Rebel Angel, page 20
7
Two Women, a Ford and a Rolleiflex
… blues from everywhere and nowhere, the wild and steadfast song of the downtrodden, both jungle cry and feverish hymn, played with a perceptible undertow of seduction and protest.
Annemarie Schwarzenbach, ‘Dark End of the Street in Washington’
The Schwarzenbach name had for decades been associated with silk in the mill towns of Pennsylvania and the factories of Hoboken. Labour at the looms was mostly female and non-unionized. The Depression had tightened silk belts and brought home the fragile balancing act between capital and manpower. By the time Annemarie visited the United States in the late summer of 1936, her writing had begun to focus on the social conditions of workers, on exploitation in factories, mines and lumber mills. For a boss’s daughter, she pulled few punches:
Success went hand in glove with ruthlessness, and the Puritan mind saw to it that this was pleasing to the Almighty. To become rich therefore took on a moral dimension – a cruel irony if we recall the origins of some of America’s greatest fortunes. Despite everything, the survival of the fittest held sway.1
She left for the United States from Le Havre on 26 August. Klaus and Erika weren’t far behind, on board the Statendam from Rotterdam. Klaus had corresponded with American publishers Knopf about a possible deal for his novel Pathetic Symphony, and hoped publication of Mephisto would follow suit. Unlike Annemarie, the Manns could rely on name recognition and fitted into the American cult of literary celebrity. Annemarie was an unknown – her books hadn’t made much of an impression beyond Switzerland, her journalism had limited appeal, and her Middle Eastern travel writing hadn’t sold. She was determined, however, to establish herself on a more professional footing as a journalist, and had arrangements with a string of Swiss papers. Her approach to photography professionalized apace: in New York she made contact with the Black Star photo agency in order to distribute her work.
In Death in Persia, a character called Barbara holds her own against a right-thinking young archaeologist called Heynes:
They were having an intense debate about Roosevelt and the National Recovery Administration. Heynes was barely able to counter Barbara’s wonderfully concise arguments. He was trying to play the sceptic but she was protesting in her deep, strident voice. …
‘What’s the point?’ asked Heynes, leaning his head on the back of the chair. ‘What’s the use of knowing that you can’t solve the Black issue? That America is a pile of problems our best men fail to solve.’2
America’s ‘pile of problems’ became a focus of Annemarie’s writing and photography over the course of three trans-Atlantic visits during the next five years.
LIFE magazine launched in November 1936 with a cover photo showing Fort Peck Dam in Montana taken by Margaret Bourke-White, one of six female photographers on the staff.3 It was a New Deal project, all concrete and pylons, and that the photographer was a woman can’t have been lost on Annemarie. In the new year she planned to report with Baa on the miners’ strike in Pittsburgh. In the meantime, President Roosevelt was coming up for re-election in November, facing Republican hopeful Alf Landon, and Annemarie covered it for the National-Zeitung in Basel.
During the President’s first term, his New Deal had attempted to lift the country out of the worst of the Depression, shoring up ordinary Americans against the predations of ‘business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking’.4 Roosevelt understood that when times are tough, employers double down and empathy is in short supply. Eight million Americans, however, were still without jobs and labour unrest had led to strikes. Roosevelt had supported the Wagner Act of 1935, guaranteeing the right to unions and collective bargaining, and the Social Security Act which provided relief for the unemployed. America was voting along its perennial fault line: democratic solidarity confronting Republican individualism, mild socialism versus laissez-faire capitalism.
Besides economic intervention, Washington was chronicling the effects of the Depression on the culture of the South, where a way of life that had endured since the Civil War was passing into history. In 1936 the Library of Congress started recording negro spirituals, work songs and field chants while the novel Gone with the Wind (1936), the musical Porgy and Bess (1935), Gershwin and jazz all appropriated and commercialized forms of Black and Southern culture. Annemarie’s articles over the coming year anatomized the interaction of class and race on which the old south was predicated, and the north’s ready exploitation of less organized and cheaper southern labour as industry expanded. She knew that cant phrases and twinkle-eyed founding myths rang hollow, that the American Dream was spun sugar on a very thin slice of pie.
Annemarie Schwarzenbach with her Rolleiflex Standard 621 camera, 1938. Photo by Anita Forrer
Courtesy of Swiss Literary Archives
In Washington, Annemarie stayed at Barbara’s mother’s house on Waterside Drive. Elizabeth Washburn Wright was the widow of Dr. Hamilton Wright, a government-appointed anti-drug crusader against Chinese opium. He died in 1917 when Barbara was still a child. His wife, well connected in Washington circles, carried on his delegate work. Barbara appears to have been one of thirty photographers under Roy Stryker, in charge of documentary photography at the Resettlement Administration, later renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA).5 This gave Annemarie access to the FSA archive. Her first reports in October 1936 for Zürcher Illustrierte made use of photos by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. Evans had worked with writer James Agee for Fortune magazine in summer 1936, and Annemarie made use of Agee’s October 1933 and May 1935 articles in Fortune as background material for her reports. Her own photos began to take on the imagery and grittiness we associate with these pioneering photographers, capturing ‘the unemployed, street children, the homeless and others left behind by American society’.6 Perhaps too she was aware of the German photojournalist Hansel Mieth, employed by LIFE magazine, who recorded the effects of the Depression for posterity.7
In Washington, Annemarie wrote about the availability of cocaine out by the airport and black panhandlers by the port:
Skinny young black guys wander around the port precinct, picking up cigarette butts, dancing barefoot or tap-dancing in tattered boots. They accompany their movements with a low-whistled ditty, waiting on a nickel or a dime tossed from the deck of the port restaurant. Then the pack mutely throws itself on this booty and in a split second it’s a free-for-all.8
This keen observation, typical of her reports, pitches the have-nots against the haves and highlights ‘the stark differences between rich and poor, white and black, while fundamentally casting doubt on the viability of the “American Dream”’.9
In September she travelled north to Maine where early voting was slated, and noted the Russian source of timber for the Hearst newspaper empire – an early instance of globalism coming into conflict with home production:
Hearst, the press baron, procured paper for his newspapers and magazines in a rival establishment that bought its timber from Russia instead of from Maine. Nonetheless, in the shop windows of the Republican end of town, posters trumpeted in black and white the great benefits the same Mr. Hearst had bestowed on local businesses … ‘That’s just bluff’, explained the young Canadian.10
The Republicans won by a slim majority in Maine.
The Manns, meanwhile, had arrived at the Bedford Hotel on East 40th Street, which exiled German and Jewish intellectuals used as a base in New York. On arrival, the news wasn’t good about Annemarie’s health. An infected needle had led to septicaemia in her leg – perhaps a recurrence of a similar problem with her leg in Persia. Erika travelled to Washington to minister help, conscious that again she was playing nurse. Annemarie’s messenger boy was Michael Logan, a friend of Baa’s, and Klaus was smitten: ‘Dancer, really nice; smart as well. … Michael reste la nuit chez moi. Tendresse’, reads Klaus’s diary,11 and intermittently during his stay in America Michael danced attendance. The Bedford would become Klaus’s home from home over the next four years as his family moved to Princeton and California and he himself criss-crossed the country on lecture tours. Erika had friends with benefits: Martin Gumpert, also resident at the Bedford, was a writer and doctor who supplied morphine and with whom Erika became involved; she also took up with New York banker and financier Maurice Wertheim who professed an interest in supporting her Peppermill cabaret, due to open on 5 January 1937 at the Chanin auditorium on Lexington Avenue.12 There was an air of make-or-break about the operation.
Throughout the autumn, worries continued about Annemarie’s health. She too based herself at the Bedford, and helped Klaus translate his articles into English. She was also on the cocktail circuit. On 3 November, election night, she was guest of a Republican women’s club, ‘in a quiet, well-to-do neighbourhood’. From there she went to an up-and-coming fashion designer’s atelier where ‘a group of young “radicals” – socialists, Communists, painters, journalists and writers – crowded around a small radio and heatedly discussed Roosevelt’s re-election’ for a second term:
Around one o’clock in the morning the defeated candidate Alfred Landon sent a congratulatory telegram to Roosevelt, clarifying his intention to go duck hunting. The radio announced that the President’s famous laugh was audible from the balcony of his Hyde Park house.13 In Times Square an incalculable crowd gathered.14
By early November Annemarie had settled in New York. The exiles celebrated Thanksgiving at their hotel with Erika and the crew and ended the evening with Annemarie, Magnus Henning (cabaret pianist) and Lotte Goslar (dancer) at the Apollo Vaudeville Theater. Annemarie wasn’t, therefore, invited to celebrate Thanksgiving at the Hamilton-Wright home in Washington: or chose not to. The same group of friends dined again on the 28th, and in a Mexican restaurant on the 30th. In the midst of this social whirlwind, Klaus learned that his father had been deprived of German citizenship.15 Now the whole Mann family was adrift. Klaus celebrated Christmas in Erika’s room at the Bedford, a sad-sweet little fest with tree, presents, roast chicken from the deli, champagne and gramophone music. Annemarie and members of the cabaret joined them: no Christmas dinner with Baa and her mother in Washington. The New Year brought Klaus a proposal for a lecture tour of the United States in the autumn. Travelling on temporary Dutch papers, his three-month visa had run its course. He returned to Europe with hope of better success in the autumn: money was tight.16
‘Somehow it didn’t quite click’17 wrote Klaus diplomatically about the fortunes of his sister’s cabaret in the new world. The difference in cultures was as wide as the Atlantic: the American audience wanted cabaret with frou-frou shaking a leg – instead they got ironic, politically engaged German humour delivered with an accent. Barbara and Annemarie were at the première at the Chanin Auditorium, after which singer Spivey Le Voe regaled them at Tony’s nightclub on West 52nd Street, where they waited for the early papers with their not-very-good theatre notices. Despite moving to a better venue, the New School for Social Research, the show that had been a success in a dozen European countries, died a death in New York. The re-jigged performance was sparsely attended by an audience of sixty – thirty of them press and only sixteen paying. The critics praised Therese Giehse but panned the show. On 6 January, Klaus ate with Annemarie at the oyster bar in Grand Central and already the première had become a ‘fiasco’. On the 9th she saw him safely on board the steamer – the Lafayette – back to Europe.
