Schwarzenbach’s America

Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942) was a Swiss writer who visited the United States on two occasions before her untimely death at age 36. Her first visit was in 1936-1937 in company with the American photographer Barbara Wright, with whom she was having an affair. Schwarzenbach’s second visit was shorter, from late May 1940 into 1941, at the beginning of the war, when Paris had already fallen to the Germans.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach on Nantucket, 1940.

During that first photo-journalistic trip she observed American labour relations, the effect of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the conditions of the rural and mining poor in the South and in Pittsburg. Schwarzenbach was reporting on assignment for Swiss papers, among them the National-Zeitung and the Luzerner Tagblatt. Some of Schwarzenbach’s photos are stunning. The pair must have turned heads in the rural and industrial south.

Barbara Wright photographed by Annemarie Schwarzenbach, November-December 1937

But the Swiss reporter’s analysis of American society and economics seems a mirror image of our own troubled times for the poor and the dispossessed. Schwarzenbach was a committed Left-winger, at a time when Europe had swung to the right. Her comments on the labour union politics of John L. Lewis, on sharecropping, on the dearth of social safety nets are particularly interesting eighty years later.

But the pioneering time is over: the West has been won. Social upheaval has taken place and henceforth workers remain workers or join the army of eight million unemployed – the landless farmer, in debt, whose holding has been ravaged by dust storm, erosion and flood, who has lost all hope of owning the land. The middle class remains where it is while a small number of investors form the new aristocracy.

Tuskegee, Alabama, 1937

Negro boys at the port, Charleston, South Carolina, 1937

The Swiss community of Gruetli in Tennessee, photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach, 1937

During her second American stay in 1940, she met up with her old friends Erica and Klaus Mann in New York. She met the writer Carson McCullers, who fell in love with her. McCuller’s follow-up novel to her Book of the Month The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was Reflections in a Golden Eye, which she dedicated to the striking-looking Schwarzenbach. They met at the Bedford Hotel in New York City.

We agreed to meet the following day for lunch, and fixed a time an hour before I was to leave New York. I had a coffee and she had a glass of milk and a slice of buttered bread, which she left untouched. While she wrote down her address, I noticed her hands trembling and that her handwriting was barely legible. While I spoke, she leaned in with her pale child’s face and fixed her big grey eyes on my lips, as though she was hard of hearing.

Carson McCullers, about the time she met Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Schwarzenbach spent the summer on Nantucket and wrote two of her best pieces on the island, where she rented a cabin in Siasconset. The first is a fine description of Nantucket life at the beginning of the war:

And the gardens: unforgettable. They bear no relation to the enormous green expanses of the English lawn, to the geometrical arrangements of Mogul-style gardens in India, or the hanging gardens of Semiramis. They recall most of all the gardens of farmers in the Emmental. But in Emmental there aren’t as many roses as there are on Nantucket. Wild briar roses grow in profusion over picket fences, climbing on the roofs of sea captains’ houses, on barns, farmhouses.

Following this second round of reporting from the United States, she returned to Switzerland and headed off again to Portugal, the Congo and Morocco. But it was in Switzerland, in the Engadin, that she fell off her bicycle and died as a result of injuries, at age thirty-four, in 1942.