Rebel Angel, page 11
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Annemarie had been in Rheinsberg for a productive and restful three weeks. Back in Berlin in December, she played golf with art historian Hanna Kiel and resumed a busy social life in the company of writers and journalists Roby Frey, Hansi Sturm, Doris von Schönthan and Mopsa’s husband, Rudolph von Ripper – known as Jack Ripper. Letters to Erika are angst-filled (himmelangst, underlined twice), full of soul-searching, taking rejection by Ursula von Hohenlohe as a bitter lesson learnt, and no longer believing ‘that there is such a thing as happy love, it is always hideous, disillusioning and infinitely lonely’.30
Annemarie renewed contact with Maria Daelen, towards whom she gravitated when needing a shoulder to cry on. Daelen lived in Berlin-Charlottenburg and specialized in surgery, a field almost exclusively ring-fenced by men. The two friends frequented a similar social clique of well-to-do women, shared a liking for cars (Maria drove a red Ford Cabriolet) and were attracted to each other. Maria provided sympathy and medical care but, as with other friends, in the long run she grew tired of Annemarie’s neediness, alcohol and drug intake.
Maria had a remarkable personality. And Annemarie fell in love with her in Berlin. … she was also someone who was very kind to Annemarie and helped her immensely, and then she too lost patience. Just like everybody else.31
Returning to Bocken for Christmas, Annemarie went out of her way to Munich to join the Mann family for dinner. Klaus had read and reviewed her Friends of Bernhard favourably. After barely two months in Berlin, she had sampled the nightlife, drunk too much, fallen in love, completed a novella and another book was underway. At home, Annemarie resumed her old pursuits: riding with mother and brother Hasi, visiting grandmother Clara, listening to the new portable gramophone and welcoming royalty. The Schwarzenbachs entertained two Spanish infanta-in-exile, Beatrix and Maria Christina, living partly in Lausanne following the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in April 1931. Princess Beatrix, then twenty-two, brought out Annemarie’s best courtly manner. Renée no doubt got an edited account of life in Berlin. ‘When I talked to her on the phone this morning, she was kind of upset because Fair-Enough didn’t make the race. So, of course, she said I am morally unbalanced. It’s always the same thing. As soon as something is wrong with the horses, she remembers how bad I am.’32
Despite her disapproval, Renée travelled on 10 January 1932 to St. Gallen with Hanna Kiel for a reading at a women’s club from Annemarie’s lost novel. Kiel, art historian in a lesbian circle, moved to Florence when Hitler came to power and remained there for the rest of her life; Renée was rooting for the Führer: driver and passenger were singularly ill-matched. Annemarie’s reading went well but she was again coming down with a headache, sore throat and flu. This did not prevent her skiing in Arosa with Ursula von Hohenlohe, Kiel and others, staying in the Chalet Canols in Lenzerheide-am-See for most of January. She was keen to have Erika visit but Erika was nursing her own illness and perhaps wanted to pull back from Annemarie’s intensity.
Back in Berlin after a restorative month in the mountains, Annemarie began reviewing film for the NZZ: Jean Cocteau’s obscure, experimental Blood of a Poet (1932), Battleship Potemkin (1925), as well as Viktor Turin’s 1929 documentary about Soviet railway workers, Turksib (Turkistan to Siberia).33 Russian films were enjoying a vogue at the beginning of the thirties and Annemarie’s choice signals her interest in documentary, in the Soviet experiment, as well as in exotic travel: all portending the direction her writing and life would take. In January she weighed up various destinations – Persia, Mexico, Spain – with Hanna and Erika.34 She visited the studios of UfA, the German film production company in the Berlin suburb of Babelsberg.35 Her writing about film indicates she had thought about the importance of showing rather than telling, spotting its influence on Hemingway, with implications for her own writing:
A writer such as Hemingway employs a very similar technique. He doesn’t write: ‘the man was very disappointed’ but rather describes the man’s body language, for example: ‘he got up and left the room’. Such descriptions are interchangeable with a shooting script.36
Why did she not review the premier lesbian film of the period, Mädchen in Uniform? A glancing reference in a letter suggests she ‘suffered agonies’ watching it – perhaps from embarrassment at seeing her desires embodied on celluloid.37 The film may simply have been too close to the bone.
In January Annemarie moved into Maria Daelen’s apartment (‘provisorisch’) and after some weeks, into her own apartment nearby. Their friendship had evolved into an affair and quickly reverted to friendship. Annemarie was busy with research for the Piper guide in and around Lugano, and both Hanna Kiel and Maria Daelen accompanied her on these motoring trips from Berlin. Maria visited Bocken for the first time in late March and appears to have passed muster with Renée, who appreciated and was reassured by the doctor’s friendship with her daughter.
German politics had begun to curtail freedoms and her stifling home life had awakened Annemarie’s wanderlust. In January she wrote to Erika: ‘I think one should quit Europe and the beaten path for a while.’38 Later that month, Nazi stormtroopers broke up a Munich pacifist meeting where Erika was speaking, and the press mounted a vicious campaign of calumny against the whole Mann family. Writing from Bocken, Annemarie felt that her mother drained all the energy from her and the prospect of travel had become all the more an escape from suffocation at home. She was only twenty-four in the spring of 1932 when she joined Klaus and Erika, together with their childhood friend Ricki Hallgarten, in planning a journey overland to Persia. Grandmother Clara mentioned in her diary that Annemarie had switched ‘her enthusiasm for all things modern to archeology’.39 She researched their Persian trip with her usual thoroughness, sorting finances, visas and typhus shots, reading up on the Balkans, planning their route. This set the template for Annemarie’s later journeys: travel as an escape from the domestic, in the footsteps of the legendary oriental travellers.
Ricki Hallgarten, however, was a different matter:
The project of our Persian journey was just one of our devices to cheat Riki out of his suicide. We persuaded him to embark with us on an expedition with two cars … Annemarie, ‘the Swiss child’, would join us. Wasn’t it a grand, exciting idea? To get rid, for a while, of the whole mess here at home!40
Departure was set for May 5. Klaus was feeling under the weather: in January he had tried morphine and cocaine in order to compare their effects, and had smoked opium with Cocteau. On May 4 they scheduled a press shoot advertising their trip for the Bavarian film company Emelka. The next day, after lunch – with Annemarie and Eva Herrmann present – Frau Mann took a phone call from Ammersee, where Riki kept a lakeside studio. He had shot himself in the heart, leaving a note that she should be contacted. The following day Erika and Klaus went to see the body and remarked on the blood stains all over the bedroom ‘like the scattered fragments of a mysterious pattern – a last message, a warning, the writing on the wall’.41 With the benefit of hindsight, Klaus in his memoirs couldn’t help seeing his friend’s suicide as a precursor of ‘coming disasters’.
The oriental jaunt was off and the three remaining young people headed south to Venice. Munich actor Herbert Franz (‘Babs’) joined them.42 They descended on the Hotel Metropole and changed to the Hotel des Bains on the Lido, where Mann senior had two decades earlier set Death in Venice on the eve of the First World War: ‘its iridescent twilight, the Moorish dream of its architecture, the wistful song from the Grand Canal’.43 The weather was momentarily hot and they enjoyed gondola and boat trips, gelato and trattoria, visits to museums and dressing up for dinner in the sumptuous hotel. It was here that Annemarie celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday.
Photographs, mostly taken by Babs, show the trio somewhat sombrely mugging at the camera. Annemarie’s sharp fashion sense, youthful looks before morphine hardened her features, the draw of her peculiarly cold, affectless stare propagated her glamour decades later. In one Venice snap she sits scrunched between the Manns like a cosseted child in this chosen family, luggage at their feet, the stocky boatman at the tiller behind. Both Klaus and Erika are smoking, kitted out in summer whites. Erika’s arm drapes over Annemarie’s slight shoulder, the Swiss child slumped in her seat in a striped blazer and frock. She eyeballs the photographer with narrowed unsmiling eyes. In another snap Erika is draped around her once more rather precariously on the arm of a rattan chair, whereas Annemarie adopts the same defiant look, cigarette in hand, too cool to smile.
Klaus recalled Annemarie’s rage in Venice when newspapers reported Blackshirts slapping Arturo Toscanini in Bologna; the sixty-four-year-old had refused to conduct the fascists’ anthem ‘Giovinezza’. ‘How could they dare to slap his face? Those dirty fascists, I mean! Toscanini’s face! Think of it! And why? Because he didn’t feel like conducting their lousy anthem! Oh! It’s outrageous! Sickening, that’s what it is.’44 Toscanini had visited Bocken in 1924 and conducted a memorial concert for Siegfried Wagner in Bayreuth in 1930, but broke with the festival’s pro-fascist atmosphere the following year. Annemarie’s solidarity with Toscanini put her at odds with views at home; Italy’s fascism had helped keep Schwarzenbach affiliate factories in Milan free of labour disputes.
Erika Mann, Annemarie, Klaus Mann, Venice 1932
Monacensia Literary Archive and Library, Munich
After ten warm days in Venice, the terrible trio with Babs in tow drove north in convoy. The Manns’ car broke down and after a farewell drink with Annemarie in the garage, she returned to Switzerland via Milan while the Manns crossed the Julian Alps. They stopped for red wine in the marketplace at Trent. The car broke down again south of Bolzano and Klaus admired the handsome grease monkey in the garage. By the time they reached Munich, the newspapers were full of von Papen installed as the new Chancellor and Klaus’s foreboding had intensified.
The shine had gone off Berlin for Annemarie and for many others whose lives and livelihoods were now threatened.45 The halcyon days were over, and Annemarie turned to the idea of writing and travelling as lodestones in time of crisis. Ill again with fever, she read up on the origins of European culture in Mycenae, Knossos and the Sumerian sites of Ur and Kish.46 She researched the Asian holdings in the Ethnological Museum in Berlin.47 At about this time she met ethnographer and traveller Leo Matthias whose 1931 book Griff in den Orient recounted his experiences in Turkey, illustrated with his own photos – perhaps he urged her to travel to Persia.48 She was itching to be on the move, research providing intellectual as well as romantic fodder for her wanderlust. Writing to Erika, Annemarie had become disillusioned with the city: ‘I now know exactly what you loathe about Berlin and the blindness of the people here.’49 She returned to her dislike of Berlin and Berliners later in the year – ‘how tedious and standoffish the people here are’.50 The Berliner Schnauze – the snarky tone, bringing down all pretensions – was not to her taste. Vladimir Nabokov, another patrician in exile at this time, felt a similar antipathy – and one wonders how much wealth and social class played into Annemarie’s dealings with people.
Driving north from Munich, Klaus described a Germany ‘terrorized by brutality bordering on hysteria, the whole country riven and dulled by a vulgar bloody-mindedness’.51 The three of them – Erika, Klaus and Annemarie – planned a trip to Finland, where Klaus was pursuing a romantic interest. Swastika armbands adorned the Hitler Youth in the Stralsund harbour bars. Relieved to board the ferry to Rügen, these young cosmopolitans noted the charm of southern Sweden’s open spaces, the dearth of alcohol and profusion of pastry shops, while Josephine Baker was regaling the Scandinavians with her banana dance.
They boarded the night ferry to Helsinki, Erika supervising the loading of her car. Young binge-drinking Swedes, lively with hard liquor, were on board. After an eighteen-hour crossing, the three friends rested and dined at Helsinki’s premier Hotel Kämp. Erika and Klaus noted its pre-revolution atmosphere preserved in amber: palm court, jovial porter, fin-de-siècle ditties, droskies waiting. It was like one of their father’s stories about aristocratic decline, with pretty boys cavorting in the lobby.52 Reading Gide’s Corydon, a seminal gay text, on the ferry, Klaus anticipated his reunion with the handsome, dapper Hans Aminoff, who had turned men’s heads in Paris and was himself weighing up marriage and/or homosexuality.
At Pekkala, a charming estate on a peninsula in a landscape of lakes, they were guests of Aminoff’s distinguished family. Klaus’s diary for the summer doesn’t give much away: ‘Tendresse pour Hans’53 seems not much after a long journey over land and sea. They embarked on a motorboat excursion through the lacustrine landscape. In the evening there was gramophone music; Annemarie played Bach and Chopin on the piano. It was a hot, stormy northern summer and they bathed in the dark lakes under a bright sky, eating crayfish and lingonberries. On 29 July Annemarie and Hans’s sister, Ingrid, headed back early to Helsinki.
From this harum-scarum trip north, Klaus was inspired to write Flucht in den Norden, a novel telling the story of a homosexual relationship tricked out as a heterosexual one; Annemarie wasn’t the only one veiling her desire. He gives his character Johanna Annemarie’s androgynous features: ‘She ran like a boy finally escaping from school. Her hair, flopping over her forehead, was cut like a boy’s. From a distance she could be taken for a young man in the sixth form. Below her linen skirt her knees were bare.’54 Johanna plays Bach on the piano. The manuscript’s dedication ‘To H.A., in memory of summer 1932’ disappears in the published novel, by which time Aminoff had married and fathered a child, Antonia.55 Klaus paid a second poignant visit to Pekkala, returning from the Moscow Writers Conference at the end of August 1934. Aminoff had morphed into another married homosexual taking his pleasure on the side. Folded away as a heterosexual love story, a bittersweet homosexual affair glimmers behind it like the northern lights.56
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Biographies of Annemarie date her introduction to morphine to October 1932. Her family might have become aware as early as November of the previous year of drugs and excessive drinking. Her cousin in Berlin-Frohnau had difficulty keeping track of her movements.57 A Berlin correspondent of Professor Burckhardt informed him in veiled terms of Annemarie’s drug use. References to drugs and drug deals occur in Lyric Novella and while Annemarie’s morphine use intensified in the autumn of 1932, she may have been dabbling over the course of the previous year. Ella Maillart noted Annemarie asking: ‘How can a drug tried out of curiosity ever harm me?’58 Ruth Landshoff recalled being ‘in the part of the city where Mopsa lived and I proposed we go to her for refreshment. That is when Annemarie met Mopsa and I wish she hadn’t.’59 Mopsa Sternheim and her husband Jack Ripper were notorious users and Annemarie herself confirms this introduction to the drug that was to irreparably mark her life. ‘With the arrival of Mopsa on the scene all hell broke loose.’60 She liked Mopsa – an attractive, bisexual, larger-than-life character. Annemarie’s later 1935 account to Dr. Forel confirms this context:
The patient became a morphine addict in 1932 through a friend of Erika Mann’s, Ms. Thea Sternheim, who also belonged to the group around [Pamela] Wedekind. Another friend, Annette Kolb, introduced her to Thea Sternheim, whom Erika Mann had seriously warned her about for fear she might become addicted. In November 1932, she injected herself with Eukodal, which had an immediate euphoric effect. At this time, she only took Eukodal ‘socially’.61
Maria Daelen, like Erika, knew that Mopsa was bad news. ‘For the first time she was tasting life without protection and without interference’,62 is how Ruth Landshoff describes Annemarie. By January 1933 Annemarie predicted correctly that morphine would ‘ruin’ her and was determined not to succumb.63
Journalist Adolph Stein, using the pen name Rumpelstilzchen, had brought the Berlin drug underworld to the attention of his suburban and provincial readers as early as 1920:
At Alexanderplatz, which was next to the police station, morphine was easily obtainable in amounts ‘not just enough for a few injections, but enough to send an entire small town to the grave’. Nine out of ten waiters in Berlin’s cafes solicited cocaine orders from their customers, as other revellers openly snorted the powder in well-lit booths. Opium balls were available for sale on the street and in hidden establishments. Glue, hashish, chloral hydrate, and marijuana rounded out the highs and lows. Indispensable party props for erotic amusement were the syringe and the hand mirror.64
Klaus used codewords and abbreviations in his diaries to cloak his drug consumption. Eukodal (Eu/Euka/Euca) was a morphine-based medicine, produced by Merck in Darmstadt, that doctors might prescribe, known as Schwesterchen morphine, morphine’s little sister. The key code word in Klaus’s diaries is genommen, meaning ‘taken’. On the June 1931 evening he spent with Annemarie on the Eden Bar roof terrace, he noted that he took three doses of Eukodal and morphine. We don’t know if Annemarie partook.
She lived dangerously. She drank too much and never went to bed until late in the morning. … I went to visit her. A bottle of vermouth was standing next to her manuscript. I was shocked. She had the gramophone playing while she wrote. I was even more shocked.65
Annemarie confirms that she wrote best while listening to music on an empty stomach with a little alcohol to hand.66 The first volume of the Piper guide to Switzerland had gone to press and she was turning out pieces for a second volume, focused on north and west Switzerland. Journalism and hack work kept her busy, without feeding her imagination, and she ended 1932 ‘with no visible result, feeling rather sad and convinced that I can only half-cope with life’.67
