Annemarie Schwarzenbach's Baltic Journals

Danzig/Gdansk market. Photograph by Annemarie Schwarzenbach, courtesy of Swiss National Archives

 

In the spring of 1937 the Swiss writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach travels eastwards from Germany, and through the Baltic States. Her destination is St Petersburg, but she is a photo-journalist, and she is interested in hearing people’s stories, viewpoints and experiences. So she takes pictures and talks to people she meets on the way, sometimes eavesdropping on conversations as all writers do. She wants to sound out the feelings and opinions of people she meets en route, sometimes literally, as fellow train passengers, sometimes in the street or in cafes. She writes articles in the form of a journal, based on what she calls these ‘little encounters’.


In Germany, Annemarie recounts the difficulties of a Jewish wood merchant whose business is ruined by anti-semitism which drives away his customers; the travelling salesman who faces a deluge of bureaucratic forms to travel from one state or country to another, from Germany through the Polish corridor, then the Free City of Danzig, then the Baltic States. Or the farmer who is forced, by nazi decree, to feed his pigs with German rye grains, which costs twice as much as other imported cereals and he does not know how he can survive with such increased expense. There’s the signalman whose child is ill but he cannot afford to send her to a sanatorium for his wages are all taken up with feeding his family and paying the party dues so that he barely has enough to pay for a glass of beer with his colleagues after work. In addition, on his day off he has been summoned to attend the Day of Culture as a kind of back up security force, even though the Town Hall, where Goebbels is due to give a speech, is surrounded with SA (special forces) and SS (military security) guards.

Annemarie is curious to see what the Day of Culture would be like and stops off at this unnamed town. For hours there were various parades – of the SS and the SA, of the Hitler Youth, of the League of Young German Women, of the employees of the Workers Trades and Services.
Goebbels speech, she reports, is a tirade of furious propaganda; ‘he says that the whole world hates Germany because the German people are the best in the world. And so the youth must remain on permanent alert. The future belongs to the youth….. The children then sing the Horst Wessel Lied (the nazi anthem or theme song) for the tenth time that day, with enthusiasm.’

In the evening Annemarie joins the crowd gathered outside the theatre where Schiller’s Don Carlos was being played. All the theatre tickets were sold out. Annemarie had attempted earlier to reach the box office to see if there were any returns, but she was constantly intercepted by men in uniform, passed from one official to another and ultimately refused access; she describes it as ‘ a theatre transformed into a barracks’. The crowd passes the time before the interval, (when it was rumoured that Goebbels would appear again), by singing the Horst Wessel Lied over and over and when Annemarie once forgot to raise her right arm, the woman next to her ‘said in a furious voice “raise your arm immediately or we will report you to the police”. What terrified me was not so much the threat as the tone of her voice and the malevolent expression on her face, which was twisted with hatred. And I thought how at this moment, inside the theatre, Schiller’s character the Marquis de Posa, was making his most beautiful speech – about freedom ...’

Danzig/Gdansk vegetable stallholders. Photograph by Annemarie Schwarzenbach, courtesy of Swiss National Archives

 

Annemarie travels on, spends a couple of days in Danzig, and emerges ‘on the other side of the corridor’ in East Prussia.  Geography immediately becomes historical. The territory has to be explained. At that time, before WWII, Germany was separated from East Prussia by a strip of land which was Polish territory, allowing Poland access to the Baltic sea ports and trade. To the east of that was The Free City of Danzig so -called, not part of either Germany or Poland though most of the population was German, Poles were sidelined and Jewish people were discriminated against, and later persecuted. To the east of that we had East Prussia, once independent but now part of Germany. And beyond that, the Baltic states, independent since the end of WW1.  That small strip of land between Danzig/Gdansk and Germany was greatly valued by the Poles although they did not like the term ‘corridor’, for land that had for long been a part of Polish territory. The Polish Foreign Minister Jozef Beck said that the term ‘Pomeranian Voivodeship’ should be used for land which “has been Polish for centuries, with a small percentage of German settlers". Somehow you could understand that this term did not catch on, as it hardly rolls smoothly off the tongue.

And so Annemarie wrote about the experiences of Jewish people, some of whom were trying to get papers to secure a passport and leave, others whose livelihoods were ruined and had nowhere else to go; small traders who were struggling to survive, students who were trying to avoid being drafted into the army; some nazi supporters who were enjoying paid holidays for the first time, and some who were uneasy about the way things were going but were too frightened to voice any criticism; and citizens of the newly independent Baltic States who wanted nothing to do with either of the large powers to the east and west, Germany and the USSR.

History relates events and even outcomes. A people ‘ends up’ as part of another country (as the Baltic states became part of USSR) then they ‘end up’ becoming free and independent again. But it seems that the experiences of individuals do not have quite the same clear cut trajectory, as they pass through various states of being, sometimes prosperous, sometimes precarious, and sometimes – through poverty or persecution, or both, impossible. The concerns, worries, fears for the future of many of the people Annemarie talked to, almost a century ago now, feel immediate, heartfelt and utterly recognizable, as if she was talking to people today.