Androgyny was the power and the curse of the tragically glamorous writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach
She traveled the world, published widely, and died at age 34
In 1939, two women in a Ford roadster were barreling down the dusty, desolate Northern Road that connects Afghanistan to the rest of the world. Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Ella Maillart, the first women known to travel the road alone, had driven all the way from Switzerland. As fascism spread across Europe, they were disgusted by what their world was becoming. But their reasons for the journey were more personal than that. Maillart would later say she was there to save Schwarzenbach. Schwarzenbach’s reasons were more complicated.
Schwarzenbach was a journalist, photographer, and an intrepid traveler. Her life was both inspiration and warning for the restless. Once while traveling to Tehran she fell in love with a Turkish diplomat’s daughter, then married a French diplomat. She traveled through the Middle East, Africa, and the American South during the Depression, taking thousands of photographs and writing more than 300 articles, many of which were published in Switzerland. But each journey only intensified her hunger for novelty, rather than satisfying it. Travel to foreign lands holds the promise of reinvention — an unknown landscape could reveal an unknown you. She was searching for a place “where traditional ways of living had not been abolished.” Her own life had grown “unbearable.”
If our appearances are our way of communicating our ideologies to the world, Schwarzenbach was trying to communicate something bold, a rejection of a one-size-fits-all approach to life. Cutting a lean and elegant figure with a close-cropped haircut and sideswept bangs, her androgyny was nearly always what people mentioned first about her. A photographer friend, Marianne Breslauer, for whom Schwarzenbach became a muse said that she was “neither a man nor a woman, but an angel, an archangel.” The self was fluid. The introduction to Maillart’s book, The Cruel Way, about the women’s Afghan journey reads, “And so she drifted along, sometimes a writer, sometimes muse, sometimes archeologist. Sometimes boy, sometimes girl.” Through her life, her androgyny would prove both inspiration and trap. At times her fluidity was liberating. At others, she seemed to be unraveling.
Schwarzenbach was born into one of the wealthiest families in Switzerland. Her father was a silk industry magnate, her maternal grandfather, the head of the Swiss army. As a child, she often dressed as a boy. What began as a skepticism of gender mores became a desire to experiment with all mores. After receiving a doctorate and writing her first book at 23, Schwarzenbach left her conservative family behind — but not necessarily their money — and headed to bohemian Berlin where androgyny was considered glamorous and intellectual and art culture flourished. She became close with the children of novelist Thomas Mann. It was in Berlin that she first encountered morphine. A friend recalled, “She lived dangerously. She drank too much. She never went to sleep before dawn.”
Schwarzenbach was increasingly at odds with her family. They disapproved of her life in Berlin and wanted her to renounce her friendship with the anti-fascist Manns. Schwarzenbach refused. She wrote to Mann’s son that the Nazi’s were “repellent” and “I only ask myself — and it becomes daily more urgent — whether the people fully realize the significance of what is happening.” When her family proved sympathetic to the Nazis, especially her mother, Schwarzenbach doubled down on her political beliefs, financing an anti-fascist literary magazine, Die Sammlung.
She clashed constantly with her mother. Her great nephew, Alexis Schwarzenbach, a historian, described the relationship to me as “deeply ambiguous, a love-hate relationship, very intense.” But mother and daughter had a secret in common: Schwarzenbach’s mother also had affairs with women, which her father tolerated. Alexis Schwarzenbach pointed out that the difference between the two women was “her mother was able to have stable long-term relationships whereas Annemarie never achieved that.”
One of Schwarzenbach’s most heated and tumultuous relationships was with the American author Carson McCullers, whom she met while traveling in the United States in 1940. McCullers was captivated by her appearance. Hilton Als wrote in the New Yorker, “Schwarzenbach had the kind of androgyny and physical fearlessness that McCullers most admired.” McCullers became obsessed with Schwarzenbach. In conversations with her psychiatrist, she talked about Schwarzenbach endlessly, every anecdote reminding her of something Schwarzenbach said or did. Of the seven transcripts of her sessions, Schwarzenbach is the subject of five. In her unfinished autobiography, she wrote, “I don’t know of a friend whom I have loved more.”
The relationship wasn’t consummated. When McCullers’ psychiatrist asked why, she recounted a scene. In a moment alone, Schwarzenbach had instructed McCullers to take off her clothes.
McCullers did. Schwarzenbach began to touch her, “And I felt this flowering jazz passion,” she said. “I thought at last, I had Annemarie, at last, at last.”
Suddenly Schwarzenbach leapt out of bed and began insulting McCullers, calling her skinny and saying she didn’t want her, telling her about other people she wanted to sleep with instead. Distraught, McCullers grabbed her clothes and ran from the room. As she was trying to get dressed, McCullers heard a yell from the bathroom. Schwarzenbach had a razor in hand, was cutting her wrists and trying to cut her neck. She was hospitalized not long after. She refused to let McCullers visit. McCullers sent flowers. Schwarzenbach would later write to her, “Carson, remember our moments of understanding and how much I loved you.”
The drug addiction that had begun in Berlin had gripped her again. She had hoped the road trip to Afghanistan, a little over a year earlier, would wrench her free of the drug once and for all. But the addiction remained, as did the self-destructive impulse that had always lurked on the edges of her life. In her book, Maillart mused, “I must discover why again and again she chose the complicated, cruel way of hell. Could it be that she preferred it to an easier mode of living?”
One summer day in 1942, Schwarzenbach was riding her bike in the Swiss Engadin mountains. In a final act of bravado, she thrust her arms out to either side to show that she could ride without hands. She fell from her bike, hitting her head. She was in a coma for three days and awoke with amnesia, recognizing no one. When her mother located her in a clinic, she was horrified by her condition. She had been wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia. Her mother brought her home, then to her own house in Sils, Switzerland, which she had always adored. On November 15th, just before her mother was to arrive for a visit, she died. She was 34. She had defined herself by refusing to be defined and died not knowing who she was.
Schwarzenbach’s mother and grandmother quickly gathered her diaries and burned them. The woman who gave her life, and battled her so fiercely over her identity, now believed she finally had the power to erase her.
