Annemarie Schwarzenbach : Ravaged Angel

The British designer Clare Waight Keller scored the biggest fashion triumph of 2018 five months ago when the Duchess of Sussex walked down the aisle of St George’s Chapel in a boat-necked Givenchy wedding dress. No Paris catwalk show, even one that brings city traffic to a standstill on a Sunday evening and scores the starriest front row of the week, could hope to compete.

Waight Keller could very easily have revelled in royal wedding afterglow. After all, any boat-necked Givenchy dress on a sales rail would be a home banker right now. Instead, she used her evening at Paris fashion week to show that her vision and ambition reached far beyond one beautiful wedding dress.

The first twelve models – nine women, three men – on a catwalk weaving through the marbled halls of the Palais de Justice all had almost identical haircuts, a neat ear-grazing schoolboy trim. “The casting was paramount,” said Waight Keller after the show. “I wanted the women and men to be indefinable. Something about that felt relevant – and appealing, actually.” Royal wedding or no royal wedding, Waight Keller is not about to be pigeonholed into fairytale frocks. After all, Audrey Hepburn – muse of Hubert de Givenchy, whose Funny Face wedding dress was a reference for that of the duchess – was rocking a gamine pixie crop back in 1954.

This season’s muse was not Meghan but Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a Swiss writer and photographer who became a Berlin celebrity during the Weimar republic. “I was researching silhouettes,” said Waight Keller after the show, “and I came across this spectacular looking woman, whose mother had never insisted on her dressing like a girl, and who as an adult dressed sometimes as a man and sometimes as a woman but always in a modest, elegant way.”

The designer was wearing an elegant short-sleeved navy blouse tucked into high-waisted black trousers, firmly belted, with cone-heeled court shoes. It was a quiet take on the look amped up on the catwalk. Those high-waisted trousers were worn with silk blouses, cropped trenchcoats or abbreviated biker jackets. Shimmering silver evening capes brought an otherworldly glory to matt black crepe tailored separates or loose, dark silk gowns.

Waight Keller’s show notes were opaque and telegram-brief. “Silver solidifies”, she wrote, underscoring the purposeful, hard-edged mood that saw models marching past at a frantic pace that deliberately jettisoned all memories of a glide down the isle. Not content with having sparked a trend for feminine bateau necklines earlier this year, this show suggested Waight Keller might be about to make the fashion world go doe-eyed for sharp tailoring, metallic and monochrome. The latest fairytale frock? it’s a tuxedo.

Clare Waight Keller's Givenchy show in Paris shimmers sharply in a tuxedo. By Jess Cartner-Morley. The Guardian, September 30, 2018.

When American novelist Carson McCullers met Swiss author and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach in the summer of 1940, she fell in love – instantly and hard. “She had a face that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life,” she said. McCullers wasn’t the only one to become enraptured with Schwarzenbach: German novelist Thomas Mann called her a “ravaged angel”; another writer, Roger Martin du Gard, said she had “the face of an inconsolable angel”; while German photographer Marianne Breslauer, who took numerous photos of Schwarzenbach, likened her to “the Archangel Gabriel standing before Heaven”.

But with the rediscovery in the late 1980s of Schwarzenbach’s body of work – a rich catalogue of journalism and photographs documenting her adventurous farflung travels – she gained new interest for more than just her angelic beauty; she was recognised as a female pioneer and a gay icon. In 2001, there was even a feature film, The Journey to Kafiristan, tracing her 4,000-mile drive from Geneva to Kabul in a Ford Deluxe with ethnologist Ella Maillart (‘How far would you go for true love?’ read the tagline).

Born in Zurich on 23rd May 1908, into a wealthy family, Schwarzenbach was always a nonconformist. Her bisexual mother Renée, the daughter of a Swiss general and descendant of the Bismarck family, dressed little Annemarie in boys’ clothes from an early age. She wore men’s clothes for the rest of her life, and was often mistaken for a man, favouring tailored suits, fitted sweaters and collared shirts – a wardrobe that both reflected her conservative background and the bohemian lifestyle she later pursued. She had a taste for haute couture too; while in the throes of a passionate affair with the daughter of the ambassador of Turkey to Persia, she would steal and wear her lover’s gowns.

This year, Schwarzenbach’s incredible style informed Givenchy’s Spring/Summer 2019 collection. The house’s artistic director, Clare Waight Keller, directly referenced images of the “hauntingly handsome writer”, presenting tuxedo jackets, leather motorcycle jackets tucked into army trousers, and elegant gowns that reflected the bias-cut 1930s fashion – and perhaps those stolen frocks. “I was researching silhouettes, and came across this spectacular looking woman, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who dressed sometimes as a man and sometimes as a woman but always in a modest, elegant way,” explains Waight Keller. “It spoke to me, as it aligns perfectly with what we’re doing at Givenchy. I find the idea of not being defined by a gender in the way you express yourself through clothes extremely modern. Her sense of freedom in the way she would present herself as a different character from one day to the next is highly inspiring. I also love the message about acceptance and tolerance her story gives: she was at peace with her androgyny, and so many years later, it still inspires people like me to keep on colliding codes.”

Schwarzenbach’s legacy goes beyond fashion. A talented writer, she published her first book in 1931 when she was just 23 and, after a brief stint in Berlin where she enjoyed the last hurrah of the Weimar Republic (according to her friend Ruth Landshoff, “she lived dangerously. She drank too much. She never went to sleep before dawn”), she embarked on a career as a photojournalist. Producing 365 articles and 50 photo-reports for major Swiss, German and American newspapers and magazines in the space of just nine years, she travelled to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Persia, and later Afghanistan, the USA, the Baltic states and Russia, often unaccompanied.

Her personal life was no less frenetic. A committed anti-fascist, she helped her friend Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann, finance the literary review Die Sammlung, which published exiled German writers; and she used her diplomatic passport – a by-product of her marriage-of-convenience to the gay French ambassador to Persia, Claude Clarac – to rescue anti-fascists in Austria. But her political commitment resulted in unbearable tensions with her Nazi-sympathising family, culminating in 1934 with her first suicide attempt.

And then there was the matter of her morphine addiction. A user from her early 20s, Schwarzenbach spent much of her life struggling to kick the habit. In fact, that audacious car journey to Afghanistan in 1940 was another failed attempt to clean up; her co-traveller Maillart chronicled the difficult experience in the book All the Roads Are Open: The Afghan Journey. That same year, the Manns introduced Schwarzenbach to smitten novelist Carson McCullers. Seventy years later, Suzanne Vega wrote the song Lover, Beloved about McCullers’ unrequited passion: “Everyone wants you, everyone loves you, how can I possibly compete?”

The mounting stress of this doomed affair and the death of Schwarzenbach’s father led to a second suicide bid, this time in New York. She was promptly admitted to a psychiatric ward, diagnosed with schizophrenia and subjected to weeks of barbaric treatment. Schwarzenbach escaped, was hospitalised again and then forced out of the US, winding her way back to Switzerland via Portugal, the Belgian Congo and Morocco. Tragically, once home she suffered a serious head injury from a bicycle accident that resulted in more hospital and more morphine. Her mother Renée refused to allow visitors – even her estranged husband Claude was turned away. Two months later, Schwarzenbach passed away, aged 34.

In a final twisted act, Renée destroyed most of her daughter’s diaries and letters, believing they shamed the family. Thankfully, one of Schwarzenbach’s friends held on to a collection of photographs and writings, and in the process saved Annemarie Schwarzenbach from the mists of obscurity.

Clare Waight Keller on the Angelic Gay Icon That Inspired Givenchy S/S19. By  Ted Stansfield. Another Man  ,  May 1 , 2019.

Last month, at the SS19 womenswear shows, androgyny and ambiguity reigned. Across all four fashion capitals, the boundaries of gender continued to blur; from Gareth Pugh’s voguing ball, to Margiela’s first co-ed runway, Hedi Slimane’s gender-neutral suiting at Céline, and Louis Vuitton’s cast of trans and non-binary models, the season marked a welcome further push towards inclusivity.

At Givenchy, creative director Clare Waight Keller celebrated the androgynous beauty and pioneering spirit of Swiss writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach (as well as Lou Reed and Nico of the Velvet Underground). Not only did she send a collection made up of high-waisted, masculine trousers, languid silk shirts, and relaxed tailored styles down the runway, she also enlisted a number of models who bore more than a passing resemblance to Schwarzenbach to wear it.

In recent years, Schwarzenbach’s distinctive and mysterious glamour has captured the contemporary queer imagination, given her unique history. Born in Zurich in 1908, her life was one of contradictions: her struggle with physical fragility and opioid addiction co-existed with an adventurous streak and proclivity for global travel, while admirers and detractors have placed her on opposing sides of the artistic rebellion against Hitler in the 1930s.

In terms of style, her presentation was deliberately neither feminine or masculine, and, much like the SS19 Givenchy collection, instead walked the line somewhere in-between. With her short hair and understated wardrobe of slim trousers, neat shirts, and knitted sweaters, her beauty sat in stark contrast to what was deemed glamorous in the 30s and 40s, and she was all the more enigmatic for it. Captivating many who came into contact with her, she had many affairs with women throughout her short life. On a reporting trip to the Pyrenees, fellow photographer Marianne Breslauer took a picture of her, and wrote that “She was neither a man nor a woman, but an angel. An archangel.”

But who exactly was Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and what is it about her that so drew her admirers – and the contemporary queer, for whom she is a total pin-up – towards her?

Born Annemarie Minna Renée Schwarzenbach in 1908, Renée Schwarzenbach was raised as a boy near Lake Zurich by her father, who’d made his fortune in the silk industry and her mother, Renée Schwarzenbach-Mille, who descended from German aristocracy and was openly bisexual. Renée carried out an affair with German soprano Emmy Krüger, while also pursuing her passion for horses and photography. Annemarie took after her mother with her passion for adventure and her free-spirited nature, but their relationship was often fraught. Renée’s political loyalty to the reconstruction of Germany under Hitler during World War II, and the Schwarzenbachs’ sympathy for far-right Swiss Fronts, led to the deterioration of the familial bond. Annemarie denounced the fascist regime, moving with a circle that included Jews and political refugees exiled from the troubled country.

Schwarzenbach’s wanderings took her all over the globe. Despite a sensitive constitution, she cultivated a vast travelogue in her short life, and explored the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and America extensively. Having left behind a troubled home life, the photographer and writer moved first to Berlin, where she threw herself into the vibrant, bohemian nightlife and a hedonistic existence of drink and drugs, before marrying French diplomat Achille-Claude Clarac (who was also homosexual) to obtain a French diplomatic passport. The pair settled for a short time in Tehran, before Schwarzenbach left for Kabul, Lisbon, and the Balkans, never staying in one place too long.

“Fear makes us stubborn: we call reality only what we can grasp with our hands. War in other countries? Just twelve hours, twelve weeks from our borders? God forbid. But the journey ever so slightly lifts the veil over the mystery of space and a city with a magical, unreal name… becomes real the instant we set foot there and touch it with our living breath,” she wrote in her 1940 book All the Roads Are Open: The Afghan Journey, which documents her trip to Afghanistan with fellow writer Ella Maillart. The previous year, the pair had become the first women to travel the country’s Northern Road, as the fled the storm brewing in Europe in a beaten-up Ford.  

Schwarzenbach’s photographs offer unique insight into her singular vision. Best known, perhaps, for the images she captured of the Hitler Youth in Vienna or her self-portraits, she also extensively documented the people and sites she encountered during her wide travels. For the queer sensibility, it’s photos of Annemarie herself that most enchant though. Slim and pale, with deep-set eyes that seem to simultaneously look at and past the viewer, American novelist Carson McCullers wrote that “she had a face that would haunt me for the rest of my life”. She was often seen wearing a suit and a necktie, always with an unusual air of mystery. It’s likely this that so enchanted her queer admirers then, and continues to do so now. At a time when homosexuality was widely castigated, Schwarzenbach blazed a trail for living freely and unapologetically.

Schwarzenbach struggled with mental illness and substance abuse, both of which deeply impacted her outlook on life and work. Though she eventually died after a tragic bicycle accident in 1942, at just 34, Schwarzenbach’s chronic illnesses defined her life nearly as much as her adventurous spirit. Her trip to Afghanistan with Ella Maillart marked a decisive low in her physical and mental health, following a stint in rehab for a morphine addiction. Her physical fragility and the effect it had on her usual charisma eventually exhausted Maillart, who remarked honestly that she was sick of ‘Christina’ (as she referred to Annemarie) by the end of the journey. Maillart and Schwarzenbach’s progressive ideas about travel and photography also served as covers for the various vulnerabilities of traveling women in that era. They railed against the presumption of women’s physical inferiority via direct writing and photographs as well as their adopted, androgynous style of dress.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s influence is far further-reaching than just the Givenchy catwalk. Dressed by her mother in boys clothing throughout her childhood, she retained a preference for menswear throughout her life, and cultivated a style that still resonates today. Despite the physical tolls of her depression and addiction, Schwarzenbach blazed a path down the middle of more than just the binary between man and woman: she cultivated an intrepid persona, nearly unheard of for women, even as her body and mind presented untoward obstacles. At a time when women are fighting for equality, justice, and increasingly, simply to be heard, Schwarzenbach’s endurance in the name of curiosity and discovery is more than just a reference point – it’s an inspiration.

Revisiting the life of trailblazing queer heroine Annemarie Schwarzenbach. By Alexandra Julienne. Dazed , November 2, 2018. 

It was the summer of 1939, in the last weeks before war would sweep across Europe, and Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Ella K. Maillart were embarking on a 4,000-mile drive from Geneva to Kabul, Afghanistan, with the goal of curing Schwarzenbach of her morphine addiction.

At first it seemed as if this quixotic plan might be working: As the two women, both journalists and authors, made their way from Switzerland, through Italy and on into Yugoslavia, they stopped at roadside campsites and small village inns, choosing to steer clear of towns and cities where drugs might be available.

Indeed, one night, as they slept under the stars outside Belgrade, they were awakened by the sounds of village men cutting hay. Schwarzenbach, normally frail and intense, “seemed to revive,” Maillart wrote.

But then, further east, in Bulgaria, at a hotel in Sofia, Schwarzenbach had her first slip. She woke up “seedy,” pale and vomiting, Maillart wrote. That she was using drugs again became clear when Maillart discovered “the brittle glass of an empty ampoule” in the bathroom.

The women went on to endure a tense drive into Turkey, barely speaking, until, in Istanbul, Schwarzenbach turned to her friend and asked, “Why do you bother about me?”

“Why do I bother about you? … I don’t know,” Maillart recalled replying. “I can’t say it is because I love you, because I detest you when I see such gifts as yours spoilt as they are.”

The women would make it to Kabul but ultimately fail in their mission: Schwarzenbach fell back into old habits, and Maillart left her in frustration, going on to India and leaving Schwarzenbach in the hands of a pair of French archaeologists.

Schwarzenbach eventually made her way back to Europe by boat, and three years later she died in a bicycle accident in the Swiss mountains. But Maillart, who went on to enjoy a long career as a travel writer, did not forget her. In “The Cruel Way: Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford, 1939,” her account of their journey published in 1947, she would portray her friend as both tragic and transcendent.

And she would recant the declaration she had made in the car.

“I think I loved her profoundly,” she wrote.

Schwarzenbach was an accomplished journalist, novelist and photographer whose work was in many ways overshadowed by the drama of her life.

An heiress, she was born in Zurich on May 23, 1908, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Her mother was the daughter of a general and a descendant of the Bismarck family. Early on, her mother, who was bisexual, dressed Annemarie in boys’ clothes. (Schwarzenbach would enjoy wearing men’s clothes for the rest of her life.)

Her androgynous glamour left a strong impression on the intellectual circles in which she mingled. The novelist Thomas Mann, whose children were close to Schwarzenbach, called her a “ravaged angel.” And the unrequited passion she inspired in the American author Carson McCullers would lead to a Suzanne Vega song, “Lover, Beloved,” written from McCullers’s point of view more than seven decades later. (“Everyone wants you / Everyone loves you / How can I possibly compete?”)

The photographer Marianne Breslauer, who made memorable images of Schwarzenbach, echoed Mann when she said that at first glance Schwarzenbach appeared to be neither man nor woman but “like the Archangel Gabriel.”

Schwarzenbach spent much of her adult life as an addict. She had numerous tumultuous love affairs with women. She had a complicated relationship with her family, who had Nazi sympathies. And she fell out with the Mann family, who thought her anti-fascism efforts were inadequate because she refused to cut ties with her Nazi-supporting relatives. It was an estrangement that hurt her profoundly, in part because she was in love with Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika Mann.

Schwarzenbach attempted suicide twice. After she died of her bicycle accident injuries at 34 on Nov. 15, 1942, in the Swiss town of Sils im Engadin — she had been showing off by riding with no hands — her mother, defying her daughter’s will, destroyed Schwarzenbach’s papers for fear of how they might reflect on the family.

Schwarzenbach’s work — ranging from striking photographs of Hitler youth to novels, from critiques of Swiss neutrality to travelogues from Central Asia — would not be rediscovered in her native Switzerland until the late 1980s, when the country began re-evaluating its World War II history. (Much of her written work is unavailable in English.)

One of her earliest books, “Lyric Novella,” tells the story of a young man from a wealthy family not unlike Schwarzenbach’s who rejects his family’s plans for him in order to pursue his obsession with a nightclub singer. The novel, said the book’s translator, Lucy Renner Jones, is a pitch-perfect portrait of an era in which to be a member of the upper class was to be a slave to family duty.

For all her seeming fragility, Schwarzenbach was adventurous. One of her best-known books, “Death in Persia,” was based on the years she lived in Tehran as a diplomat’s wife (a marriage of convenience; her husband was also gay). During that period she fell in love and had an affair with a Turkish diplomat’s daughter.

On her travels with Maillart from Switzerland to Afghanistan, the two women engaged in high-speed chases with the police in Azerbaijan and ran away from officials near the Iran-Afghanistan border. (Maillart died in her mountain chalet in Switzerland in 1997 and received an obituary in The Times.)

Schwarzenbach also spent time in the United States as a freelance reporter and photographer, traveling in the Deep South and across Pennsylvania, focusing on the mining and steel industries there. Her photographs from those travels reveal a journalist intensely interested in the social dynamics around her.

And though Mann and others saw Schwarzenbach as a beautiful but troubled soul, they may have been buying what she was selling. She knew very well what effect she had on people and cultivated her public persona carefully, according to her great-nephew Alexis Schwarzenbach, a historian who has written a book about her. “That was part of the package,” he said.

In the decades since she was rediscovered, Schwarzenbach has become something of a cult figure in Europe, though just what she represents remains unsettled. To some she was an anti-fascist; to others, her anti-fascism did not go far enough. To some she was an early L.B.G.T. heroine; to others she was remarkable for her refusal to be defined by any gender conventions.

In one of the most famous images of her taken by Breslauer, Schwarzenbach, in her mid-20s, wears a fitted sweater over a collared shirt. Her hair close cropped, she stares straight at the camera. She is unsmiling, her face half obscured by shadow, her expression languorous. It’s a remarkable face, onto which many things can be projected.

Overlooked No More: Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Author, Photographer and ‘Ravaged Angel’. By Alicia P.q. Wittmeyer. The New York Times , October 10, 2018.

Buried in the folds of his-story, Annemarie Schwarzenbach was a widely published lesbian author. Born in 1908, Schwarzenbach died young, at the age of 34. By then, she’d attempted suicide twice, after years of self-harm. Schwarzenbach defied sexist norms. Those ‘norms’ were sexist and damaging then, and they’re still sexist and damaging now.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach was haunted by a world that considered her incorrectly female—So why have there been so many attempts to revise her story, recategorize and relabel her, postmortem, only to say the same? It’s not only unethical, it robs lesbians of what few pages we have in the his-story books. If we can be revised after we’re dead, by the very thing we fight against while we’re alive, then what are we fighting for?

Dazed recently reported that Schwarzenbach “was raised as a boy.” This is a prime example of the ways in which things have been taken out of context to perpetuate sexist ideas. There’s been a media push to rebrand Schwarzenbach as ‘on the outskirts of womanhood.’

Although historically, girls were forced to abide by the rigid rules of ‘gender’ (stereotypes designated based on sex), Schwarzenbach’s parents didn’t force her to conform to ‘norms.’ On the contrary… As a child, she sported short hair, and wore comfortable clothes that were (and still are) categorized as ‘boy’s clothes.’ It’s been said that she was raised “like a boy,” not “as a boy.” And in the context of that time period, that statement refers to the stereotypes, roles and freedoms that were only granted to boys.

Until 1987, Schwarzenbach was forgotten. Her great nephew, historian Alexis Schwarzenbach, didn’t know much about her, until he discovered one of her novels on a bookshelf.

“I went to my grandmother and said, ‘I didn’t know grandfather’s sister was a writer’. And she said, ‘yes, she was a writer, and a lesbian and a morphine addict.’ ”—Swiss Info 

The mainstream media’s erasure of the word “lesbian,” is a major point of contention that the lesbian community has expressed, time and time again. In a recent article by The New York Times, about Schwarzenbach, the word “lesbian” is never used… Not even once. The article refers to Schwarzenbach as “gay,” and her husband as “also gay,” and calls Schwarzenbach an “L.B.G.T. heroine.”

By the age of 23, Schwarzenbach published her first novel, which was very well received. In ten years, she published several novels and produced more than 300 articles, and 5,000 photographs from her journeys across the world. Annemarie Schwarzenbach was finally unearthed from his-story, only to be buried in sexism and lesphobia, once again.

Schwarzenbach is one of the many women who’ve been resurrected and popularized in mainstream culture to bolster false narratives. Narratives that not only maintain the regressive idea that there’s a wrong way to be a girl, a wrong way to be a woman, but also further enshrine lesphobia.

Continuing to equate ‘femininity’ with ‘womanhood’ is about as sexist as it gets. And yet, here we are. Women who dare to claw their way out of the man-made box (of roles and expectations), deserve to be celebrated—Not reinvented postmortem, in order to further cement the very stereotypes that put them in that box to begin with.

Though Schwarzenbach’s beauty caught the eye of men and women alike, her ‘androgynous’ style left her vulnerable to regular abuse. She was a trailblazer who defied sexist expectations—But for women who don’t look and behave the way people think a woman “should” look and behave, the price is often high.

Schwarzenbach spent most of her adult life trying to escape. She wrote, took photos, traveled, drank, used drugs, and was known to regularly stay awake till the break of dawn.

She also kept away from her family, one of the wealthiest families in Switzerland. She had major political disagreements with her mother, who was a Nazi sympathizer, known to be domineering. Her mother was bisexual, and her father tolerated his wife’s extramarital affairs with women.

After Schwarzenbach had a brief affair with a German writer, Erika Mann, she settled into the Mann family’s home and became an ‘adopted’ part of their family. She spent a good deal of time hanging out with Erika’s gay brother, Klaus Mann, in Berlin. Schwarzenbach started using drugs and was introduced to morphine.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach and the Mann family, were vehemently anti-Nazi. Her association with the family caused major conflict with her parents—Especially her mother, who took issue with Schwarzenbach’s circle, which included Jewish people and political refugees.

Like many lesbians (who don’t conform to norms), Schwarzenbach, who was regularly dehumanized, was driven to self-harm. Her addiction haunted her. And in her mid-twenties, she attempted suicide for the first time, after a scandalous affair with the daughter of a Turkish Ambassador. Her family was embarrassed by the suicide attempt, rather than concerned.

Shortly thereafter, she married a French diplomat, Claude Clarac. It was a marriage of convenience that not only provided her with a diplomatic passport (which allowed her to travel freely), but also covered up the fact that they were both gay. But after only five months, she grew restless and left him to travel. Further romantic involvements with women and the resulting persecution, would eventually lead to her downfall.

The persecution she faced, is still alive and well today. “Lesbian” is still a word people hesitate to utter. And the mainstream has continually sanctioned the abuse of ‘butch’ lesbians—Still casting them as unflattering caricatures, no more than a ‘she’s really a man’ punchline. The sexism and lesphobia behind the abuse, is not only a reflection of fragile masculinity, it’s a reflection of how deeply ingrained misogyny is in most people. The resulting cruelty comes with real world consequences.

While the mainstream media has a long history of obsessively trying to expunge ‘masculine’ lesbians from the category of womanhood, ‘androgynous’ women are quite often the epitome of female beauty, the best womankind has to offer.

The media frequently uses an inaccurately translated quote, taken out of context, to push the idea that Schwarzenbach was something other than a woman because of her style—“She was neither a man nor a woman, but an angel, an archangel.” Revisionists have used this version, of a poetic statement (spoken in admiration, by fellow photographer Marianne Breslauer), to build a new narrative about Annemarie Schwarzenbach.

The sexist notion that girls and women should inherently want to dress and behave a certain way, is encoded in us from the time we are born. It’s in everything around us, from movies, to magazines. It’s the very reason women like Schwarzenbach are being revised and ‘othered,’ postmortem. Many people never realize the depths to which we’ve been universally brainwashed.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach was known to be introspective, sensitive and passionate. In her photos, she appears incredibly stylish. Women never needed men to tell us what was sexy—We already knew.

Schwarzenbach tried to run, but no road would ever lead to the escape of her demons. In 1936, she went on a road trip, in the United States, with American photographer Barbara Hamilton-Wright, and documented the industrial regions of the Northeast during the Great Depression. The following year, they went again, and she documented the Deep South. The rift between Schwarzenbach and her family grew.

In 1939, Schwarzenbach tried again to overcome addiction, by going on a road trip with fellow writer, Ella Maillart, from Geneva to Afganistan. Eventually, she got ahold of a morphine substitute and they parted ways. Schwarzenbach then had a love affair with Ella Maillart’s married friend, French archaeologist Ria Hackin, causing such a scandal, she was forbidden to travel in Turkmenistan.

She went back to the United States to work with the Mann siblings, on a committee that helped refugees from Europe. There she met writer Carson McCullers, who reportedly fell head over heels for Schwarzenbach. “She had a face that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life,” Carson McCullers said.

Let’s take a quick detour here, because McCullers is also among a growing number of women who’ve had their lives revised, postmortem. A writer in The New Yorker, explained her decision to write Carson McCullers as a “man,” in a play and in a movie, stating, “I started to notice that McCullers had issues with her gender…Her given name was Lula, but she took on her middle name, Carson…” I’m not sure what this proves… My friends called me Jay, ages 6-12. In high school, I was called Little Joe. Siri calls me Big Daddy. My current sign out is JD. And I also go by the nickname Romeo.

As further ‘proof,’ the writer goes on to say “[Carson McCullers] wore men’s clothes, and was often photographed in a suit. Her main protagonists were young, boyish girls with men’s names: Frankie and Mick.” I wear ‘men’s clothes.’ I’ve been photographed in a suit. My protagonists have so-called ‘men’s names.’ Check, check, and check.

The writer then concludes that “…had [Carson McCullers] been alive today… she might have been living as a transgender man.” Adding, “She did once tell Capote, ‘I think I was born a boy,’ which doesn’t, in and of itself, mean much—but how many of us, as little girls, have never had that thought? Most.” On the contrary, most of us have had that thought. In fact, my wife and I don’t know any lesbians who didn’t have that experience—It’s a common theme with young lesbians, as we grapple with sexist expectations, limitations and same-sex attraction.

Are all women who break stereotypes going to be up for revision, postmortem? If we’re going on the basis of sexist stereotypes, every lesbian I know could be recategorized after death.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach is summed up in one line, in this same article in The New Yorker: “McCullers was deeply in love with a Swiss journalist, a lesbian drug addict named Annemarie Schwarzenbach.”

“A lesbian drug addict.” The way in which our history is so thoughtlessly mangled and relayed by mainstream media, is appalling. Schwarzenbach, a tortured soul and brilliant icon, was so much more than “a lesbian drug addict.”

Schwarzenbach never became involved with Carson McCullers. At the time, she was involved in a troubled relationship with a married woman, Margot von Opel, and she still had feelings for Erika Mann, who cut her out of her life.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s mental health further declined, and she attempted suicide once again. This landed her in a psychiatric hospital in 1940, where she was held, until 1941. After Schwarzenbach was released, she returned to Switzerland. She then went to the Belgian Congo of Central Africa, after which she took a two month trip to visit Claude Clarac.

On September 7th, in 1942, Annemarie Schwarzenbach fell from her bike, in the Alps of Switzerland, and struck her head. She was in a coma for three days and she woke with amnesia. Her mother wouldn’t permit Claude or any of her friends to see her. She was kept in the family home in Switzerland, where she didn’t recognize anyone, and died nine weeks later, in November of 1942. Her mother set all of her daughter’s letters and diaries on fire, but her published works remain.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach Died Defying Sexist ‘Norms,’ Only to be Redefined, Postmortem, By Sexist ‘Norms’. By Julia Diana Roberston . The Velvet Chronicle,  March 28, 2019.