Introduction

In 2018 the New York Times published an obituary of Annemarie Schwarzenbach some seventy-five years after her untimely death. The Swiss author's stock was up and a desire to correct the dead-white-male bias of historical reporting led the obituarist to wonder what lay behind this resurgence of interest: gay cult figure, androgynous glamour, the romance of trustafarian travel, drugs and an early death?

All of the above. Schwarzenbach was 'a beautiful but troubled soul', as the Times obituary put it, well aware of the effect she had on men and women. There lies the crux, between physical beauty and trouble of soul. She struck Nobel laureate Thomas Mann as an 'extraordinarily pretty' boy. Several years later, by which time morphine had made its mark, he called her 'a ravaged angel'. Another Nobel laureate, Roger Martin du Gard, referred to her 'inconsolable angelface'. A stable of Weimar writers worked her androgynous effect into their fictional characters. Women and men stood in awe of her beauty, on the ski slope, in cafés and nightclubs. This youthful otherworldly effect - spoiled innocence, fallen angel - hasn't gone out of fashion and exerts a similar pull on a modern audience. Those whom the gods love die young. Schwarzenbach died in her own bed during a war when millions less fortunate suffered horrific deaths, when her friends found themselves scattered to the winds of exile, barely escaping with their lives. Her life played out against the rise of the Nazis and the German diaspora in France and New York. Between one war and another, Schwarzenbach burned brightly, as we like to gloss such tragic romantics, in 'a world of cocktails and cigarettes, sleepers and sleek limousines', as critic Carl Seelig eulogized her. She reported in journalism and fiction on the disorder of the decade, the rise of fascism and the allure of travel. Being Swiss cushioned her movements, as did wealth, looks and a diplomatic marriage. Cursed by restlessness, the arc of her short life nonetheless did not bend towards fulfilment. Quite the contrary: drugs, schizophrenic episodes, and an inability to be still all fractured her sense of self and eventually her writing.

The twenty-first-century mode latches onto rebels like Schwarzenbach as precursors to our own identity politics. Her illness, addictions and lesbianism get reconfigured as symptoms of social and parental oppression: she becomes a victim in the 'live fast, die young' club. This remaking was already nascent in the generation after the First World War, cropping their hair, shooting up and tuning out in the dives of Berlin and Montparnasse, blaming their elders for the tribulations of the Great War. Schwarzenbach's glamour-girl image, her queerness, sometimes obscures her role as a political rebel against the rise of fascism. This entanglement of meme and content, image and politics, photography and writing, is central to her life. Interest in her writing and photos is inextricable from her visual appeal, as her earlier biographer, Charles Linsmayer, pointed out. Schwarzenbach's cult, her short, glamorous, tragic life, her pretty face, have all tended to upstage the writing.1 This biography attempts to redress that balance.

The face undoubtedly helped. Schwarzenbach was memorably photographed, in particular by Marianne Breslauer, whose portrait of 'the writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach' appeared in the October 1933 edition of Berlin's Uhu magazine and over the following century has come to shape an aesthetic, an infinitely marketable lesbian look, noli me tangere, disaffected cool. Schwarzenbach in turn wielded her Rolleiflex throughout her travels and many of these photographs were published in magazines in her lifetime. The visual record foregrounds her cars, the steamships, exotic wastelands, bedraggled refugees and young fascists of the thirties; Persia, Afghanistan, Russia, the underbelly of the United States: trouble spots still in the headlines. She joins the sorority of female explorers of the Middle East, breaking the bounds of gender while not straying too far from the colonial hotel and the diplomatic bag. Constantly writing, observing and responding to her tarnished times with great intelligence, style and political engagement, she managed to fall on the right side of history despite her Nazi-sympathizing family. For a decade between the wars, she seemed to be at the centre of the zeitgeist, to try hard to overcome her addiction and her psychological frailty. She was more than just a pretty face.2

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At the start of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, just before countries closed their borders and went into lockdown, I was skim-reading three decades of diaries in the Monacensia Library in Munich, where the Mann family archives are preserved. Thomas Mann's children, Erika and Klaus, both gay, had been close friends of Annemarie all her adult life and she was welcomed at the family dinner table. The diaries belonged to opera singer Emmy Krüger, Renée Schwarzenbach's friend - girlfriend, lover, lady's companion? Krüger transcribed her diaries in pencil, for the most part, onto tiny three inch by two inch pages folded between the original diary covers in a cramped, evenly flowing hand, using up all the available space. They were difficult to make out in German. I was wearing white gloves and wielding a magnifying glass, Google translate open on the laptop beside me, with a view out the window onto the linden trees fronting the Isar river and the Englischer Garten. The evenness of the hand, the sameness of the writing instrument and the detached pages, slipped between card and leatherette covers year after year, gave the transcription away - copied out some time after the war. I was anticipating the annus miserabilis 1933, when Krüger sang at Hitler's behest in Munich. But the 1933 diary was missing. When I pointed this out, the archivist shrugged her shoulders as though she'd encountered such lacunae before. Diaries are like families: working up their best stories, trimming the embarrassments, putting on a brave, made-up face to the world in different layers of reality: fact, myth, history, fiction, lie. Krüger's diaries and their elisions illustrate the difficulty of seeing clearly the progress of National Socialism in the twenties and thirties long after the apotheosis of the movement and its defeat.

The politics of memory proceeds by selective amnesia, and homosexual memory in families, more often than not, takes the same primrose path. Tampering with the written record occurred on the afternoon of Annemarie's death when Renée burned her daughter's diaries and correspondence, including letters from Erika and Klaus Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Carson McCullers, her husband Claude Clarac as well as countless girlfriends and confidants. This too was an attempt to set the record straight, not just about Annemarie but also her fraught relationship with her mother. After the war, when traveller Ella Maillart wished to publish her account of a journey with Annemarie to Kabul, The Cruel Way, Renée insisted on disguising her daughter's name and on editorial oversight. Throughout history, family and inheritance law has sidelined homosexual relationships in the name of propriety - and property - while the written record has been winnowed, sanitized if not outright gone up in flames. The Nazis were past masters at this too.

Schwarzenbach took an early definitive stance against National Socialism. In Munich I'd arranged to meet Dr. Maren Richter, historian and curator at the Obersalzberg Memorial and Educational Center at Berchtesgaden, Hitler's mountain fastness. We discussed German resistance, in particular Annemarie's friends Maria Daelen, Albrecht Haushofer and others in the context of Operation Valkyrie, the failed assassination of the Führer in 1944. Daelen had a long affair with Wilhelm Furtwängler, chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, whose own career and allegiance remain contested. Schwarzenbach's resistance was not simply a matter of good and bad Germans but of coming to terms with the complexity of responses to National Socialism as it evolved over twenty years among family and friends. Hitler's promise to make Germany great again appealed to all sorts of people but not to socialists, communists, the writers and artists of Weimar's cultural renaissance, many of whom were Jewish and gay in both senses of the word. This was Annemarie's tribe and she ran with it early. Her friend and fellow exile Klaus Mann describes her as 'one of these peculiar sham-émigrés',3 but her political stance was extraordinarily brave and unwavering in the face of her staunch family, their early fundraising on Hitler's behalf, and their militaristic bent.

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Schwarzenbach first attracted attention in Switzerland with the publication in Zurich of her novel Friends of Bernhard (1931) when she was twenty-three. Her second book, Lyric Novella (1933), its Berlin publication overshadowed by Hitler's accession to power, employs the device of transmuting lesbian experience into heterosexual narration: changing the pronouns. A third novel, set in an Austrian ski resort, Flucht nach oben, resurfaced after her death and was published in 1999. A collection of short stories, Bei diesem Regen, and a biography of a...