Rebel Angel, page 8
A sequence of photos taken by Vollmoeller on this occasion shows Annemarie in white drawstring pants and linen shirt, looking boyish, with Landshoff mooning at her. (Other photos in the archive show Landshoff nude, as well as a topless sequence taken of Josephine Baker; Vollmoeller was quite the shutterbug.)20 Among those present were the photographer and model Doris von Schönthan, who later joined the French Resistance, Ursula von Zedlitz, half-English, half-German translator and writer, and the Princesse de Polignac herself. This was a smart, eclectic sisterhood. Returning via Munich, Annemarie unwisely spilled the beans to Emmy Krüger – who might be expected to be in awe of the Wagner connection but whose reaction no doubt was conveyed to Bocken:
Ruth Landshoff and Annemarie, photographed by Karl Vollmoeller, Palazzo Vendramin, Venice, September 1930
Deutsches Literaturarchiv (DLA) Marbach
She sullies her parents’ name in this filth! Was in Venice with Vollmoeller and his ladies – and the shamelessness of the goings-on made my blood freeze. She is sick – insane, as I said years ago – I see no good future for this child. I do pity Renée and Alfred.21
Annemarie herself told her mother, the parents drew a line in the sand and she was grounded for the duration. While her behaviour may have been in question, it was the infamous reputation of the principal players that was at issue. In a letter to Erika Mann, whom Annemarie had just met in Munich, she gave her account of her mother’s reaction:
I told Mama all about Venice, since it’s pointless anyway … Mama threw everything back at me, namely, that if I continue to have anything to do with Vollmoeller and R. (as was the previous bone of contention), my parents will cut me off, that I am also degrading myself and – above all, that I hand a personal triumph (cue violin strings) to those in the Palace for having gone there to spite my parents’ express opposition.22
This, of course, is a standard parent–child dispute about disreputable friends leading youth astray. Nonetheless, a breach had been opened and the financial screws tightened. Annemarie was beginning to encounter like-minded friends – politically devil-may-care, sexually polymorphous, reputationally dubious, connected to the moneyed end of the arts – who would prove helpful to her writing ambitions but also peel back the respectable veneer of heterosexual life. All of them in the coming years would feel the pinch of fascism and be obliged to seek the path of exile. The good-girl destiny mapped out for Annemarie had taken a turn towards high bohemianism, Weimar decadence and political resistance.
*
Returning from Venice via Munich in September 1930, Annemarie met Erika Mann for the first time. Klaus, Erika’s brother, also became a good friend to Annemarie some months later. Annemarie was twenty-three and had been writing fiction with increasing seriousness since she was seventeen. Her association with the Mann siblings precipitated Friends of Bernhard, a first novel written quickly in the same year and published in June 1931 to some acclaim. The Manns constituted her most enduring friendships in a lifetime of emotional ups and downs, when many were uprooted and exiled or grew tired of her rich-girl antics and stormy personal weather.
She introduced herself in a letter to Erika as an aspiring writer and was invited to call at the Mann villa on Poschinger Strasse. The siblings had been in the limelight for a number of years, basking in reflected glory from their father, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in December 1929. Annemarie must have known too, from Ruth Landshoff and perhaps from other mutual acquaintances on the daisy chain, that Erika was lesbian and made no bones about it. ‘I didn’t know her before. She turned up in Munich and contacted me to arrange to meet. She wanted to be a writer and was interested in my brother Klaus’s and my writing, and in her own as well, and wanted to talk about work. And so she came to my parents’ house, Thomas and Katia Mann.’23
Thomas Mann, for his part, noted in his diary following Annemarie’s visit: ‘Strangely, if she were a boy, then she would have to be considered extraordinarily pretty’, a comment typical of his gender-bending and of his own interest in boys. Mann was being fêted as the grand homme, the representative voice of his fractious country, a role he was always happy to fulfil with adroit grandiloquence.
Erika and Klaus Mann, 1927. Photo by Edward Wasou
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The Manns – parents and six children – were variously Bavarian bohemians, ‘villa proletariat’, or thoroughly bourgeois in habits of body and mind. They were a long way from the Prussian militarism of the Wille side of Annemarie’s family. In the villa that Thomas Mann had built from the proceeds of his best-selling Buddenbrooks, each child had a personalized silver napkin ring. Erika was almost three years older than Annemarie and had behind her a half-career in the theatre, a spurious marriage to the rising actor of the day, Gustav Gründgens, and a harum-scarum world tour with her brother, in the course of which they had met the glamour-pusses of German Hollywood, traded on family celebrity, and finangled a book contract. She had the dark shiny Pringsheim eyes on her mother’s Jewish side of the family, a dramatic chic mannishness and her own car. We get a glimpse of her allure for Annemarie in a short film clip dating from 1928, in which this Dichterkind promotes a forthcoming trip to Morocco, courtesy of Hapag-Lloyd Cruises who were footing the bill.24 Dressed as a ship’s guide or bellhop, in shirt, tie and mariner’s cap, Erika radiates charm; winning face, the suit a size too big like a boy at high school graduation. At the time Annemarie fell for her, Erika was making a name for herself as a writer of articles and children’s stories. Klaus also wrote, with a knack for publicity, but with more depth and verve than his sister. Jean Cocteau, knowing a thing or two about shallowness himself, described their posturing as ‘a drama of frivolity’.25 They were a kind of German literary brat pack.
That there was more to their meeting than dinner with the parents and a chat about writing is clear from the correspondence. The young people went to the Simplicissimus cabaret in Munich, the centre of bohemian life and a place to let one’s hair down,26 with Fred Pasternek, a mutual friend from Zurich, joining them.27 Munich was an artistic and royal city, a Renaissance court gathering the peoples of the south-west, Bavaria and its hinterland. As V.S. Pritchett puts it, the German language here ‘has less of the sergeant-major in it’.28 Munich became a key stopping-off place for Annemarie over the next two years. She became acquainted with the writers, theatre people and painters around the Mann family. Upper Bavaria, with its lakes and proximity to the Austrian ski stations, was only half a day’s drive from Switzerland.
Back home in Bocken, Annemarie had found her match. She addressed Erika as ‘My big brother Eri, whom I love so much.’29 This cosy acolyte vein continued in subsequent letters where it is clear that Annemarie has found refuge from rows with her parents sparked by the Venice visit. ‘I talked to Father. Your long and kind-hearted letter helped me to put my case reasonably well. It was still very bitter.’30 While Annemarie gave her parents her side of the story, Erika seems to have intervened on her behalf with Emmy Krüger in Munich. ‘Too bad you are not here now to say a few words in my favour. You did that so well with Emmy Krüger – really fabulously decent of you.’31 The Schwarzenbach parents exercised tough love and forbade Annemarie from travelling for the winter.
Annemarie was at pains to present herself to Erica as industrious. ‘Today I’ve already written ten pages of what might become a novel, if I have enough patience and talent.’32 The novel, Friends of Bernhard, grew apace and was completed in a two-month burst of intense writing. She saw it as an amplification of her Paris stories about young people café-hopping around the Left Bank and as a token of new-found friendship, an ambisexual roman à clef. Leaving the university library at nine or ten in the morning, she repaired to her father’s quiet Zurich office where she wrote ‘two, four, six hours at a stretch’.33 Annemarie saw her short novel echoing Cocteau’s Les enfants terribles. Signing off her letters to Erika with ‘Your child A’, she had found an alternative family, allies against her biological one. Cocteau’s notion of youth living apart from parents, in a licentious clique, made its way into the new novel, and reflected Annemarie’s own desire to put some distance between herself and her family:
I think the boy Bernhard will be a similar ‘type’, but treated with more care, since he is just 17 and a typical ‘younger brother’, also he will at least have no opportunity to strike an attitude, which in the Parisian stories came off so suspiciously girlish (and, as some people noted, ‘perverse’ – as if such a loaded word could be bandied about so carelessly!)34
Annemarie sees herself as a child, the young brother, to Erika’s older role; there is yearning but not much contentment. This gives pause to speculate, as Annemarie’s first biographer does, how fulfilling the relationship may have been between the two young people. Erika had behind her one brief marriage to Germany’s premier gay actor, Gustaf Gründgens, and another unconsummated one to England’s gay poet, W.H. Auden, coming up. How deep did Annemarie’s affair with Erika go? Lacking Erika’s side of the correspondence, we don’t know how reciprocated nor how embodied Annemarie’s feelings were.
A month into the two women’s friendship, Annemarie had arranged a speaking engagement for Erika and Klaus at Zurich’s Federal Polytechnic School in December, for an honorarium of 300 Swiss francs plus travel expenses. Writing from the student union, telephoning Erika, using fellow student Fred Pasternek as go-between, she was able to keep her connection with the Manns alive while being confined to Zurich.
Her correspondence with Erika provides a glimpse of a fairly packed day-to-day life. In October she entertained three Spanish princelings for lunch at Bocken and returned with them in her Victory to university lectures, escorted by police outriders.35 On a later occasion she was stopped because of no lights and she took pride in being addressed by the policeman as ‘young man’. She was nervous about her first public reading at the end of October at the Lyceum Club in Zurich, a women’s club. Later in the term she drove up to the Dolder Grand for coffee with German ice-skating champion Thea Frenssen, finding common cause as women in a man’s world: ‘sometimes the only woman braving it out among fifteen men … as she does’.36 Frau Frenssen appears later in January ‘frightfully graceful’ on the skating rink at Suvretta-Haus in St. Moritz, where Annemarie joined her. Swooning after a duchess at the races in Geneva in November, Annemarie (riding a horse called Lady Lough) gives way to camp banter.37 Her letters occasionally provide glimpses of how lesbian desire operated. The gilded world of hotels, celebrity and royalty, harking back to the nineteenth century, living on at the races in the twentieth, is at odds with her later image as a rebel defending the downtrodden. These were not the horses of Franz Marc’s Der Blaue Reiter movement but the old Wilhelminian nags out for a late run before being put to pasture. Annemarie sits astraddle diverging worlds; her letters to Erika were written at Bocken and from the student union, but also from the Baur en Ville Hotel in Zurich and the Beau-Rivage Hotel in Geneva. While the Mann siblings, too, enjoyed a gilded youth, it was no match for Annemarie’s. Their nickname for her was Princess Miro.
Thea Frenssen and Annemarie, Bocken 1932
Courtesy of Zentralbibliothek Zürich
Erika’s first two-day visit to Bocken passed off well with Renée. The daughter of the Nobel laureate knew how to comport herself and had her feet more on the ground than Annemarie, who was inclined to be flighty. The Manns gave their by-now standard talk on young German writers, with which they had regaled the American lecture circuit the year before. Annemarie was aware at this second meeting in the flesh that her ardour was not matched by Erika’s, whose girlfriend at this time was the Munich actress Therese Giehse. While Annemarie initially wanted exclusive claim on Erika’s affections, the more pragmatic and older Erika let her down gently – by August 1931, Annemarie mentions ‘Frau Giehse’ in the correspondence.
Shortly before meeting Annemarie, Klaus had been rehearsing his play The Siblings at the Münchner Kammerspiele, where it opened and quickly flopped in November 1930. Annemarie had wanted to travel to Munich for the première on 12 November but her father kiboshed the idea.38 Klaus, too, was gay and grew close to Annemarie even as Erika was pulling away. He had just turned twenty-three, and already had behind him an aborted engagement to Pamela Wedekind, daughter of the playwright and a childhood friend. He had published short stories, children’s stories, a novel about Alexander the Great and a play featuring lesbian lovers. The quintessential flâneur and littérateur, Klaus was at home in Europe’s cities by night and day. ‘Bliss it may have been then to be alive’, writes Anthony Heilbut, ‘to prowl the world’s capitals in pursuit of drugs and pretty boys, to party with Garbo and commune with Gide.’39 Klaus’s description of his youth in Munich, Berlin and Paris gives a flavour of the libertine atmosphere that drew Annemarie to the Mann children and allowed her to feel more at home with them than in gnomic Zurich:
… we want narcotics and kisses to forget our wretchedness. Let’s go to bed with each other! Or fool around in the parks if there are no beds. Boys with girls, boys with boys, girls with girls, men with girls and boys, women with men or boys or girls or tamed little panthers – what’s the difference? Let’s embrace each other! Let’s dance!40
Klaus’s rackety life in hotels on both sides of the Atlantic became a model for Annemarie, whose own life was soon to turn peripatetic. He epitomizes the revolt against the generation of the fathers, in aesthetic, political and sexual matters, characterized by inter-war youth, as historian Peter Gay has identified: ‘When we think of Weimar, we think of modernity in art, literature, and thought; we think of the rebellion of sons against fathers: Dadaists against art, Berliners against beefy philistinism.’41 Annemarie was ripe for this agenda and her encounters with Erika and Klaus in Munich and Zurich accentuated a revolt already underway. As power shifted from Weimar to the National Socialists, these children of the revolution were instrumental in combating fascism and lending their voices to the German diaspora in opposition to Hitler.
*
Annemarie’s supervisor for her doctoral thesis in history42 was Karl Meyer, a specialist in the Middle Ages attached to the university and to Zurich’s technical institute, ETH. He held firmly against National Socialism, at the time growing contentious across the border in Bavaria. Her chosen area of research was the history of the Upper Engadine in the Middle Ages and the early Modern Era and she went about it with typical zeal. She knew the region well from her school days in Fetan but also from frequent visits to St. Moritz. While she researched in the cantonal archives in Chur, the geographer Albrecht Haushofer helped with maps and Professor Burckhardt loaned her books.
The small community under study was the Romansh-speaking Rhaetian people of the canton of Graubunden in south-east Switzerland. Annemarie took issue with the one-sided view of the Engadine as part of the German sphere of influence, seeing it as a cultural crossroads between Latin and Germanic cultures, what we might now call a ‘liminal space’ – the Engadine mountain world literally straddling Roman limes. In contesting a German-centric view, she was up against political nostrums – Volk, Rassenkunde (the pseudo-science of race) – then gaining currency among faculty and students in German universities. Five years after the Locarno Treaty which had settled national borders, a disgruntlement with foreigners deciding its fate had resurfaced in Germany.
She had sufficient belief in Burckhardt’s judgement and influence to show him her early stories and sketches – a confidence not misplaced since Burckhardt forwarded her work to the editor of Amalthea. This Vienna-based publishing house at the time acted as a counter-offensive to the rise of Bolshevik influence. By 6 February 1931, she knew her novel Friends of Bernhard had been accepted and slated for publication in June.
Alfred’s grounding was no longer in force. Staying once more at Suvretta-Haus, she expected Vollmoeller to be in his usual residence at Badrutt Palace in St. Moritz, but he was ill. Ruth Landshoff had married David Graf Yorck von Wartenburg in December 1930, a society marriage much put about in the magazines, though, curiously, Annemarie makes no mention of it.
Her dissertation submitted and university requirements met in April 1931, Annemarie had reached the end of her studies. One of her last assignments was on Georg Trakl, an Austrian poet who had, like Annemarie, a troubled relationship with drugs and died of a cocaine overdose in a military hospital at the beginning of the First World War, age twenty-six. Annemarie had moved into Zurich in order to better concentrate on her work for her finals. As light relief she walked in the garden and read Thomas Mann’s essays. She drove to Munich with Valerie Korrbrunner, from there to Paris with Hanna Kiel, both of them staying somewhat indisposed at the Hotel Matignon, and then south to the Riviera for a long weekend to meet up with Klaus Mann who was enjoying the late spring weather. Her years of wanderlust had begun.
*
The Mann siblings were under contract to write The Riviera Book in the Piper travel series, capitalizing on their knowledge of the newly fashionable south of France.43 When Korrodi showed Annemarie the ‘sulphur yellow’ cover illustration by Walter Trier, he had enough confidence in her to ask her to co-write the proposed Swiss volumes of this new automobile-friendly guidebook. Annemarie quickly took to the travel writing genre, which she would make her own over the coming decade. Hanging around Suzie’s Bar in Bandol at Pentecost and in Sanary-sur-Mer, she wrote ‘Brief von der Côte d’Azur’44 (Letter from the Côte d’Azur) which appeared in the NZZ in June. She tried out a Sunday supplement style, name-dropping and trend-spotting, presenting a chic Riviera for her readership.
