Saturday, February 22, 2014

The Empress Auguste Viktoria, 1913


This image is obviously a page taken from a magazine of the time.

Auguste Viktoria (October 22, 1858, Dolzig Palace, in what is now Lubsko, Poland – April 11, 1921, Huis Doorn, the Netherlands), born Auguste Viktoria Friederike Luise Feodora Jenny von Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, last German Empress and Queen Consort of Prussia.

She married the future Emperor Wilhelm II in 1881, and gave him seven children, six sons and a daughter.  Known in the family as "Dona", she and her husband were well matched; she was the model of the devoted, submissive wife, happily acquiescing to his whims and taking on his prejudices and grudges against, among others, his own mother and siblings.  Her usual placidity and her markedly unintellectual nature earned her little respect within the extended family, but she was beloved by the public, who saw her as the epitome of the good German wife and mother.

After the debacle of World War I, the Emperor's abdication and exile, and the subsequent suicide of her youngest son, her health declined rapidly and she died at the age of sixty-two.

The dress and most of the jewelry is the same as in the picture above, but the necklaces are different.

***

The diadem that the Empress is wearing in both photographs.  It was made by the jeweler Koch and was
commissioned in 1906 in honor of the Imperial couple's twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.  Some of the
elements were removed in 1950 for use in other jewelry.)



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