My publisher diehard asks me questions about Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and my book about her, The Buoyancy of the Craft.
Herat, Afghanistan. Photo: Annemarie Schwarzenbach
Diehard: To what extent do you identify with Annemarie? She has travelled a lot, as you have – and in what ways is she different from you?
I first came across Annemarie as the companion to Ella Maillart (also a traveller and writer) in their overland journey from Switzerland to Afghanistan. That immediately interested me as I had made the same overland journey, 34 years after they did. Once I discovered Annemarie’s own writing, she revealed how important it was to her, as a practice which was deeply satisfying, and as a craft which she wanted to hone and perfect.
I could also identify with her struggle in her youth, against familial expectations and the conventions of the time, basically, her need for freedom, to explore both the outer world and her inner self and psychology, to understand and find meaning and purpose in her life.
So yes, quite a lot.
There are some differences in our characters though. Annemarie tended to plunge passionately into her adventures, without always calculating the risks. I tend to be much more cautious, with a greater sense of self-preservation!
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| Tallinn, Estonia. Photo:Annemarie Schwarzenbach |
How much were her travels necessary and how much voluntary?
Annemarie’s first travels outside Europe were with a group of archaeologists who visited digs in Iraq, Syria and Persia, where she later worked as an assistant archaeologist. So these travels were necessary, and she took notes which she used in her writing, both fiction and non-fiction. Travel to the Soviet Union Writers Congress in 1934 was not strictly necessary but an invitation which was hard for any writer to resist, especially one interested in what was happening in the Soviet Union at that time. Her travels as photo-journalist were to write articles about these different places. She managed to combine every journey she made with writing of some kind. But usually she picked the places she went to, the journey to Afghanistan with Ella being a good example. Before they left, the two women secured commissions from magazines to write articles, and funded the journey that way.
How far does the politics affect Annemarie's writing?
She was not a political writer as such, but in her journalism and some of her stories, she wrote about people who suffered under Hitler’s regime just as she wrote about people in the USA who suffered from the effects of the Depression. Her articles were published in Swiss Journals and newspapers but the stories she wrote about the difficulties of Jewish people in 1930s Germany were not published in her lifetime because of the censorship. She started an anti-fascist journal Die Sammlung/The Collection, and helped to get contributors and funding for it, but asked Klaus Mann to be the editor, as she knew he would be good at it. Klaus was in exile by this time, and found a sympathetic editor in Amsterdam to publish it. After the war broke out she felt she could best play a part by using her talents as a writer and journalist, and worked as a foreign correspondent out of Lisbon and later for the Free French in the then Belgian Congo.
Edward Lear - the Vjosa river, Albania
Edward Lear - Tepelene, Albania
Does she bring to mind any Scottish or English writers who have had similar writing lives?
I can’t help thinking of Edward Lear and Bruce Chatwin, both of them great travellers and writers. I’ve also studied the life of Edward Lear, who combined making a living (through his drawings and paintings) with travel, initially for his health, and later because of the subject matter it gave him for his paintings, and because he enjoyed it. Lear is probably best known for his limericks but he was a fine writer, as his Journals testify, with a painter’s eye for landscape details, and also very funny. (See his Journals in Greece and Albania, Calabria and Crete, among others.)
Bruce Chatwin very successfully combined travel with writing but, like Annemarie, died young and so we don’t know if he would have settled anywhere later in life.
Photographs by Annemarie Schwarzenbach courtesy of Swiss National Archives.
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