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## A Life in Between: The Long Middle Years
Between her emergence in Berlin in 1920 and her death in Charlottesville in 1984, Anna Anderson’s life followed a pattern shaped almost entirely by the claim she had made and the infrastructure that claim created around her.
She lived with supporters. In the early years, Russian émigré contacts housed her in Berlin. She moved through a series of residences provided by believers in her identity, including a period at Castle Seeon in Bavaria, the estate of Duke George of Leuchtenberg, who supported her claim. She came to the United States in 1928 with the assistance of Gleb Botkin, who had organized the trip and arranged a stay with an American acquaintance, Xenia Leeds. The composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who had encountered her claim, contributed funds for her American stay.
In New York, her behavior — by various accounts erratic, difficult, and at times alarming — led to a period of institutionalization. She was committed to a sanatorium in 1930. She returned to Germany in 1931, where the legal case that would consume the next forty years of her life began to take shape.
The German legal proceedings were among the longest in the country’s history. The case began formally in the 1930s and was still active in the 1960s. A Hamburg court examined the evidence at length. The case was ultimately decided in 1970 by the German Federal Supreme Court, which ruled, in a formulation that has become the standard characterization of the proceedings, that Anderson had neither been proven to be Anastasia nor proven not to be. The court found insufficient evidence to determine her identity in either direction.