Rebel Angel, page 9
In Sanary, beginning to become a watering hole for the German anti-Nazi diaspora, she met car enthusiast and young writer Sybille Bedford – then known as Sybille von Schoenebeck. Bedford describes the exhilaration of being alive with wheels at the end of the third decade of the twentieth century:
Cars were cheap enough, manageable enough, worked well enough to be bought and used with insouciance. One could take a chum, a girl, a suitcase, set out on a fine morning, start in the cool of night, comme le coeur vous en dise. … Suddenly there was choice; the world had opened up, even the world twenty miles beyond one’s doorstep.45
Futurism and speed defined the new decade. Annemarie’s life was beginning to pick up momentum, shuttling between Paris, Zurich, Venice and Nice. Klaus Mann’s novel Treffpunkt im Unendlichen (1932) – ‘Vanishing Point’ – written quickly in the summer of 1931, introduces a character called Annemarie. The narrator first spots her in a carriage of the Berlin–Paris express:
The young girl was called Annemarie and was apparently heading to Paris to train as a fashion illustrator. She had been brought up by an aunt who had tried to palm her off – the girl’s parents had disappeared in South America – and had left her with a monthly allowance of one hundred and fifty marks.46
The girl crosses his path again a year later, at the end of the novel, in the Dôme café in Montparnasse:
He noticed she had become leaner in the face, her mouth fuller, and also more tarted up than before. Her watery-blue eyes were brightly shadowed – dove-grey shadows, thought Sebastian. The grey dress somewhat tight and rather worn. But the bright red neckerchief set it off jauntily. ‘She has learned’, thought Sebastian. ‘Yes indeed. She’s gone to bed, in the meantime, with quite a few men, some for money, others for pleasure. My guess is about twenty or thirty. Last time I met her, she was still a virgin …’.47
Klaus’s fictional Annemarie is a cypher for change, for the frenzy of the Weimar interlude. They drink a few Pernods and end up in a dancehall in the rue de Lappe. She has learned to drink cherry brandies and cognacs. She beds a sailor. There was a vogue among women in the 1920s for the marine look, as Sybille Bedford recalled: ‘she wore sailor trousers, and a little scarlet singlet that left bare the back and the athletic arms, shells on her ears and more shells about her neck’.48 In planning what to wear for the Munich carnival in February, Annemarie informed Erika that a sailor suit ‘is decidedly my favourite suit for such occasions and the costume most suitable for any eventuality!!’49
Klaus wasn’t the only writer at the time rendering Annemarie in fiction, an indication of her effect on men and women alike. In Die Goldene Horde (1931), Wilhelm Speyer imagines her as a fifteen-year-old runaway from school called Annemarie, who joins a travelling circus as a performer. Richard, a classmate, is charged with finding her:
A year ago, she had been a rather unremarkable schoolgirl whom nobody paid any attention to … a petite child, nimble and unpretentious; there was a slight oriental cast to her complexion that suited the circus; black, closely cropped hair but not too short, parted on the side.50
A second Speyer novel, Sommer in Italien (1932), captures a more overtly lesbian figure. The narrator and his friend Dorothy encounter a young writer of unsettling beauty, ‘a lovely Sappho adept’ together with a brother and sister nicknamed ‘the children’, who entertain the company with rapid-fire, sharply enunciated repartee: ‘they worshipped at the altar of the clipped syllable, to which they paid divine service’. The witty infamous siblings are clearly Erika and Klaus, who affected this manner of speaking, and the attractive lesbian is Annemarie in this roman à clef. Speyer fell under her charm until he too realized that she wasn’t interested.
Returning to Bocken from her French travels in mid-June, Annemarie became embroiled in another parental row. In Bavaria the National Socialists were on the march and squabbling with Communists. The Nazis were anathema to Annemarie’s new friends, many of whom came from assimilated Jewish families, whereas Renée’s politics had become emboldened. She had followed Hitler’s rise through the Munich beer halls and was largely sympathetic to his message of restoring German might following the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. Like many genteel Nazis, Renée tempered her views where the violence and excesses of Hitler’s followers were concerned, disapproving of their coarse Jew-baiting. Her accusation of ‘moral depravity’51 levelled at Annemarie at this time was no doubt coloured by politics but also showed Renée turning a blind eye to the larger depravity gaining ground across the border. ‘Where do I belong? Why don’t Papa or Mama actually speak to me?’52 was Annemarie’s response to these recriminations. She took refuge with Erika, holidaying at Walchensee in the Bavarian Alps, where politics was very much on the menu and where most likely Annemarie first met Erika’s girlfriend Therese Giehse. The writer Bruno Frank, a neighbour and friend of the Mann family, was also there. Renée became infuriated at the leftist, Jewish and lesbian company her daughter was keeping. Annemarie’s letter home flaunts a certain defiant tone, mentioning Frank’s view that Nazi politics was ‘to blame’53 for the recent brawls in Bavaria. The knives were out.
*
Begun in September of the previous year and finished in two months, Freunde um Bernhard (Friends of Bernhard) was published in spring 1931 by Almathea Verlag. Annemarie’s letter to Albrecht Haushofer downplays its completion:
… only a thick manuscript of a short novel, which I’m not sure you would be all that interested in: adolescent characters, blunt and ‘human’ in their needs, insecure and immature they certainly are.54
Despite this modesty, she was anxious about its reception. Annemarie sketched her characters for Erika: ‘The youngster Gert, cowardly, insecure and impressionable. Christina and her handsome brother Leon – I wonder if you will like Christina, she’s quite a strange creature – unscrupulous but forgivable … I think my deepest sympathy goes out to Gert, this cowardly, hideous boy.’55 Bernhard’s friends are arty, willowy young men, feisty women and protective adults. Just turned seventeen, he has the face of a child, and is a music student in Paris whose favourite composer is Bach.
The setting is the Latin Quarter, with excursions to Berlin and Lugano, the way-stations of the young, idle rich. Annemarie’s bright studios and hazy bars seem a bohemian leftover from a nineteenth-century novel, unreal and already out of date by the end of the années folles, with their burnt sugar smell of ‘Crêpes Suzette’.56 Bernhard’s friends talk about love but the novel’s englamoured relationships don’t succumb to passion and remain curiously sexless; there’s no oil paint on the sheets. The novel recalls Klaus Mann’s first play, Anja and Esther, about the polymorphously perverse affections of four boys and girls loosely based on his sister Erika, Pamela Wedekind, Ricki Hallgarten and himself. Annemarie’s young characters are similarly self-regarding, cushioned by art and money.
While all her characters are young, they don’t quite break free of their autobiographical moorings. Following a row about who’s got the most talent, Gert returns to Berlin and the siblings head to Florence. Gert begins to reminisce about their time in the south, evoking chianti bottles, donkeys and hotel balconies:
In an osteria smelling of olive oil and salami, they had grilled fish. That night Leon drank a lot of wine. The straw-covered bottle sat on the table, the cloth stained. They were sitting out on the terrace and street sounds rose from below. A cat roamed the tables with a mewling cry and they slipped him pieces of bread and pasta and Gert took him in his arms and stroked his marmalade fur.57
In Paris, Bernard feels abandoned by his friends and by the older somewhat louche men and women who have taken him under their wing. Betsy, an American in Europe and a musician like him, is heading home, as many did when the bottom had fallen out of the economy in 1929. In the novel’s final pages Bernhard wanders a Latin Quarter quay alone, observing the schoolboys whose ranks he has now left:
It must be five, class over, a tide of little boys in black school smocks crossed the junction noisily, their grimy berets sitting well back on small heads, on a shock of dark mussed hair. They whistle and throw stones. A few knots of quieter boys make their way, chatting among themselves like the middle schoolers they are. They’re pallid, grey-skinned around the eyes. Bernhard watches them as they go.58
Erika pointed out to Annemarie the novel’s similarity with André Gide’s Counterfeiters: ‘You must be right, but it must have been subconscious, since I haven’t read The Counterfeiters for many years. And now I see that it has a character called Bernard. Oh oh!’59
Ruth Landshoff summed up this first novel’s reception:
Her first book was published and got benevolent notices in Austria and Germany and rapturous ones in Switzerland. In that book only a few passages showed her dignified and delightful prose. Most of it was about the intricate pattern of difficulties among a group of certain young people who most probably were fashioned after real life persons. Everyone was terribly sensitive.60
The ‘clicking latch of a roman à clef ’, as Julian Barnes calls it, is heard only by those in the know, and time throws the key away. Annemarie’s young people have been let loose in the props room and are trying on the costumes. The camped-up transvestite quality of her characters recalls girls playing princes and courtiers in a school performance. She had found a way to write herself into men or boys who liked other boys or who were indeterminate. Women dressing as men had long been a way to gain entrance to the wider world: it provided a hitherto forbidden entrée to Georges Sand; when nineteenth-century female factory workers discovered that male workers were paid double the wages of women, they disguised themselves accordingly; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando enacts the same conceit. Colette, Missy, Marlene Dietrich and Mae West all played with such theatrical gender-bending. Areti Georgiadou, Annemarie’s biographer, picks up this motif of disguise, of drag:
The literary device of the androgynous young protagonist or narrator allows the author to insinuate herself without having to pretend to herself as a woman. Their very boyishness gives them licence to behave as the author wishes and, though ostensibly male, they never become virile. They remain young, innocent and sexually indeterminate, representing an unfallen state – an idealized child as an incarnation of utopia, an expression of the desire for original purity.61
Annemarie before driving to Berlin, 19 September 1931. Photo by Renée Schwarzenbach
Courtesy of Zentralbibliothek Zürich
By August 1931 Annemarie was well underway with her next book, titled Autumn Departure, a manuscript that has been lost. In the same month she spent two days in Salzburg with Erika and worked in a breezy house style on the Piper Guide to Switzerland. Professor Burckhardt proposed some research work in Berlin, giving an air of legitimacy to Annemarie’s move there in September. It was a city that had been in her sights for some time.62 Renée agreed to let her go on condition that she stay at a cousin’s house in Frohnau. She photographed her departing daughter with one foot on the running board, hand on the car door handle, ready for the road. Dr. Annemarie Schwarzenbach at twenty-three is wearing her good-girl outfit – sleeveless v-neck sweater over a white blouse, wrap-around skirt covering the knees, sheer stockings, Mary-Janes with Cuban heels and a narrow strap, not yet dusty from driving. She could be heading off to the convent but instead she is a young novelist with her sights set on Berlin.
Notes
1 ‘Annemarie’ included in Klatsch, Rhum und klein Feuer, Ruth Landshoff-Yorck Archive. HGARC.2 Ibid.3 Published in NZZ, 13 October 1929. SLA.4 Published in NZZ, 22 November 1929. SLA.5 AS to Dominique Schlumberger, 25 November 1929. SLA.6 AS letter to Jacqueline Nougarède, 22 September 1929. SLA.7 Claude Bourdet letter to his mother, Catherine Pozzi, 6 June 1930, cited in Lettres à Claude Bourdet (1931–1938), p. 6.8 Claude Bourdet papers, cited in Dominique Laure Miermont, Annemarie Schwarzenbach ou le mal d’Europe, pp. 56–7.9 Emmy Krüger in her diary mentions Annemarie in connection with Vollmoeller as early as 28 June 1929, Emmy Krüger Archive. MLM.10 AS letter to Dominique Schlumberger, 22 January 1930. SLA.11 As she was in 1927, by the photographers Zander and Labisch, a photo which resurfaced to mark the centenary of the 1920s on the front page of Die Zeit, 23 January 2020.12 ‘Autobiography’, pp. 116 and 172. HGARC.13 ‘Annemarie’, pp. 1–2, text in English by Ruth Landshoff-Yorck, Ruth Landshoff-Yorck Archives. Included in Klatsch, Ruhm und kleine Feuer, p. 161. HGARC.14 AS to Ernst Merz, 6 January 1929. Merz Archive. SLA.15 Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Eine Frau zu sehen (Zurich: Kein & Aber, 2008), p. 1.16 Ibid., p. 6.17 ‘Annemarie’, p. 4. Ruth Landshoff-Yorck Archive. HGARC.18 ‘Autobiography’, p. 201. HGARC.19 Géza von Cziffra, Kauf dir einen bunten Luftballon: Erinnerungen an Götter und Halbgötter (Munich: Herbig, 1975), p. 89.20 Ruth Landshoff Archive. DLA. See also Jan Burger, et al., Im Schattenreich der wilden Zwanziger: Fotografien von Karl Vollmoeller aus dem Nachlass von Ruth Landshoff-Yorck (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2017).21 Emmy Krüger diary, 27 September 1930. Emmy Krüger Archive. MLM.22 AS letter to Erika Mann, [early October 1930], Erika Mann Archive. MLM.23 Erika Mann deposition, 20 November 1934, Erika Mann file, Zurich City Police, V.E. c. 63, Folder 341, Zurich City Archives. Cited in Alexis Schwarzenbach, Die Geborene, p. 274.24 Ein Reisefilm unter der Führung von Erika Mann: Werbefilm für die Hapag-Lloyd 1928, Austrian Film Museum, Vienna.25 Cited in Frederic Spotts, Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann, p. 258.26 Elisabeth Tworek, Literarisches München zur Zeit von Thomas Mann, pp. 32–3.27 AS letter to Erika Mann, [8 December 1930], Erika Mann Archive. MLM.28 V.S. Pritchett, At Home and Abroad, p. 177.29 AS letter to Erika Mann, 20 October 1930, Erika Mann Archive. MLM.30 AS letter to Erika Mann, 15 October 1930, Erika Mann Archive. MLM.31 AS letter to Erika Mann, [early October 1930], Wir werden es schon zuwege bringen, das Leben, p. 19.32 Ibid., [September/October 1930], p. 17.33 Ibid., 20 November 1930, p. 34.34 Ibid., 20 October 1930, pp. 23–4.35 Ibid., pp. 26–7. The princelings were Alfonso (b. 1907), Jaime (b. 1908) and little Gonzalo (b. 1914).36 Ibid., 8 December 1930, pp. 38–9.37 Ibid., [16 November 1930], pp. 29–30.38 Ibid., 15 October 1930, Wir werden es schon zuwege bringen, das Leben, pp. 21–2.39 Anthony Heilbut, Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature, p. 442.40 Klaus Mann, The Turning Point, p. 86.41 Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, p. xiii.42 Prior to 1955, this could be achieved in seven semesters at Zurich University.43 Erika Mann and Klaus Mann, Das Buch von der Riviera, published in 1931 and still in print.44 AS, ‘Brief von der Côte d’Azur’, 28 June 1931 in the NZZ. SLA.45 Sybille Bedford, As it Was: Pleasures, Landscapes and Justice (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990), p. 9.46 Klaus Mann, Treffpunkt im Unendlichen, p. 18.47 Ibid., p. 205.48 Sybille Bedford’s A Compass Error (London: Daunt Books, 2011), p. 44.49 AS letter to Erika Mann, 25 January 1931, Wir werden es schon zuwege bringen, das Leben, p. 45.50 Wilhelm Speyer, Die Goldene Horde, p. 105.51 AS letter to Erika Mann, 18 August 1931, Erika Mann Archive. MLM.52 AS letter to Erika Mann, [August 1931], Wir werden es schon zuwege bringen, das Leben, p. 56.53 AS letter to Renée Schwarzenbach-Wille, [June 1931]. 190.8. Schwarzenbach Archives. ZBZ.54 AS letter to Albrecht Haushofer, 30 November 1930. SLA.55 AS letter to Erika Mann, 20 November 1930, Wir werden es schon zuwege bringen, das Leben, pp. 32–3.56 AS, Freunde um Bernhard, p. 97.57 Ibid., p. 170.58 Ibid., p. 176.59 AS letter to Erika Mann, May 1931, Wir werden es schon zuwege bringen, das Leben, p. 52.60 ‘Annemarie’, a text in English by Ruth Landshoff-Yorck, Ruth Landshoff-Yorck Archive. HGARC.61 Areti Georgiadou, Das Leben zerfetzt sich mir, p. 52.62 ‘Seit ich von Berlin weg bin, schlafe ich täglich einige Stunden länger.’ AS letter to Hans Schwarzenbach, 7 May [1931]. 201.2. Schwarzenbach Archives. ZBZ.
4
Closet of Selves
‘Well, really, darling’, she said, because I was clearly puzzled, ‘if it’s not about a couple of old bull-dykes, what the hell is it about?’1
Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
The premiere of a steamy lesbian boarding school drama, Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform), took place at the Gloria Palast in Berlin on the evening of 27 November 1931. The director of its all-female cast, Leontine Sagan, had pulled off a first that still resonates with a queer cinema audience a hundred years later. The setting is a school in Potsdam for the daughters of Prussian army officers and nobles. Fourteen-year-old motherless new girl Manuela von Meinhardis falls for a beautiful teacher, Frau von Bernburg. The teacher crosses a line by giving the girl one of her petticoats; pash becomes passion. A school performance turns to anarchy when the servants spike the punch and Manuela drunkenly declares her love. The film’s psychodrama ends with Manuela’s attempted suicide foiled by last-minute schoolgirl solidarity.
Christa Winsloe, Baroness von Hatvany, a Munich-based friend of the Mann family and well known in the lesbian subculture of both cities, wrote the successful play on which the film was based. Erika Mann had a minor part in the film. The leading actress who played the besotted teen, twenty-three-year-old Hertha Thiele, recalled half a century later:
The whole of Mädchen in Uniform was set in the Empress Augusta boarding school, where Winsloe was educated. Actually there really was a Manuela who remained lame all of her life after she threw herself down the stairs. She came to the premiere of the film. I saw her from a distance, and at the time Winsloe told me, ‘The experience is one which I had to write from my heart’. Winsloe was a lesbian. She was not even sixteen when she married Baron von Hatvanyi.2
