Well said. Particularly when casual use of calling Dona a "cow" serves to wrongly establish her image and persona amongst people who do not know and appreciate her true regal, sophisticated, and highly attractive being.
Personally I see her neither as a cow nor as full of grandezza, but as the Kirchen-Guste who built hundred churches in the vain effort to save the working classes from Socialism.
BTW that (the bigotted church stuff) is just one of many striking similarities between VA and AF. Both empresses so reclusive, so devoted to their children, their husbands and nursing their husbands' frail (delusional) autocratic egos. No wonder they couldn't stand each other, as they probably saw some of their own bad qualities reflected in each other.
Good points. I agree with some of those similarities between VA and AF. However, I don't think Dona can be viewed any where near the recluse that AF was; in fact, is there anywhere she is actually characterized as a recluse? I've always seen, read, and heard of her as a very willing participant in social and private doings.
I also don't think the motivation for Dona's building sponsorships was saving the masses from socialism. Rather, she was a devoted Christian and committed to the beautification of the cityscapes which her churches most definitely added a sense of splendor we enjoy today (what's left of them, that is).
I agree, she was far from the kind of recluse AF was. But a recluse in the sense of limiting herself to domestic matters and the circle of the "Hallelujah Aunts". Her retreating role is of course also a reason why she is so little known today, the last empress - even among the Germans, compared to her legendary husband. But there were of course some facts which made her position quite different from AF's.
- The more advanced political structure of the German Empire as compared to the Russian one left less room for personal politics - and thus also for powerful women.
- Her children being largely boys, she was less able to (if she even wished to) isolate her family from society (which she, just like AF considered dangerous and debauched), with them attending cadet school in Plön and going into the army.
- AV was not a foreigner.
Still one can argue that AV is one of the more productive contemporaries to compare AF with, since they both were the first ladies of empires where there still were some degree of personal rule (by their very controversial husbands). Environmentally, AF had more in common with AV than with Alexandra and Mary of the UK.
I think anti-Socialism played a part in AV's church building, as the court and her husband were linked with the Christian-Social (anti-Socialist and somewhat anti-Semitic) movement of Adolf Stoecker, the Dean and Court Pastor of Berlin. It is symbolic that one of the churches built by AV, the Versöhnungskirche / Reconciliation Church in the Bernauer Straße in Berlin, came to lie right next to the Berlin Wall, was blown up by the DDR / GDR as late as 1985 and is now replaced by a very moving clay Chapel of Reconciliation (made from the dirt from the site, containing bits of the broken bricks of the church), right next to the Berlin Wall Memorial.
