Rebel Angel, page 17
The knives were out. Thomas Mann viewed Annemarie’s Berlin incident as a ‘symptom of the panicky tension in Germany’.16 The Röhm Putsch, so-called Night of the Long Knives, took place between 30 June and 2 July 1934, at the time of Annemarie’s diplomatic grilling. Hitler had shown his hand. Röhm’s homosexuality and the depravity of his circle provided a convenient pretext to strike. Connected to the Manns and her gay friends, Annemarie could easily have been shaken down and made to talk. Writing to Klaus from Graubunden on 4 July, she used the phrase ‘under the fig-leaf of morality’ to describe Hitler’s cynical machinations.17 Thomas Mann mentions that she had been banned from Germany because of a ‘single contribution to Die Sammlung’.18 The incident with the German Consul gave a foretaste of difficulty to come.
*
Rows at home about the insalubrious Manns and the bloody Germans led Annemarie to decamp to the lakeside Villa Favorita in Castagnola outside Lugano, formerly owned by Leopold of Prussia and now by the cream of German manufacturing. She was there at the invitation of Baroness Maud. Like Rilke, Annemarie was rarely short of a feather bed in château or Schloss. It was a large estate bought to house the growing art collection of Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza and it was here that Annemarie wrote up her travel journal, which became Winter in Vorderasien (1934) (Winter in the Near East), a first draft completed in a matter of weeks on 21 May. After considering Orell-Füssli in Zurich and Niehaus in Basel, she came to an agreement quickly with Rascher-Verlag, a Zurich-based publisher with roots in the pacifist movement and a reputable list of authors that included Carl Jung, Somerset Maugham, Catherine Mansfield and Elias Canetti. Annemarie agreed to part-fund the publication herself, with a print run of 2,000, and the book came out in November 1934. Between publication and 1940, only 350 copies were sold and so Rascher was reluctant to take on a follow-up book of short stories, Die Falkenkrafig (A Cage of Falcons), covering similar territory and written shortly afterwards. A number of the stories concern emigration to Palestine by German-Jewish refugees. Rascher had garnered a reputation as a ‘Jewish publisher’ when a book by Stefan Zweig they had brought out had been impounded in the Reich. Swiss publishers, keen for German readers across the border, were risk-averse. It was not just the diplomats who were falling into line.19
Written in the same period as Winter in the Near East, Annemarie’s suite of short stories stakes out similar territory but digs at a different level. Displaced European characters – colonials, mappers, archaeologists, female explorers – confront the landscape and cultures in and around the expedition house in Reyhanli, in Haifa, Jerusalem and the desert. ‘I’m busy as a bee, and worried because they write themselves so easily: short stories, linked by character and set in the expedition house, coming together loosely almost like a novel.’20 By early July she was feeling the draw of the East again.
The well-made bed here still seems to me to float, an unreal state – and then I come down to earth again. Life here seems so superficial, no longer grounded – and back there is sunshine and shadow, dust, loneliness, reflection.21
The ‘well-made bed’ in the villa had nothing unreal about it. Baroness Maud’s bed was equally comfortable. Her fifty-seven-year-old husband was busy at this time amassing an art collection, some of it of dubious provenance. The steel trade, already ramping up in 1934 under Hitler, would exploit industrial slave labour, contributing to the German war effort. ‘Maud never went with us when we went dancing in our naughty bars, in the Friedrichgracht or the Eldorado’, writes Ruth Landshoff. ‘She was careful in one way.’22 Annemarie described her to Claude Bourdet as ‘a young ravishing woman, totally charming’23 and as ‘beautiful angel-headed’24 to Klaus.
With Maud, in early July Annemarie decamped to the Hotel Astoria in Bad Gastein in Austria. There the relationship seems to have come to a crisis or an impasse. By mid-July the halo had fallen from the Boticelli angel and she was now ‘the little lady Maud’ and had returned to her husband, his art collection and the villa on the lake. Annemarie took stock of three recent fiascos: her ill-advised flying visit to Berlin; the deterioration of her relationship with her family; and Maud’s lack of interest: ‘I kept working hard at the writing but as soon as I put pen down, life was dull as dishwater. Things didn’t pick up with Maud because I’m not entertaining enough, I’m not some boy with a speedboat and a pilot’s licence. You’ll laugh, but that’s the way it is.’25
In July an agent in St. Moritz wrote to Annemarie about a stone house (seven rooms and an outhouse) available for rent on the lakeshore at Sils in the Engadine. She had been on the lookout for a place in the area for at least a year: a house to write in and welcome her friends but also an attempt to break from the controlling atmosphere at Bocken. ‘If my papa gets behind the project’,26 she thought, it would be an ideal retreat in a part of Switzerland she had grown to know well. Eventually, she rented Haus Jaeger from the Godly family in Sils-Maria, and hired Martha Cadisch as housekeeper.
*
Her decision in the summer of 1934 to attend the first Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow with Klaus must have been taken on the spur of the moment. They left Zurich on 12 August via Vienna and Warsaw to Moscow, indulging in morphine on the train. Writers had been invited to attend the congress from all over the Soviet Union, together with forty sympathizers from other countries. Annemarie blew hot and cold about the Soviet experiment. While expressing solidarity with the workers she harboured ‘brooding scepticism’ – wrongthink – about artistic conformity. Serious reading seemed widespread in the Soviet Union, in contrast to the shallows of the West where ‘the writer, instead of being honoured, has to be content with an editor who pays a pittance’.27 She was wary of the Soviet experiment as a land of milk and honey. In comparing Soviet collectivism to the American business ethic, her thinking has a Spenglerian cast:
… the Russians, on the other hand, like the Americans, share a primal awe of the machine, speed and technical progress. This go-hung approach, however, accords with the needs of a large country that has been backward until quite recently.28
In Moscow she pursued an interest in documentary film already sparked in Berlin. She saw Misery in the Borinage (1933) twice, a silent film by Henri Storck and Joris Ivens about the 1932 strike in the Belgian coal-mining region. It included scenes of police firing on striking miners in Ambridge, Pennsylvania in 1933, anticipating her visit as a journalist there in 1936. While sometimes champagne socialist in behaviour, and rarely linking her own family’s lucrative exploitation to labour misery, she showed a genuine empathy for social division and workers’ conditions a number of years before she turned it to account in America’s industrial heartland and the Jim Crow South. Unlike Joris Ivens’ later denunciation of Dutch colonialism,29 her empathy did not extend to challenging colonialism as such. Like Klaus, Annemarie saw the Soviet Union as a bulwark against fascism in Europe while the anti-colonial struggle had to wait, a silent subaltern in the wings. ‘I am convinced that we now need to side with the USSR if we are to make anything of our future. Despite this positive side to things, we – Klaus and I – didn’t feel very happy here for other reasons. Klaus and I are in full agreement on that.’30 It was a couple of years before Andre Gide’s Return from the USSR (1937) turned the intellectual tide against the Soviet dystopia.
At the beginning of September Annemarie boarded the train south across Russia to Tbilisi31 in Georgia, and from there to Baku. She had agreed to supply Otto Kleiber at Basel’s National-Zeitung with fifteen articles based on her second visit to Persia. Writing on the train, she described the approach to Tbilisi, the rain, that peculiarly European habit of being in a hurry under an umbrella whereas the Arabs and Persians nonchalantly knew how to take their time. Young men disappeared into the sulphur baths. There were Armenian, Georgian and Jewish shopkeepers. It was East meets West again, a topography she was beginning to make her own.32
Archaeologist Friedrich Krefter picked her up in his car and they spent the night in ‘the jungle of Rasht’, no doubt sampling the caviar and the Georgian wines, and the next day drove through the rain down to Tehran. She gave a wide berth to the comforts of the German legation where the ambassador had been apprised of her connection to Die Sammlung and the fracas in Switzerland. Giving Claude Bourdet a forwarding address at the American embassy – she was never short of a diplomatic connection – one wonders what the reception there might have been for a young woman arriving alone from the Soviet Writers Congress. Compartmentalization was also a trait she would make her own.
Erich Schmidt was in charge of the Joint Expedition to Persia at Tepe Hissar and at Rhages. Annemarie describes him as ‘our hyper-industrious little Director’33 and ‘a hard-working German’ who drank little.34
In Moscow the French writer and later Gaullist minister of cultural affairs André Malraux had asked Annemarie what she was going to do in Rhages – a site he knew. Malraux too had started out as a romantic orientalist, involved in running artefacts out of Angkor Wat and passing plunder off as action-man adventure. In print at any rate, Annemarie doesn’t provide an answer to Malraux’s question, apart from mentioning the ‘terrible sadness of Persia’.35 In correspondence she was more prosaic: ‘I’m learning how to live alone with my colleagues, days begin before sunrise at 5, consisting of fairly tiring work until nightfall. A short rest, and then another day. That’s it. I find it strange, hard, and calming.’36 She appears to have done mostly clerical work – typing catalogue cards – but also packing crates of ceramics for the museums in Boston and Philadelphia.37 Schmidt may have thought she needed to learn archaeology from the ground up, like any intern.
Malraux’s question and Schmidt the taskmaster may have prompted introspection; a crisis had been building which led her to consider marriage. Having recently completed two books set in the Middle East, the shine had gone off archaeology and she may have asked herself what she was doing cataloguing and packing. Morphine use is symptomatic – or the cause – of Annemarie’s bewilderment at this stage. Her consumption continued at Rhages, as well as hashish with a Russian called Babinski. ‘His servant filled our pipe – a chunk of yellowish, clay-coloured hashish powder, and over it a layer of tobacco … I choked and coughed. The servant Hassan, a fifteen-year-old boy, watched me and laughed.’38 Perhaps, too, Maud Thyssens’s rejection, compounding other failures, determined Annemarie to give marriage a twirl. Her brush with Nazi officialdom in the summer and her family’s threat to cut her free might also have backed her into a corner. Marriage became a calculated move.
The solution to her dilemma came in the form of thirty-one-year-old French first secretary Achille-Claude Clarac who, of course, was the beneficiary of a diplomatic passport. Annemarie first mentioned Clarac in correspondence with Klaus on 4 November, a letter with a jaunty postscript: ‘Now I could also marry a local Kurdish prince, he owns more than one village, but I’m too attached to you two.’39 The ‘also’ here implies Annemarie was weighing her options: she wasn’t the only one.
On 22 November she wrote to Bourdet of her engagement to Clarac, trying to soften the blow. Bourdet had first seen her in 1929 and had seriously pursued her since their kiss in 1933:
She was living then in Berlin, in the vibrant, louche world before the Nazis, among its leftist writers, fabulously rich Jews, homosexuals and lesbians. Her mother, it was said, ‘liked women’ – maybe that was what took Annemarie in that direction, maybe her unfeminine traits could be seen under certain lights, maybe the influence of Erika Mann, the daughter of Thomas and the sister of Klaus – he too homosexual. It was rumoured, though I refused to take it in, and anyway was there truth to the whole story? She seemed to like me then.40
Claude Clarac in Farmanieh, Persia, summer of 1935. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach
Courtesy of Swiss Literary Archives and Wikimedia Commons
Bourdet’s loss was diplomat Claude Clarac’s gain. He took her to dinner, on night drives, and sometimes she had to sneak back into her cold room. Besides archaeology, the shine had gone off Persia too, and she was homesick; the dust and glare of the capital, the humdrum pettiness of expat life dulled her senses used to glitter and stimulation. She anticipated objections to her marriage from her family, since Clarac was French Catholic. Gertrude Bell had described Muslim wives looking ‘like plants reared in a cellar’41 and Swiss women of Annemarie’s standing before the war were brought up as hothouse flowers. Outside Tehran there were horse-riding days and boozy nights with Countess Maud von Rosen, whom Annemarie described as ‘a cross between Maria Daelen and Greta Garbo’.42 The Swedish writer, traveller and equestrienne would later publish a travel book on Persia.43 She becomes another of the face cards in Annemarie’s colourful rather dog-eared pack of desert women, intrepid explorers and gender-benders.
Annemarie’s surprising telegram announcing her engagement arrived at Bocken in the middle of ructions to do with Erika Mann’s Peppermill cabaret in November 1934. The previous summer, both women had noticed a National Front in Switzerland agitating against German exiles and communists.44 On 16 November further disturbances in the theatre spilled onto the street, with anti-semitic epithets heard and a police pistol going off. Over the following evenings, stink bombs and rabble-rousing continued. ‘Motorized police formed a ring around the theatre every evening … Guns, strange knives, and brass knuckles were confiscated.’45 The police arrested over a hundred National Front demonstrators on 26 November. ‘Erika is certain’, wrote Thomas Mann in his diary, ‘that old Schwarzenbach’s hysteria and hateful capitalist paranoia is behind all of this.’ She had spotted family and friends of Renée’s in the audience, stirring things up, including a nephew with a whistle. She also told the police that pictures of Hitler and Vice-Chancellor von Papen sat on Renée’s writing desk.46
Investigations concluded that a personal feud between Renée and Erika was behind the rabble-rousing. Alexis Schwarzenbach, in his biography of Renée, quotes police interviews of the time.
… it is said that Annemarie Schwarzenbach is a lesbian. If relatives say so about her, we have to assume it is so. The same is said about Frau Mann. I myself confronted Frau Mann with these rumours. She simply explained that she has had no sexual relationship with Annemarie Schwarzenbach. It is further reported that the actress Therese Giehse, in the Peppermill cast, also has a similar sexual contact with Frau Mann, that both are ‘in a relationship’.47
Death threats made against Erika, accusing her of being a ‘traitor’, were thought to stem from Germany or German agents. For the police, a family feud was the line of least resistance.
Returned from her travels on 16 December, Annemarie begged to differ. She laid the blame at the booted feet of the National Front, led by her old adversary Rolf Henne.48 The Peppermill story had already become old news by the time Annemarie published her conclusion in the Zürcher Post (other newspapers weren’t interested) on 27 December 1934.49 It was a public salvo against some members of her family for stirring things up, but she did not finger Renée; Thomas Mann characterized the article as ‘courageous’.50
Klaus, Erika and Annemarie reconvened in the Mann house in Küsnacht on 28 December. Klaus had been deprived of German citizenship in November: ‘Congratulations’, wrote Christopher Isherwood from Copenhagen, asking him to send his new novel Flucht in den Norden to Jonathan Cape.51 Erika too expected her citizenship to be revoked and was thinking of asking Isherwood to marry her so she could acquire a British passport. Annemarie had become engaged to Claude three weeks before and nobody present was under any illusions as to her motives. She sent Claude a copy of Breslauer’s photo (she always kept extra copies), writing on the reverse:
Mother hates this picture because it makes me look a bit crazy? And Maud [Thyssen] tore it up, by the way, after having had it in her room for a long time. Now, at this painful time – (I have almost lost my nerve, darling) – this photo might take on a new meaning, maybe a likeness? Maybe you, my darling, can square up to it? Meaning – try to pin down the dark side …!52
This peculiar but revealing inscription alludes to Annemarie’s half-shaded portrait. She had written to Bourdet ten days earlier: ‘Claude, you’re wrong. What do you know about my marriage, the reasons, the feelings? I’ll explain to you one day.’53 To her fiancé she was inclined to issue a challenge, – now you see me, now you don’t! – while to Bourdet she mystified both reason and feeling but with the Manns she could be out. Where there is much ink there is much to hide, and here Annemarie seems to be playing peek-a-boo with family and friends.
It was clear by December 1934 that addiction had begun to exact a toll. Klaus remarked in his diary for 28 December: Annemarie ‘is beautiful, thin and sweet. Very addicted to morphine. The three of us indulged together.’54 She looked forward to the restorative power of her house in Sils, available in the new year, and hoped to bring her elective family together: Erika, Klaus and other friends. ‘Tuna [morphine] eats away at me, tossing and turning on these sleepless nights, surrounded by such weak hamstrung people, so that I wonder what all of this is for – if the drug’s not to hand.’55 Annemarie was beginning to regret the ‘strange intermittent period’ of her time in Persia and to promise the stateless Klaus that she would see about getting him a French passport once she was married to Claude.56
Erika was crucial in convincing Annemarie on 3 January 1935 to book into Dr. Ernst Ruppaner’s private clinic in Samedan in the Engadin for withdrawal treatment – the first of many. Annemarie’s parents were worried by her drug habit though she appears to have been unaware that they knew. Writing to her mother, she called it a ‘rest cure’. Her parents took exception to the tone of the letter and to Erika’s chaperoning role; their view was that the Mann influence caused the problem. Alfred replied sternly:
