive identification — no money, no social advancement, no legal claim. What they might lose from either a definitive affirmation or a definitive denial was considerable: involvement in expensive litigation, media attention, the disruption of their private lives. Ambiguity served their interests better than clarity.
The family’s later conduct — declining to sign affidavits, declining to pursue the identification — is consistent with people who had correctly identified an uncomfortable connection and chosen not to press it.
The DNA match to Carl Maucher, Anderson’s maternal-line relative through the Schanzkowska family, resolved the question that Felix Schanzkowski’s ambiguous recognition had left open. The family’s biology confirmed what the family’s behavior had suggested.
—
## The Question of Self-Construction: Identity in Extremity
Among the most intellectually serious attempts to understand the Anna Anderson case — those that move beyond simple “impostor” or “genuine claimant” frameworks — are approaches that try to understand identity formation under extreme circumstances.
Franziska Schanzkowska, if she is the person who later became Anna Anderson, had experienced a series of events by 1920 that would have severely disrupted any stable sense of self: the death of her father, migration from her home community to the unfamiliar environment of wartime Berlin, the death of her fiancé, severe trauma in the munitions factory explosion, psychiatric institutionalization, and whatever circumstances surrounded her apparent suicide attempt in February 1920.