Rebel Angel, page 27
A seated boy in Mandu, India. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach
Courtesy of Swiss Literary Archives and Wikimedia Commons
The Conte Biancamano left Bombay on 7 January 1940, behind schedule. Annemarie spent the return voyage writing an article a day about Afghanistan for Swiss outlets, watching Aden and the Red Sea, Port Saïd, Haifa and Naples go by. Shipping was disrupted – the British were keeping a controlling eye on the strategic Suez canal: between a stronghold and a stranglehold was a matter of a syllable, and the Conte Biancamano, as an Axis vessel, must have been one of the last to navigate the canal during the war.
… the old, true Aden, the city of Hindus, Arabs, half-breeds and negro boys, a filthy, wretched place, an ancient one laden with secrets, rich in ivory and sandalwood, shimmering with alabaster in bright nights.114
On the final leg of the journey from Naples to Genoa, they rerouted full steam ahead to come to the assistance of the Orazio, a trans-Atlantic steamer carrying 645 crew and passengers, many of them Jewish refugees fleeing to South America. The Orazio had caught fire off Toulon and 106 passengers were lost when the ship went down in freezing weather with the mistral blowing. It was a foretaste of the war to come. Annemarie’s account of the fire and rescue published in Basel’s National-Zeitung five days later shows compassion and solidarity:
Then we saw little bundles lying at the bottom of the boat, here and there a tousled head peering up – they were children, nothing but children, and the rowers, their legs spreadeagled between the hull and the seats, lifted them up and handed them over the side to our gangway where helping arms grabbed hold of them and took them onto the boat.115
The Conte Biancamano docked five days late and Annemarie joined other passengers and refugees in a hotel. ‘It was a mild Italian winter’s day, driving towards the Gotthard. I needed to acclimatize to war in Europe, to these same green meadows and ripening fields I had traversed in peacetime and had looked back on from far-off Asia.’116 Diplomatic passport in hand, Annemarie was one of the lucky travellers ‘not under the jurisdiction of this place’117 – and while her sympathies with refugees were genuine, her staying power tended to be short-lived.
When she arrived in Bocken on 25 January, her family were apprehensive about her physical and mental health, keen to know if she was truly drug-free. For Renée this was once again a mixed blessing: there had been too many promises of no drugs and three expensive attempts at cure during the previous year. Both mother and grandmother warily took Annemarie’s assurances at face value; Renée had too much experience with her daughter’s deviousness to commit and, besides, Alfred’s health needed attention.
Hindsight and the war give Annemarie’s movements a trajectory, as though she knew what she was doing, but it is a trajectory with a harum-scarum quality. There were harbingers of war in June 1939 when they left Europe: had she wished to put her shoulder to the wheel she could have stayed. When war was declared, Kini stuck to her original plan while Annemarie’s response was at once more political though vague and idealistic. Unlike her friends the Hackims, who had pledged allegiance to de Gaulle’s resistance and had a plan of action, Annemarie had no definite role in mind and even considered travelling to the United States with Anita Forrer. As an accredited Swiss journalist on a French diplomatic passport, Annemarie’s options were facilitated rather than hampered by nationality.
Judicious details and the photographic record create a story of gutsy women on a voyage of discovery east of Eden. Kini sat out the war in an ashram in India and Annemarie returned to an uneasy Europe, strung out, restless still, only to make a disastrous final visit to the United States. Their Afghan journey has all the makings of a road movie: war, drugs, local colour, legations, female adventurers pitted against the elements. War and hindsight confer nostalgia on this costume drama of pith helmets, turbans and women in cinched pants lounging by vintage cars, the standing buddhas of Bamiyan magically restored from the desert dust and Annemarie in her element. She had a tendency to see Afghanistan as a paradise, a Swiss-like federation of tribes holding out between the mighty Soviet Union and the British in India.118 While tempering this exotic tendency in her journalism, she could not altogether abandon it – to do so would threaten the long-cherished poeticization in her writing: if there was no poetry then she was just a jobbing journo after all. Nonetheless, the scales had fallen from her orientalist eyes. Closer attention to the record reveals her distracted state of mind, aware that she is romanticizing a harsher reality. The belief in travel as an ineffable end in itself, or indeed travel as therapeutic, had failed her. She had come to the end of a certain kind of love affair with the east.119
Notes
1 Frederic Spotts, Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann, p. 121.2 Letter from Eduard Fueter to Carl Jacob Burckhardt, 10 May 1936, Carl Burckhardt Archive. BUL.3 Clara Wille-von Bismarck, Tagebuch 1940. 160.1. Schwarzenbach Archives. ZBZ.4 Thomas Mann, 9 November 1935, Tagebücher. Annemarie was chez Mann for tea and dinner.5 Renée Schwarzenbach letter to Claude Clarac, 2 April 1936. 190.8. Schwarzenbach Archives. ZBZ.6 Speech by Richard von Weizsäcker, President of Germany (1984–1994), 8 May 1985.7 Hubert Butler, ‘Lament for Archaeology’, in Escape from the Anthill, p. 243.8 Kirsten Esch, Science and Crime (2018), a documentary film.9 AS to Dr. Binswanger, 22 August 1938, Medical history 5563, 11 July–4 August 1938, Tubingen University Archives 44/5563, file Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach. Cited in Alexis Schwarzenbach, Die Geborene, p. 336.10 AS, ‘Kleine Begegnungen in Deutschland’, Insel Europa: Reportagen und Feuilletons 1930–1942, p. 107.11 Ibid., p. 114.12 Ibid., pp. 118–19. Rebecca West, travelling in Austria at the time, confirms the view. ‘[T]he Nazis had put a director into his company who knew nothing and was simply a Party man in line for a job.’ Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2006), p. 31.13 Ibid., p.124.14 Carl Burckhardt, Mein Danziger Mission 1937–1939, cited in The Berlin Diaries of Marie Vassiltchikov, p. 48.15 AS letter to Florianna Storrer-Madelung, 7 June 1937. Storrer Archive. SLA.16 Carl Burckhardt’s compromising relationship with the Nazis in Danzig is explored in the documentary The Red Cross and the Third Reich: On the Failure of Help, 2006, by Christine Rütten. One of Walter Benjamin’s last letters was to Burckhardt, 25 July 1940, seeking refuge in Switzerland.17 AS letter to Klaus Mann, 21 May 1937, Wir werden es schon zuwege bringen, das Leben, p. 155.18 ‘Bei Studenten in vier Ländern’, Insel Europa: Reportagen und Feuilletons 1930–1942, pp. 156–7.19 AS, ‘The Ascension of the Khan Tengri’, text in English, p. 1. SLA.20 AS, Lorenz Saladin: Ein Leben für die Berge, p. 19.21 Saladin described himself as ‘1905 Verdingt zu den Bauern’. Roland Begert’s 2008 novel Lange Jahre fremd, about children used in industry after the war, as well as the 2012 film Der Verdingbub (The Foster Boy) drew much needed attention to children as cheap labour. In 2013 the Swiss government officially apologized for this historic exploitation.22 AS, ‘A Life for the Mountains’, text in English, p. 1. SLA.23 Saladin had a frost-bitten hand which turned gangrenous. He cut off part of the flesh, which led to blood poisoning.24 AS, ‘A Life for the Mountains’, text in English, p. 1. SLA. The photographs, augmented by a further trove brought from Moscow by Robert Steiner and Emil Zopfi, are held in the Swiss Alpine Museum in Bern.25 See Alexis Schwarzenbach’s review of Annemarie’s photographs in Republik, 29 September 2020. https://www.republik.ch/2020/09/29/was-will-ich-erfahren-etwas-wesentliches.26 Klaus Mann’s long letter to Annemarie, 21 February 1938, Klaus Mann Archive. MLM. Annemarie’s reply, [18 March 1938], Wir werden es schon zuwege bringen, das Leben, pp. 162–5.27 AS letter to Klaus Mann, 18 March 1938, Wir werden es schon zuwege bringen, das Leben, p. 165.28 Klaus Mann, 18 March 1937, Tagebücher.29 Anthony Heilbut cited in Sherill Tippins, February House, p. 46.30 ‘Ein Paar Schuhe fallen in den Inn’, Insel Europa: Reportagen und Feuilletons 1930–1942, p. 204.31 AS, ‘Österreich gründlich verändert’, Luzerner Tagblatt, 27 April 1938; ‘Fahrt durch das “befreite” Österreich’, Insel Europa, p. 181.32 AS, ‘Massenverhaftungen im österreichischen Offizierkorps – Nationalsozialismus ohne Maske?’, Insel Europa, p. 190.33 Hubert Butler, ‘The Kagran Gruppe’, in The Children of Drancy, p. 198.34 AS, ‘Österreich gründlich verändert’, Luzerner Tagblatt, 27 April 1938; ‘Fahrt durch das “befreite” Österreich’, Insel Europa, p. 181.35 Ibid.36 AS letter to Klaus Mann, [14 May 1938], Wir werden es schon zuwege bringen, das Leben, p. 166.37 AS letter to Klaus Mann, [22 May 1938], Klaus Mann Archive. MSM.38 AS to Renée Schwarzenbach-Wille, 25 May 1938. 190.8. Schwarzenbach Archives. ZBZ.39 Klaus Mann, 1 June 1938, Tagebücher.40 Medical history 44/5563, Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach 11 July–4 August 1938, Ludwig Binswanger estate, Tubingen University Archives. Cited in Alexis Schwarzenbach, Die Geborene, pp. 332–3.41 Alexis Schwarzenbach, Die Geborene, p. 333.42 Klaus Mann, 22 July 1938, Tagebücher.43 Klaus Mann, 1 June 1938, Tagebücher.44 ‘Die von Binswanger entwichene Annemarie.’ Thomas Mann, Sunday 14 August 1938, Tagebücher.45 ‘Zu Tische AMS verödeter Engel.’ Thomas Mann, Friday 9 September 1938, Tagebücher.46 AS letter to Anita Forrer, 12 September 1938. SLA.47 AS letter to Anita Forrer, 20 September 1938. SLA.48 AS letter to Anita Forrer, 16 November 1938. SLA.49 See her final letter to Claude Bourdet, 21 November 1938, Lettres à Claude Bourdet 1931–1938, p. 102.50 AS letter to Klaus Mann, end of January 1939, Wir werden es schon zuwege bringen, das Leben, p. 173.51 Ibid.52 Ruth Yorck von Wartenburg and Karl Vollmoeller correspondence, 1 February 1939, Karl Vollmoeller Archive. DLA.53 Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and his Kind, p. 338.54 Renée Schwarzenbach-Wille to Suzanne Öhman-Schwarzenbach, 3 March 1939. Cited in Alexis Schwarzenbach, Die Geborene, p. 343.55 Alexis Schwarzenbach, Die Geborene, pp. 345–6.56 Ella Maillart, The Cruel Way, p. 73.57 Duff Hart-Davis, Peter Fleming: A Biography, p. 135.58 AS letter to Alfred Wolkenberg, 4 January 1939, cited in All the Roads Are Open: The Afghan Journey, Afterword by Roger Perret, p. 124.59 AS letter to Klaus Mann, end of January 1939, Wir werden es schon zuwege bringen, das Leben, p. 173.60 AS letter to Ella Maillart, Easter Sunday [9 April] 1939, Alle Wege sind offen, p. 242.61 Ella Maillart, The Cruel Way, p. 1. Maillart disguises Annemarie behind the name Christina throughout – for the sake of clarity I have restored it.62 Ibid., pp. 2–3.63 AS photo caption: ‘Letzte Stunde in der Schweiz: Halt am Simplon’, June 1939. Original in English. SLA.64 ‘… mir eine Chance zu geben, die einer Reifeprüfung gleicht.’ AS to Erika Mann, June 14 [1939], Wir werden es schon zuwege bringen, das Leben, p. 87.65 Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942); Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World (1963); Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (1965).66 Ella Maillart, The Cruel Way, p. 14.67 Ibid., p. 17.68 Ibid., p. 18.69 Ibid., p. 62.70 AS, All the Roads Are Open, pp. 9–10.71 Ella Maillart, The Cruel Way, p. 14.72 Ibid., p. 33.73 AS to Erika Mann, June 14 [1939], Wir werden es schon zuwege bringen, das Leben, pp. 87–8.74 Ella Maillart, The Cruel Way, p. 199.75 Gertrude Bell, Persian Pictures, p. 182.76 AS, All the Roads Are Open, p. 15.77 Ella Maillart, The Cruel Way, p. 49.78 Ibid., p. 75.79 Ibid., pp. 81–2.80 Ibid., p. 85.81 AS, All the Roads Are Open, p. 26.82 AS, ‘Der Monat des Friedens’, National-Zeitung, 5 February 1940.83 Ella Maillart, The Cruel Way, p. 89.84 AS, ‘Der Monat des Friedens’, National-Zeitung, 5 February 1940.85 Ella Maillart, The Cruel Way, p. 162.86 Ibid., p. 92.87 Ibid., p. 112.88 Jane Dieulafoy (1851–1916), French archaeologist in Persia, was one of the first Western travellers to dress as a male in order to pass incognito in Muslim society.89 Ella Maillart, The Cruel Way, p. 117.90 Andreas Tobler, ‘Warum man ihnen keine Wahl ließ’, Sonntagszeitung.ch, 24 January 2021.91 AS, ‘Der Tschador’, Auf der Schattenseite, pp. 233–5.92 AS letter to Florianna Storrer-Madelung, 29 February 1938 [misdated?]. Storrer Archive. SLA.93 AS, ‘Aktuelles Afghanistan’, in Mitteilung der Ostschweizerischen Geographisch-Kommerziellen Gesellschaft (Hueber & Co., 1940).94 Ella Maillart, The Cruel Way, p. 194.95 Ibid., p. 174.96 Ibid., p. 193.97 AS to Anita Forrer, 24 August 1939, Alle Wege sind offen, 2021 edition, p. 254.98 AS, Kabul diary, 27/28 August, 1939, Carole Bonstein Archive, Geneva. See Dominique Laure Miermont’s note on the transcribing and bowdlerization of this text, Annemarie Schwarzenbach ou le mal d’Europe, pp. 395–6.99 AS, Kabul Diary, 30 August 1939, Carole Bonstein Archive, Geneva.100 AS, ‘Mobilisiert in Kabul’, National-Zeitung, 1 December 1939. SLA.101 AS, Kabul Diary, midnight, 2 September 1939, Carole Bonstein Archive, Geneva.102 Ella Maillart, The Cruel Way, p. 197.103 AS, Kabul Diary, 30 September 1939, Carole Bonstein Archive, Geneva.104 Dominique Laure Miermont, Annemarie Schwarzenbach ou le mal d’Europe, p. 271.105 AS, Kabul Diary, 25 October 1939, Carole Bonstein Archive, Geneva.106 See Roger Perret’s Afterword to Alle Wege sind offen, 2021 edition, p. 320.107 AS, All the Roads Are Open, p. 45.108 Ibid., p. 75.109 Ibid., p. 107.110 AS letter to Ella Maillart, 3 December 1939, Fonds Ella Maillart, Bibliothèque de Genève.111 Dated 11 December 1938. SLA.112 In Seamus Heaney’s translation ‘there are tears at the heart of things’. Seamus Heaney, Introduction to The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures, 2002, p. xv.113 Ella Maillart, The Cruel Way, p. 202.114 AS, All the Roads Are Open, pp. 113–14.115 AS, ‘Der Brand des Orazio’, National-Zeitung, 26 January 1940 and in Auf der Schattenseite, p. 246.116 AS, ‘Nach Westen’, Auf der Schattenseite, p. 255.117 Anna Seghers, Transit, translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo (New York: New York Review Books, 2013), p. 178.118 ‘All these tribes are assembled as democratically as the old Swiss cantons.’ AS, ‘Die Grenzen Afghanistans’, Zürcher Illustrierte, 29 November 1939. SLA. See also ‘Afghanistan, die Schweiz Asiens’, Zürcher Illustrierte, 2 May 1940, and numerous other articles on the subject.119 AS letters to Otto Kleiber, 20 December 1939 and 23 July 1940, Otto Kleiber Archive. BUL.
9
Running on Empty
All her life she had played with death, desperately trying to learn how to die.
Ruth Landshoff Yorck, ‘Annemarie’
Between Afghanistan and her final trip to the United States, Annemarie spent three months in Switzerland, weighing her options. Mother and daughter were at loggerheads. Renée’s allegiance to Germany was common knowledge among staff and neighbours. A former worker at Bocken remembered ‘not long after the war began, swastika graffiti appeared overnight on all the gateposts’.1 The decline of the family firm, exacerbated by the conflict, put its future in question, and impressed upon Annemarie the need to find, at age thirty-two, a regular income. At the end of January 1940, her grandmother trumpeted in her diary that Annemarie was drug-free, though Renée reserved judgement.2
She took time to organize and caption the photos she and Ella had taken on their road trip and to prepare articles in German and French for a range of Swiss publications. Among the photographers, it was a crowded field. German language outlets for Annemarie’s writing and photographs were confined to Switzerland, where magazines enjoyed a renaissance due to censorship across the border in Germany. ABC and Du published her work, as well as the photographs of Werner Bischof, Walter Bosshard and Paul Senn, photographers who brought the outside world into Swiss living rooms. Bosshard had traversed China and India since the early 1930s. Senn had chronicled social and political crises since labour protests in Geneva in 1932. France’s capitulation in June 1940 found Senn at Le Chauffour in Switzerland’s Jura Mountains, where 40,000 French troops were welcomed by the Jurassiens. The Swiss-born American photographer Robert Frank, whose portraits of Americans in the 1950s waited in the wings, descended from these pre-war socially minded photographers.3 There was no shortage of assignments Annemarie could have picked up on the home front, but instead she chose to escape once more.
Despite her success, Annemarie tended to think of reporting as provisional. Ella Maillart regarded Annemarie as at heart a poet, albeit a writer of poetic prose. The enemies of Annemarie’s promise – journalism, drugs and travel – seemed to have conspired against the longer, more sustained imagination required for fiction. She was only thirty-two, and might have looked back on a decade of increasingly fragmented and unsuccessful writings somewhat in a minor key. Like countless others on the boat to the United States, she might also have looked forward to a new start in the English-speaking world.
Having come full circle, she framed her Afghanistan journey to Klaus as ‘a need to end once and for all with a large part of my past’,4 a phrase sufficiently vague as to be meaningless. She hoped to work as a correspondent, perhaps in Scandinavia. There were plans for Anita Forrer and Annemarie to travel to America together. As it turned out, Anita travelled there alone and joined the Red Cross.5
Instead of following through on any of these plans, Annemarie took up with Baroness von Opel, whom she had known since 1935. ‘Annemarie was in Sils Maria. I was in St. Moritz. We couldn’t really avoid each other.’6 In March 1940 the intensity of her relationship with the Baroness changed and she found herself once again, as she had with Ria Hackin in Afghanistan in November and Dr. Favez in the Bellevue Clinic, the third person in someone else’s marriage. Baron Fritz Adam Hermann von Opel – ‘Rocket Fritz’, as he was known in the press – hailed from a German industrialist family that began developing cars at the turn of the twentieth century. In March 1929 General Motors bought Germany’s largest car manufacturer, and Fritz, an only child, inherited a fortune. Passionate about rocket propulsion, he spent his youth experimenting with speed – cars, gliders, motorcycles and boats. He married the actress and aviatrix Margot Löwenstein, née Sellnik, in 1929 and since 1933 they had lived mostly in Switzerland and had acquired Liechtenstein passports. Margot’s Jewish origin doubtless explains their expatriation but Fritz was also antipathetic to Hitler. The phoney war – Krieg ohne Krieg – was coming to an end by spring 1940 and they were considering moving to the United States.
