Rebel Angel, page 31
10
Heart of Darkness
I don’t know when this continual urge to escape becomes a real sickness and at what exact moment schizophrenia, base of all artistic action, is to be judged insanity.1
Portugal, like Switzerland, was neutral when war was declared and Salazar, Portugal’s dictator, now looked rather benign in comparison to his peers. He took care to maintain his country’s neutrality as ever more refugees spilled south following the Nazi rout of France during the summer of 1940. Lisbon was one of the few European ports where trans-Atlantic ships could dock, becoming not just a refugee ‘waiting room’, as Annemarie put it, but a clearing house for goods offloaded for distribution across the continent. Refugees, like freight, encountered a bureaucratic bottleneck and the city was rife with spies, consular personnel and representatives of relief organizations. The S.S. Siboney, on which Annemarie steamed from the Jersey docks, was chartered on the return voyage to assist Americans fleeing the war in Europe.
Putting into port on 10 February, Annemarie hadn’t intended to stay long but the newly-appointed Swiss chargé d’affaires in Lisbon was Henri Martin, an old friend from her time in Ankara a decade earlier. He introduced her to Red Cross delegates, leading to two articles in the NZZ, written at the behest of Martin and checked by Portuguese censors. Abandoning the by-line Clark, which she had used in the United States, henceforth she wrote under the name Clarac-Schwarzenbach. She remained in the city for three weeks, no doubt recuperating and enjoying the southern sun after the rigours of the East Coast winter.2 Her ability to pick up the pieces and write, to go about the world as normal after immense trauma, is both remarkable and dubious. Was she completely drug-free at this time? Apart from sleeping pills, quite likely. The nurse-minder had kept her on the straight and narrow on the voyage out. Was she off the booze? Harder to determine. She had been dissatisfied with her writing over the past year in the United States and habitually used alcohol to get going.3
Once again she had landed on her feet, armed with a wealth of connections and a readiness to lend her pen to the work in hand. She met the seventy-one-year-old writer Annette Kolb – they had first met in 1933 in Berlin. Perhaps it was Kolb, now stateless and without valid passport, Annemarie refers to in one of her articles: ‘Soon I’ll have to beg.’4 A week after making landfall, Annemarie wrote to her old mentor Carl Burckhardt in Geneva, offering her services to the Red Cross: ‘it would give me the right backing – I would like to travel to Egypt, Marseilles, or the Middle East in some capacity. But I was going to stay in Switzerland for the time being’. Anxious about being perceived as having ‘deserted’ the war, she saw herself as ‘the prodigal son returned’.5 Burckhardt and Annemarie met later in Geneva but the outcome of her offer remained inconclusive.
She conceived a project to travel to French Equatorial Africa where supporters of de Gaulle in Brazzaville provided troops and finance to the Free French movement. Annemarie planned to follow the war from the apparent backwater of Brazzaville and booked passage on the SS Colonial. Her well-meaning desire to be in Europe, just like her return from India a year earlier, had become side-tracked by a journey with tangential connection to the war. It did not occur to her that the wife of a Vichy diplomat in this theatre of competing forces might incur suspicion.
Meanwhile, she went home to Switzerland, an island of tranquillity in turbulent Europe. Switzerland, too, was concerned with maintaining its neutrality, effectively pursuing accommodation dressed up as resistance.6 The Swiss had ‘become specialists in the art of non-cooperation with tyranny’,7 which often segued into its opposite. Official neutrality could be overzealous, a display of correctness. In 1938 the Swiss requested German passports be stamped with the letter J, for Jewish, facilitating triage. By spring of 1941, a working relationship with the Nazis was in place in the border cantons. Exports from Basel’s chemical-pharmaceutical industry to Germany increased from 13.8 per cent at the beginning of the war to 30.8 per cent by war’s end. Geigy, for example, produced the polar red dye for the swastika flag while at the same time assuring its Nazi customers that its workforce was Jew-free.8 Since 1933 other Swiss pharmaceutical companies – Ciba, Sandoz – had fallen into step with Germany’s anti-semitic employment regulations. During the war both Roche and Geigy used forced labour – civilians from the occupied territories as well as prisoners of war – at their chemical plants at Grenzach near Basel.9 Only in recent years has historiography begun to win out over self-serving contemporary accounts.10
Alfred’s influence had often acted as a brake on Renée’s Medusa-like tug-of-war with Annemarie. With Alfred dead, his widow’s exhausted nerves could no longer handle her daughter’s volatility, her addictions, not to speak of her political sympathies. Rows about Annemarie’s supposed drug use began not long after her arrival at Bocken on 13 March. The three clinics and one insane asylum in New York spoke for themselves, as did the bills, despite Annemarie’s assurances to her mother and others that she was no longer taking morphine. Who to believe? The mother’s accusation had behind it a decade of failed treatment while Annemarie’s protestations had been aired before. Hasi undertook to finance Annemarie’s trip to Africa while no longer paying the rent on her house in Sils from family funds – 200 Swiss francs a month.11 ‘They put me very much under pressure’,12 she wrote in English to Ella. The frosty reception at Bocken, as well as the money, must have given added impetus: push and pull factors were in the balance.13 ‘I don’t really see what to do, except to go ahead with the African project which came up in Lisbon.’14 She stayed three days at Bocken and drove to Sils.
Given the dangers to Atlantic shipping, a search for glory glimmers behind Annemarie’s motivation to head to French Equatorial Africa.15 Careerism drove her towards ‘the brilliant war job as I hoped when I left the US a year ago’.16 Erika’s stint with the BBC in London and the Hackins’ ill-fated role in the French Resistance further fuelled Annemarie’s ambition. Before she left Switzerland, a copy of Carson’s Reflections in a Golden Eye arrived in the post, the dedication for Annemarie Schwarzenbach on the flyleaf. Though delighted to be its recipient, she considered her time in New York ‘a terrific, a painfully hurting defeat’.17 The African project gave her an opportunity to start afresh. Writing to Ella in the abstracted euphoric style that Annemarie had adopted since her hospitalization, she sees ‘clearly the prospect of a happier, steadier, more contented life’.18 On 10 April 1941, Clara Wille noted that Annemarie had been to lunch and was heading to Zurich in the afternoon to catch the train across a divided France.19
Annemarie had until now enjoyed unhindered passage, often first class on trans-Atlantic steamers, thanks to Swiss neutrality, her French diplomatic passport and the von Opels’ and her family’s largesse. Equipped with pith helmet, khaki shorts and mosquito repellent, she tackled the long, slow, fits-and-starts rail journey across France, through the zone libre, a journey she had often undertaken in her green Dodge Victory Brougham and Mercedes Mannheim. Now the local trains smelled of ‘Gitanes and newsprint, sometimes wine and goat cheese’. In a station buffet she ordered a hardboiled egg and bread, but sans ration card, the bread was taken from her. She traded Swiss chocolate for ration coupons with a couple of skiers. A four-hour stopover in Lyon allowed her to expedite letters and packages on behalf of the Red Cross, held up by the convoluted bureaucracy of France at war:
I was asleep when we pulled into Nîmes. Just in time, I heard the tannoy announce the name of the stop, grabbed my bags, and a young stranger helped me lug my cases onto the connecting train. A minute later, we pulled out in the direction of Narbonne.20
At Narbonne, changing trains again, she trundled south along the Vermillion Coast to Port Bou on the Spanish border, where countless escaping Jewish refugees had crossed the garrigue over the course of the previous year, and where Walter Benjamin had committed suicide six months earlier.
Back in Lisbon, waiting on visas, she spent the time in her room in the Lis Hotel writing articles. She had become adept at a kind of elegant hustling for assignments as testified by her correspondence over the years. Drumming up articles, she feared her career as a journalist had eclipsed the fiction writer. The month of April 1941 was typical of her prolific output: some ten features, with accompanying photographs, appeared in Swiss papers and magazines, on topics as diverse as Chaplin’s Great Dictator, the American army’s need for nurses, oil in Iraq, the Red Cross and the refugee crisis, as well as travel pieces about the United States and France.
Just before departure she learned of the fates of Ria and Joseph Hackin, her archaeologist friends encountered in Afghanistan.21 Steaming from Liverpool to India on a mission for de Gaulle, the Hackins were killed when their ship was torpedoed south-west of the Faroe Islands on 24 February 1941. On hearing the news, another archaeologist friend from Afghanistan, Jean Carl Meunié, committed suicide in London. Travel writer Robert Byron was also a casualty on the SS Jonathan Holt. ‘The fact that they are likely no longer alive has an almost petrifying knock-on effect on the prospect of my own, perhaps imminent death, and yet unignorable.’22
*
On 17 May 1941, she boarded the Portuguese SS Colonial, flying a neutral flag and chock full of refugees: Belgian and Dutch mothers with children resettling to the ends of the earth, some to the Congo, some navigating the Cape of Good Hope to South Africa, to new lives even further afield. While German women were being ushered towards Kinder, Küche und Fabrik, these refugees had lost everything – house, husband, homeland. This was Annemarie’s fourth shipboard voyage in a year: Bombay to Genoa in the teeth of war with her car in the hold, two trans-Atlantic crossings paid for by others and now, drifting along the Barbary Coast, her thoughts plumbed the whither and the wherefore, as they tended to do on deck. Her shipboard musings, part cabin fever, part war reports, show her knack of assembling a thousand words of observation, often riffing on orientalism and the exotic. At thirty-three, she was an old salt. When the Colonial dropped anchor at Funchal on Madeira, she was taken by the island’s tropical landscape, and produced in short order three articles on the first leg of her journey for two different papers. Barbary gave way to the Gold and Ivory Coasts, the magic names a swag-bag of colonial plunder. On her birthday, the Colonial crossed the Tropic of Cancer; flying fish and the Southern Cross hove into view.
