Hančí Baarová a falešný princ
Hančí Baarová and the Fake Prince

Summary/Abstract: A web of fabricated identities, criminal schemes, literary ambitions, and wartime intrigue shaped the extraordinary life of Marta Přívětivá, better known under the pen name Hančí Baarová. Far from the public image of a Chodsko-born writer and relative of Jindřich Šimon Baar, she was in reality a recidivist fraudster who repeatedly reinvented herself through carefully constructed myths. The article reconstructs her path from early criminal convictions and financial deceptions to unexpected literary success during the Protectorate period, when she published popular fiction under a fabricated personal history. Her life became increasingly entangled with collaborationist circles, false identities, and personal manipulations, culminating in her involvement with Jan Beneš, a charismatic conman who successfully convinced numerous supporters that he was a British-trained resistance agent and a member of the Lobkowicz family. Their activities attracted the attention of both the resistance and the Gestapo, ultimately leading to arrests, imprisonment, and Přívětivá’s deportation to Ravensbrück and other Nazi camps. After returning to Czechoslovakia in 1945, she attempted to rebuild her reputation as a persecuted writer and political victim, joining former prisoners’ organizations and resuming literary work. However, investigations into her wartime conduct, earlier affiliations, and fabricated claims gradually exposed the contradictions of her past. Facing legal proceedings and the collapse of the identity she had constructed, she died in 1947 in what was officially ruled a suicide. The study presents a remarkable case of how personal ambition, deception, opportunism, victimhood, and survival intersected in the turbulent circumstances of twentieth-century Central Europe.

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