Rebel Angel, page 25
Renée rallied round, given the seriousness of her daughter’s condition. She hoped a stay in Bocken, under doctor’s supervision, would wean Annemarie off the drug. Ruppaner’s treatment consisted of insulin and a gradual reduction to two Eukodal injections a day; the patient’s weight of 50 kilos made the full cold turkey precarious. Three years previously, Renée had concurred with Dr. Forel that Annemarie’s addiction was a symptom of a deeper malaise, existential and schizophrenic, for which Renée herself partly accepted responsibility. And so with a new girlfriend, mother on hand, and several expensive doctors treating her case, Annemarie received the attention she needed.37
Annemarie was always wary of institutionalized psychologizing, the psycho-babble of her day, and preferred to trust her own instinct. She outlined a plan to her mother: ‘Sils, work, closeness to Frau Forrer, Bocken and attachment to you, divorce from Claude.’38 Shortly after, on 1 June, behind her mother’s back, Annemarie met Erika who had driven down to Landquart in an attempt to persuade the patient to stay the course. But the addict was not for turning.39 She left Dr. Ruppaner for Anita Forrer in Malans, where under supervision from a Doctor Salis and a nurse from Davos, she managed to bring her morphine consumption down to zero over four days. Back in Sils, she fared less well and relapsed within the month, quickly realizing she required supervision. With Renée’s intervention, they decided on the Bellevue clinic in Kreuzlingen, overlooking Lake Constance, a Swiss institution which had been in the Binswanger family for four generations. Annemarie was admitted on 11 July and Dr. Binswanger thought she would need at least a three-month stay; her doctor got her to sign that she wouldn’t leave without her mother’s consent. Severe withdrawal symptoms followed: ‘The patient paces the room like a panther, upsets a lamp and threatens with her fists so that the room is cleared. The mother, to the amazement of all, absolutely calm – this was clearly nothing new to her.’40
Days later, Annemarie was able to work on her biography of Lorenz Saladin, which she finished on 24 July, and to play the hospital piano. There ensued the usual battle of wits to check out now that the worst was apparently over. The doctor stuck to his guns. Renée suggested early August. Annemarie had a hissy-fit – five nurses and two male attendants had to hold her down.41 As in the Prangins clinic under Dr. Forel, Annemarie was a disruptive patient who always thought herself better than her doctors.
Binswanger confirmed Forel’s earlier diagnosis of schizophrenia. Klaus Mann, too, independently mentions schizophrenia in his diary entry for 22 July. ‘Her suffering in that closed institution, in Kreuzlingen. Pauvre enfant. Her pronounced moral sense doing battle with the self-destructive tendencies of her psyche – and body. Schizophrenia.’42 This lay analysis indicates that Annemarie’s personality disorder, however attenuated, had become evident to her friends. Professional opinion concurred: all three doctors – Forel, Ruppaner, Binswanger – agreed that she needed at least a month-long recuperation under supervision, and that there was more to her case than drug addiction. Nonetheless, Annemarie checked out of Bellevue clinic on 2 August and made her way via Malans to Sils. Once the initial detoxification had passed, Annemarie always reasoned her way out of arrangements made at wit’s end, against the better judgement of three doctors and ignoring family trepidation.
Following the Binswanger cold turkey, Annemarie was estranged from her parents once more, and took up with her ‘Ersatz’ or elective family holidaying at the nearby Hotel Margna, while Erika and Klaus stayed at the house in Sils. Renée viewed the Manns as exiled, unpatriotic German Mischlinge. The Manns saw the Schwarzenbach-Wille clan as stupid fascists, tainted by wealth. They understood Annemarie’s break with her parents as a consequence of Renée’s intransigence: Klaus notes ‘the diabolical role of the mother’43 while Thomas’s diary entries chart Annemarie’s struggle with morphine over the course of summer 1938. On 14 August, he remarked on her having ‘escaped’ from Binswanger.44 However, by 9 September, the ‘desolate angel’ was back at his dinner table in Kusnacht, and back on the morphine.45
In September, emboldened by the success of the Anschluss, Hitler annexed the Sudetenland, the German-settled areas of Czechoslovakia which had always been in his sights. This became a refugee crisis as much as a political one and on 19 September Annemarie took off from Dubendorf Airfield outside Zurich to join ‘the elite of international journalists’ in Prague, anticipating developments but under a media embargo. Listening to Hitler’s speech, she found him ‘narrow-minded, short-sighted and dim’. In correspondence with Anita Forrer, she describes the ‘phoney, uneasy peace – and we can no longer pretend to avoid a looming conflict between Hitler, fascism, pseudo-socialism.’46
She made her way to the underground Communist newspaper, Rote Fahne (Red Flag), banned in Germany since 1933. The German editorial team were busy sifting truth from lies, and a youth from the border village of Schwaderbach told her only thirty people remained from a population of three thousand – the rest had fled.47 They had joined a wave of refugees numbering a hundred thousand – Czech and German – who had escaped the border regions for the relative safety of Prague’s Masaryk Stadium. Meanwhile, in the august surroundings of Berchtesgaden, Hitler played Chamberlain and the Western powers, resulting in the Munich agreement at the end of September. War had been averted for now. Annemarie’s thoughts turned to the precarious position of Switzerland where one ‘could no longer ignore the fact that we are an island only incidentally spared, by no means safe, defenceless.’48 While abhorring Hitler and all he stood for, she also thought responsibility for the crisis lay with the policy of appeasement pursued by communists, social democrats and conservatives alike.49
In mid-October she entered her longest period of hospitalization, four months in the Bellevue Clinic on Lake Neuchatel. A difficult settling-in period followed the pattern: withdrawal, an attempt at escape, condescension – ‘a terrible place’ – and cutting short her treatment on the insistence that she was ‘cured’. This time, romance entered the mix and Annemarie fell in love with thirty-nine-year-old Dr. Gustava – ‘Gucia’ – Favez, of Polish-Jewish origins and married with a son. ‘I have latched onto my lady doctor in the most perilous way’,50 she informed Klaus. In October her biography of Lorenz Saladin sold well, her first book on the shelves since 1934’s Winter in the Near East. This encouraged her to rework the unpublished Death in Persia. While excited to be writing fiction again, Annemarie’s January 1939 letter to Klaus suggests her manic princessy manner, the hospital like a royal court:
I’ve pulled the curtains, plugged my ears with cotton wool, and complain when a kind nurse disturbs me. Naturally, the clinic can’t believe such a patient. I weigh only 49 kilos, don’t sleep very well, don’t observe any house rules.51
With war on the horizon, her friends were searching for an exit. Ruth Landshoff, concerned for Annemarie’s health, was in New York. Vollmoeller in Basel was considering moving to the United States.52 The Mann family had decamped to Princeton and New York. In January 1939, Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden docked in New York City aboard the Champlain, and were met by Klaus and Erika. ‘They were full of liveliness and gossip. And, at once, the Giantess stopped threatening, the towers no longer appalled. Christopher felt himself among friends, cared for, safe.’53 On the penultimate crossing of the Champlain in 1940, the Nabokov family fled revolution for the third time; on its final trans-Atlantic voyage a U-boat torpedoed the liner. Across Europe, refugees from Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Prague and countless shtetl under Nazi menace were haggling for Nansen passports, manoeuvring towards the ports, settling into steerage.
The Nazis unleashed their state-abetted Kristallnacht pogrom on the night of 9–10 November. We can gauge the extent of Renée’s anti-semitism from her reaction to Kristallnacht in a 3 March 1939 letter to Suzanne. While disliking the violence, her sympathy doesn’t stretch far: ‘a Jew is still a Jew, with very few exceptions … you know I don’t get along with most of them anymore – but still, I don’t like the Jews.’ She attributes rumours of war to ‘the Jewish press’. Renée found Hitler’s methods crude but the man admirable: ‘Hitler’s a genius, without question.’54 For her, Germany’s advance was payback for its treatment at Versailles. It would show the English who was boss. When Hitler invaded Poland, Renée thought that world dominance was in the balance: ‘What has Poland got to do with England?’ She justifiably saw the English as having throughout history their own smash and grab policy. Renée viewed the outbreak of war later in 1939 as a continuation of the struggle of the First World War, a vindication of German might and a war to end all wars.55 Hitler’s pact with the Soviet Union, however, Renée and Clara saw as a betrayal of principles – they were the kind of entitled women who knew on which side their bread was buttered. Clara, while deploring Hitler’s goons, admired the genius in the man; the Soviet pact opened her eyes.
*
Annemarie first met the internationally renowned traveller Ella Maillart at the Bauer Hotel in Zurich in the summer of 1938. Kini, as she was known, described the younger Swiss writer as ‘hatless, smart in a grey suit, so thin that she was almost ethereal, she sat most of the time drooping and silent. … One thing was certain: she believed in suffering.’56 After this unpropitious encounter, Kini visited the patient in Bellevue on New Year’s Eve. Annemarie had likely heard of her from Hermine de Saussure, a mutual friend and wife of Henri Seyrig, both encountered in Tehran in 1935. Kini too heard a not quite reassuring assessment of Annemarie from the same source: the scandal of her affair with the daughter of the Turkish ambassador in Tehran, her drug-taking, her impetuous marriage.
A Geneva-born ethnologist, traveller and writer with a sporty, adventurous streak, Kini had already made a name for herself: ‘captain of the Swiss women’s hockey team, she was also an international skier … She had done a good deal of journalism and had written two travel books, of which the second had been a considerable hit in Paris.’57
Annemarie recognized ‘a similarity of mind and motive … I was reassured and overjoyed’58 and suggested Kini might visit Sils to write.59
Kini’s account of their journey, The Cruel Way: Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford, 1939 begins with Annemarie’s return from Prague, ‘convalescing after months of an exhausting cure’. They have been skiing, and Annemarie makes a remark about her father possibly getting her a new car. She wanted the latest Ford model and if she couldn’t get it in Zurich she was prepared to travel to Stockholm and pick the car up there.60 Maillart’s mind ‘was already in Persia’.61 Both were strong-willed adventurers, unmoored from female convention, sharing a love of the road. The older woman urged Annemarie to fatten up:
‘Unless you put on twenty pounds of flesh you cannot possibly tackle such hardships. Besides, who would finance us? And anyway war will soon break out …’ I didn’t mention my main objection: provided she were soon normal … Her thin hand held a cigarette, the yellow knuckles sharp under a skin as thin as tissue-paper.62
Misgivings on Kini’s side and personality differences boded ill. Annemarie ‘did not know how to be at rest’ whereas Kini sought spiritual enlightenment in India. Kini was impervious to discomfort, plucky, full of stamina as opposed to Annemarie’s rich-girl proclivities, whose well-worn plea for escape from her oppressed life had been sounded once too often. Kini offered dependency and trust that mirrored Annemarie’s relationship to her mother; an older woman who would play nurse and pay attention.
Ella Maillart packing the car, British Consulate, Meshed, Iran, 1939. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach
Courtesy of Swiss Literary Archives and Wikimedia Commons
They left Kini’s home town of Geneva on 6 June 1939, Annemarie at the wheel. The press posed the two women on the bumper of their car in front of the International Labour Organization, Kini in polka-dot blouse, skirt and sensible shoes, a skinny Annemarie in blouse and pants, one hand in pocket, the other on Kini’s knee, eyes raised to high heaven in that odd fetching way that has over time characterized her. They were nobody’s calendar girls. A caption on the back of a snap, taken at the Simplon Pass as they crossed the Alps, reads in the driver’s handwriting: ‘Why do we leave this loveliest country in the world? What urges us to go east on desert roads?’63 This retrospective rhetorical flourish – one of Annemarie’s favourite devices – remained unanswered but sounds a note for the journey ahead. Kini already knew her driver was not ‘sparkling with joie de vivre’ after the best part of a year in and out of detox clinics and dangerously close to suicide. Annemarie wanted to try on her travelling boots once more.64 She was not the first to imagine horizons widening out east. In the same month the second Baroness Blixen motored from Stockholm to China, also in a Ford; in 1941 Rebecca West headed east; joined after the war by Nicolas Bouvier, Dervla Murphy and countless trippers on the hippy trail.65 A vogue for intrepid travellers in search of spirituality was in the making.
At Trieste, breaking their journey for gelato in the port, Annemarie recalled the Gerusalemme on which she had steamed to Beirut and marriage in April 1935. How honest was she in the fashioning of her story? Kini was not the marrying kind and ‘could guess how difficult it must have been for these two to become a couple. As long as one is single it does not matter if one is extremely self-centred.’ Claude was still in the French diplomatic service at the time of Kini’s writing and the mother of the bride exercised oversight of the narrative. We might take Annemarie’s and Kini’s layered account with a pinch of backward thrown salt and a grain of truth:
Mother foretold disaster if I married. And it was happening. There was no way out, for Francis’ people were strict Catholics. It was very foolish of me to be always acting against mother – the person who knows me better than anyone else. I had no hope of freeing myself from her, no hope of ever being simply myself.66
They intended to travel south through the Balkans, ferry-hopping east along the Black Sea shore to Trebizond, skirting the southern Caucasus to Tehran and from there over the Hindu Kush to Kabul, arriving in the heat of August. By then the boil of the thirties had been lanced and war had broken out. Germany was on everybody’s lips: in the Slovenian rump of the Austro-Hungarian empire; among Swabian settlers in Serbia; in the Prussian strutting of Yugoslav garrison towns. They didn’t linger. ‘Along the road, people often greeted us with the Nazi salute. A schoolmaster raised his arm with great determination staunchly followed by his gaggle of kids. Were we taken for Germans?’67
The car was a two-seater, 18-horsepower with reinforced suspension, customized radiator and two spare tyres. Annemarie saw it as a symbol of Western civilization, know-how and industrial exploitation, all that Ford stood for in the American psyche and in Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Behind the driving seat they rigged up a shelf of forty reference works also representing the human spirit: Marco Polo, Maritain, Jung, a life of Alexander the Great, a compendium of seeker-travellers. They slept rough, under canvas and summer stars, brewing coffee on a primus. Both writers noticed the gradual change from west to east, at times lamenting ‘cinemas, newspapers, railings, pavements, electric wires’68 – at others regarding westernization with ethnographic dispassion. In Tabriz, north-west Iran, Kini finds an outdoor cinema in the ruins of the Mosque Ali Shah, ‘the fire-proof cabin of a cinema projector, new god, and bestower of oblivion to our mass civilization.’69 The Shah, like Ataturk, was modernizing, while the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company reaped rewards. Both writers tended to see development as a mixed blessing.
Reaching Sofia on 14 June, Annemarie took to her hotel bed while Kini went in search of a garage to repair the car. Later she found ‘the brittle glass of an ampoule’ on the bathroom floor and knew that her charge had relapsed. In Istanbul, the stand-off came into the open when Kini surprised Annemarie phoning a doctor friend who had been at dinner the night before. They had dined in Therapia, a diplomatic enclave north of Istanbul on the Bosphorus, with Clemens Holzmeister, Annemarie’s architect friend who had built Ankara for Kemal Ataturk. Therapia occasioned one of Annemarie’s characteristic meditations on east meets west, in which she conflated the optimism of her travels five years earlier with present circumstances. Her oriental quest had become a search for cure – therapy:
I heard the surging noise of the cramped metropolis and ate the fried fish and sugared fruits I had tasted once before. Everything had been once before! Everything was mirrored as in a glittering scabbard, the white bridges milling with people, the gently rocking steamships, the gulls.70
Kini noted her driver’s self-centredness and lack of humour: ‘the business of living is so urgent that there is no leisure for the palliative of humour’.71 When she confronted Annemarie’s duplicity in the Grand Hôtel de Londres in Istanbul, ready capitulation and empty promises came in return:
I give you complete power over me, day and night. Don’t leave me alone. If it happens again, I leave the car with you and go back. Let’s go away quickly. I have to be far from towns. Then I know I can’t get it and I live more easily. … It does not even give pleasure; it is more like a pause in nothingness … the only relaxation that I know.72
She had said the same thing to Thomas Mann: pleasure wasn’t in it; it was all about oblivion. Annemarie herself knew that she was not to be trusted. Writing to Erika, she complained about the Balkan roads, the hard ground under her sleeping bag, the tough travel regime. Tired and sick, with a 5 a.m. start ahead of her, Annemarie made no mention of the showdown with Kini.73 Kini wrote: ‘After the Sofia incident, I chose to appear hard and determined not to forgive another relapse.’74
