Cover illustration: © Frieda Jay
I've just finished reading Martha Gellhorn's Stricken Field. It was first published in 1940, and it was based on her experiences in Prague in 1938. She was a journalist, a war correspondent, first in Spain and, later in other European countries including the Czech Republic where this novel is set. She knew what she was writing about, she had seen it first hand. And she describes the situation of refugees from the Sudetenland, formerly a part of then Czechoslovakia, but which Hitler claimed in 1938. Non-nazis (Czech citizens, many of them German-speaking) fled to other parts of the country but as the Czech government came increasingly under pressure from Germany, (and would end up being totally occupied), these refugees were expelled. They had few choices. No one wanted them. If they went back to their previous home, supposing they still had a home to go to, they would share the same fate as Communists, Social Democrats, Jews and any others the nazis disliked. Gellhorn's descriptions of her characters and the dark Prague streets are vivid and gripping.
I don't know if Martha Gellhorn and Annemarie Schwarzenbach ever met but they were both photo journalists and fiction writers and both covered the same ground at roughly the same time: Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1930s. They also both introduced a new kind of journalism, new for the time. Rather than talking to ‘important’ people such as politicians, they had conversations with people they met in the street, at the market, in cafés, as well as those more directly affected by the rising tide of fascism, such as refugees, or Jewish people. They listened to their views, fears, and concerns. And both women were sometimes haunted by these stories, not knowing what happened to the people they met.
Like Martha Gellhorn, Annemarie Schwarzenbach also wrote lightly disguised fiction about some of her encounters. One of these stories, Memories:Persepolis (translated into English in Death in Persia by Lucy Renner Jones) describes Richard, a pseudonym for Karl Bergner, who was the architectural draughtsman at the Persepolis dig, directed by Ernst Herzfeld. For Karl Bergner, time in Persia, first in Persepolis, then Isfahan, was running out, and to go home to Berlin was equivalent to walking into a death trap. When I discovered more, (thanks to Dominique Laure Miermont, writing in the notes to Annemarie’s collection of stories La cage aux faucons) I knew I wanted to write about him. I wanted him to be remembered. So I wrote Lovers of Leaving.
In French they say donner le jour à ...(to give birth to, literally to bring to daylight). I'm very happy to say that Lovers of Leaving, Karl Bergner’s story, and his connection with Annemarie Schwarzenbach, has been brought into the light of day, thanks to diehard's Fiction Direct.
Copies are available from me, £8 or 10 euros with free delivery, wherever you are. (contact via fb or email)
Annemarie and Barbara Hamilton Wright, who visited Persepolis with her. (Photo credit Annemarie Schwarzenbach Erinnerungen)
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