On the Road: Annemarie in the Middle East 1933-34

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Between 1933 and 1935, Swiss writer, photographer and traveller Annemarie Schwarzenbach visited Persia and the Middle East a total of three times. Her first tour of the region lasted seven months, and she had arranged to write and photograph for Swiss newspapers and magazines. She travelled to Istanbul on the Orient Express, taking in Anatolia, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Persia – before returning overland via Georgia and the southern Soviet Union to Prague. She was interested in archaeology, and had boned up on the major sites, the succession of cultures going back millennia, and had arranged to join a group of archaeologists in what was then the French mandate in Syria. From these oriental journeys emerged a travel diary, Winter in Vorderasien (Winter in the Middle East), a book of short stories, Bei diesem Regen, (In This Rain) a novel-travelogue Tod in Persien (Death in Persia), countless pieces of journalism and a husband. Several years later, she motored overland to Afghanistan with Ella Maillart at the beginning of the Second World War. Travel corresponded to a need and produced a varied and colourful body of reportage and semi-autobiographical fiction. Way led onto way; it was clear that Annemarie had found both a lifestyle and a subject for her writing. 

Annemarie Schwarzenbach photographed by Marianne Breslauer © Photo: Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, © Marianne Breslauer / Fotostiftung Schweiz

On 12 October 1933, with a certain grand explorer aplomb, she settled into the first class carriage of the Oriental Express leaving Geneva:

“When I was a child I was enraptured by the sight of the Orient Express making its way through the Valais and up to the Simplon Pass: all you had to do was climb aboard and, unhindered, wake up one morning on the Bosphorus, on the shore of Asia.”

What’s interesting about Annemarie’s travels is the way she practises selective disclosure – what the English call reserve. This is due, perhaps, to the habits of the closet, but is also her characteristic way of framing the world. Her old university chum Fred Pasternek accompanied her on the journey as far as Beirut, but nowhere does he really appear in the record, and she took no photographs of him – in fact she had no selfies taken at all. This creates the impression of her as the intrepid traveller whereas she was supported all the way by embassies, grand hotels, cars and drivers and a cohort of people, including Fred. There was always lashings of hot water back at the residency or the palace.

Children in Istanbul, 1933. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Swiss Literary Archives, Bern

Her first stop was Istanbul and the Pera Palace Hotel perched on the Asian side. As always, Annemarie landed on her feet, knew the diplomats and archaeologists of several countries, where to go horseriding and the best colonial libraries.  She had arranged to meet Jean Pozzi, permanent counsellor and former ambassador to the French embassy. Pozzi,had been attached to the French diplomatic mission since 1907 and was a collector of Byzantine and Islamic antiquities, many now in the Louvre and the Sèvres Museum. Istanbul was undergoing a building boom and canny collectors often had to be one step behind the construction companies. Competing American universities, French institutes, British spies doubling as archaeologists and explorers, and well-heeled widows were involved in the Oriental Expedition business – ever since the spectacular discovery of Tutenkhamun’s tomb in 1922. Pozzi was the perfect contact for a young person wanting to explore the archaeology of the Middle East, and he introduced Annemarie around the diplomatic corps. Another contact was Clemens Holzmeister, a Viennese architect busy constructing the new capital of Ankara and the new presidential palace – his “Schönbrunn” – of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. “El Ghazi” had spearheaded his country’s modernisation, much of it planned and engineered by Europeans like Holzmeister.

The smells were so penetrating I almost felt sick. there were fish on woven platters, big blue iridescent ones; a thousand spices; hunks of meat, oils, a display of cheese and dairy products, melons, sacks of pepper, beer, fermented grape juice; innumerable hole-in-the-wall taverns from which emerged a heady stink of mutton fat …

In “Therapia”, a short text written in 1940 on returning to war-torn Europe from India and Afghanistan, Annemarie looked back on her first visit to Istanbul. Therapia, at the time a diplomatic enclave on the European shore of the Bosphorus, derived from the name of Sultan Selim II’s palace – Tarabiye meaning “pleasure”.

When I conjure up and cherish its name – Therapia – it floats free as it did then at the outset – bringing in its wake the smell of raspberries coming and going on the evening breeze, freshly-picked in baskets for sale in the little harbour there, the moon-dappled water lapping lazily at the quayside, and the greenery and flickering torchlight of the garden rising behind me terrace on terrace – this nocturnal Bosphorus was an uncalled-for paradise for an hour – but then dawn began, heralded by birdsong and the outgoing fishing boats.

Old houses in Ankara, Turkey, 1933. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Swiss Literary Archives, Bern

She travelled to Ankara with Holzmeister at the end of October for the tenth anniversary celebrations of the proclamation of the Turkish republic. Annemarie was again ill and already missing “Europe”. She stayed at the Hotel Bellevue Palace, the venue for official balls and receptions. There were three days of fireworks, the diplomatic corps was out in force, and she had an opportunity to observe Ataturk up close: “Many things have left their mark on that face”.

Ankara, Turkey, 1933. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach Swiss Literary Archives, Bern

It was December and inadvisable to travel by car to Syria so they boarded the Taurus Express. Across the border, roads were better maintained and Annemarie felt she was in “a civilized country”. Following the First World War, Syria and Lebanon had been carved up by France and Britain, with Syria coming under French mandate while the southern coast, Palestine and Jerusalem, came under the British. The British were ensconced in the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq as well, hand in glove protecting their access to oil.  Furthermore, Britain tipped the oil scales in Persia and to this end had installed Reza Shah Pahlavi on the throne in 1925. By the early nineteen-thirties the whole area was a quagmire of competing colonial powers protecting their oil concessions and keeping autonomy, especially nationalisation of oil, at bay.

View of the Citadel of Aleppo, Christmas 1933. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Swiss Literary Archives, Bern.

On 6 December Annemarie and Fred pitched up at the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, dowager of the old world hotels for nineteenth-century pilgrims heading south to Jerusalem. King Faisal had declared Syria’s independence from the balcony in 1918. Lawrence of Arabia slept in Room 202 and left his bar tab unpaid. Agatha Christie began Murder on the Orient Express in Room 203. Annemarie joined the traveller A-list, statesmen Mountbatten and Roosevelt, and sipped her mint tea from the same Royal Doulton china as Freya Stark, although it was more likely to have been Armenian cognac.

Times were…

She had arranged to spend some weeks at an archaeological dig at Reyhanli, joining the Syrian Expedition of the University of Chicago. This “hittite-assyrian” site on the Turkish border was about an hour and a half west of Aleppo and an hour east of the ancient site of Antioch in a province or sanjak of Turkey variously known as Alexandretta or Hatay (from Hittite). Today it’s the site of a large refugee population just inside the border with Syria. Whiskey seems to have been the drink of choice among the Chicago shovel-bums, and bottles of Mount Carmel wine, and raki. Hussein the driver accompanied them into Aleppo at night.

Aleppo, 1933. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Swiss Literary Archives, Bern.

Aleppo had always been a garrison town, there were a good few French squaddies, zouaves, Foreign Legion types and sundry men on rest and recreation,  and Hussein knew the soldiers’ bars under the citadel where “Negroes, Algerians in bright turbans, Arabs and French listened to the melancholy songs of singers from Istanbul and Cairo.” A 9 December letter mentions tantalisingly a visit with Jacques, Lebanese of Greek extraction, Etienne, French archaeologist, and the “correct” Fred Pasternek, to the joy division – des filles de joie – in the shadow of the Sarrasin fortress, with its falcons flying above the ruins and the town merchants crying their wares. Annemarie was in her element, a woman passing among men watching the women ply their trade.

Citadel tower and entrance, Aleppo, 1933. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Swiss Literary Archives, Bern.

 

The citadel at Aleppo, Syria, 1933. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Swiss Literary Archives, Bern.

 

The minaret of the mosque serves as a watchtower – and up on the parapet an African watchman under a bright turban sits motionless with his back to us, casing the city. We greet him, and he turns and invites us in Arabic to climb up, pointing over the roofs towards the setting sun: “The sea,” he says, and with a grand sweeping gesture: “Europe… Africa.”

 

The Umayyad Mosque, a Unesco World Heritage site, 1933-34. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Swiss Literary Archives, Bern.

The minaret of the Umayyad Mosque was reduced to rubble in fighting during the Syrian Civil War in April 2013. Rebuilding has begun. It is the first of the great historical structures of the Middle East that Annemarie witnessed before their destruction in the wars and conflicts of seventy years later – but not the last.

The Great Mosque of Aleppo following the siege. The Seljuk minaret was destroyed. Government and anti-government activists traded blame for the attack.

 

Skiing at Ain-Sofra in the Lebanon, 1934. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Swiss Literary Archives, Bern.

 

Leaving Reyhanli for a three-week stay in Beirut from 6 January 1934, she took stock of her situation. She arrived armed with introductions – to the French High Commissioner, to Henri Seyric, General Director of Antiquities in Syria and Lebanon and other functionaries of the French mandate, as well as the archaeologist Harald Ingholt. The elusive Fred Pasternek returned to Berlin and Annemarie was on her own, staying at the Hotel Metropole, invited to the Résidence, and skiing at Bhamdoun on Mount Lebanon. It was the gilded life she was used to, with an oriental twist. She attended a concert by the Polish-Jewish violinist Bronislaw Hubermann, playing Brahms’ Violin Concerto, during which the musician declared he would no longer play in the “Third Reich” – as it was now termed. In 1936 he established the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, thereby recruiting a thousand Jewish musicians to what was then Palestine, who otherwise would have perished. Annemarie was glad to be among the French after three weeks rough-housing with the “cold North Americans”, whom she bad-mouthed despite availing of their hospitality. But she wasn’t alone for long. Teaming up with archaeologist Daniel Schlumberger (excavating at Palmyre), they planned to drive to Damascus to look at the whirling dervishes. As an attractive woman travelling alone, she wasn’t long without an entourage.

Whirling dervishes in their element, Constantinople, early 20th. c.

Beirut was a Mediterranean town of cafe terraces, umbrella pines and orange groves. It snowed, turning the mountains into the Switzerland of the Levant. She saw the old Roman bridge over the Dog River, the fierce mustachioed men in the souks, the Maronite church in the rue des Martyrs, stalls of pomegranates and artichokes, pyramids of condensed milk, barbers working in the streets, the scarlet cummerbunds, the Roxy cinema, signs in French everywhere. She took up with Mahmoud, a twenty year-old “shoeshine boy, a character, dancing attendance, and before long my friend. Handsome …” She paid a visit to his home, met his family and had tea and sugared almonds while he changed into his white embroidered pants and they went off to explore the coast road. She also found some morphine. At this point in her life she usually indulged with her friends Klaus and Erika Mann and Mopsa Sternheim, without yet being hooked. A year later she was seriously addicted, with a habit of six to eight ‘ampoules‘ a day.

There were three days of festivities celebrating Armenian Christmas and she journeyed up the coast to the Phoenecian ruins at Byblos and visited the bazaar with another small French-speaking guide. By 23 January she was ready to move on to Jerusalem and the Biblical sites further south:

Now that I’m on the point of leaving Beirut, the city seems to take on a pivotal role. Life here is easy-going and I can take the measure of some outstanding characters. I was often alone and had time to consider my projects, which at first glance seemed daunting but firmed up eventually.

 

On board ship, Haifa, Palestine, 1934. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Swiss Literary Archives, Bern.

In Haifa she observed Jewish refugees arriving from Trieste in the wake of Nazi restrictions, the first of many over the coming decade, and a reminder of politics back in Germany. Among the photos Annemarie took of the port, one shows a short-haired woman shouldering a knapsack on board ship, standing opposite a ship’s officer: a look of intimacy passes between them. The refugees in the background have eyes only for the approaching promised land; the two foregrounded characters have eyes for each other. In “The Promised Land”, the first story in her collection Bei diesem Regen, the German diaspora is clear from an old professor and his young daughter:

He was called Levy, a chemistry professor at Fribourg University. He knew Palestine very well, and now he was showing his daughter where they were going to stay. She wouldn’t grow up in Germany but here in Palestine instead. How the Nazis had treated her father no more concerned her than the pogroms in Bessarabia. She would have a happy childhood in Palestine…

The flight from Damascus to Baghdad took her over the Syrian desert with its herds of gazelles and dried-up watercourses; the pilot invited her into his cockpit; the Euphrates River gleamed tantalisingly; nomad tents with their wattle defences stood out against the wilderness. This second leg of her journey, through Iraq, lasted a month, and will have to wait for a later posting.

View of Haifa from Mount Carmel, Palestine, 1934. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Swiss Literary Archives, Bern.

 

Sources cited

translations by Padraig Rooney

Annemarie Schwarzenbach, “Neben dem Orient-Express”, National-Zeitung, 18 July 1939, reprinted in Orientreisen: Reportagen aus der Fremde (Berlin: edition ebersbach, 2010), p. 16.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Winter in Vorderasien (Basel: Lenos Verlag, 2008), p. 26.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach letter to Claude Bourdet, 1 November 1933, Annemarie Schwarzenbach: Lettres à Claude Bourdet, ed. Dominique Laure Miermont (Carouge-Genève: Éditions Zoë, 2008), p. 45. 

Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Therapia”, 3 April 1940, National-Zeitung, reprinted in Orientreisen: Reportagen aus der Fremde (Berlin: edition ebersbach, 2010), p. 31.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach, “Schrecken der orientalischen Landstrassen”, Orientreisen: Reportagen aus der Fremde (Berlin: edition ebersbach, 2010), p. 72.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach,  An den äussersten Flüssen des Paradieses, ed. Roger Perret (Basel: Lenos Verlag, 2016), p. 53.

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On the Road: Annemarie and Marianne, Spain 1933

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The careers of Germany’s women photographers and film makers of the twenties and thirties follow the fault line of history. Marianne Breslauer (1909-2001) was a baptised Protestant like her parents but classified as Jewish under Nazi racial laws. Leni Riefenstahl allied her work to the ruling National Socialists to produce her masterpiece of propaganda and cinematography, Triumph of the Will, extolling the fascist aesthetic of the cult of the body, while Jewish athletes – Gretel Bergmann and Lili Henoch – were banned from participating in the 1936 Olympic Games. Dortmund-based Annelise Kretschmer, part-Jewish and the first woman photographer to set up her own independent studio, was obliged to resign her official positions and keep a low profile in Freiburg im Breisgau. Germain Krull moved to Monte Carlo after 1933 and during the war joined the Free French Forces in Africa as an activist and photojournalist. Many German women photographers left for England. The exhibition Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain After 1933 showcases the work done by this diaspora.

© Photo: Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, © Marianne Breslauer / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Marianne Breslauer, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Berlin, 1932, silver gelatin print, 22.7 x 17 cm, © Photo: Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, © Marianne Breslauer / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Breslauer described Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s look: “She had the same effect on me as she had on everybody: that curious mix of male and female. She reminded me of the image I have of the Angel Gabriel in Paradise. […] Not at all like a real human being, but more like a work of art.” Breslauer’s photos broadened the appeal of Schwarzenbach’s androgynous beauty and affectlessness. This cool airbrushed look chimed with the traumatised aesthetic of the Bauhaus: stripped down, disengaged, clean lines, low on make-up. A full-page portrait of “The writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach” appeared in the October 1933 edition of Uhu magazine, Breslauer’s photo credit withheld because of race laws.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942) was a Swiss writer, photographer and traveller who had published two novels, the second in March 1933, just before her trip to Spain with Breslauer. The typescript of Flucht nach oben, her third book, is dated “Le Lavandou, 10 May 1933”. Annemarie came from a wealthy Zurich family of silk industrialists and was friends with Klaus and Erika Mann and some of the German writers exiled in Sanary-sur-mer in the south of France in the early thirties. She was just beginning to find her feet as a journalist, and as a photographer, and would go on to report from and travel extensively in the Middle East, fascist Europe and Roosevelt’s America.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach, possibly photographed by Barbara Hamilton-Wright

Marianne Breslauer had followed the advice of Man Ray, whom she met as a student in Paris, and who encouraged her to find her own path in the field of photography that had fascinated her since her teens. This fortuitously took her in the direction of photojournalism and portraiture. In Berlin she began photographing her “New Woman” friends – as much a social movement as a revolution in feminine style for a particular social class.

Marianne Breslauer, “Défense d’afficher”, Paris, ca. 1936, silver gelatin print, 20.1 x 27.7 cm, © Photo: Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, © Marianne Breslauer / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Much propagated by magazines, the New Woman look sold an urban myth of sexual liberation and financial independence characterised by leisure, sport and cars – short hair parted on the side, the bathing hat worn as a fashion statement, men’s shirts, jackets and wide sailor’s trousers, motoring as an expression of new-won freedoms. The style was aspirational and a long way from the reality of rural and working women, some 1.5 million of whom were employed in greater Berlin at the time, a third in the garment industry. Breslauer’s photographs advertised and aestheticised the new look for a particular social class and their aspiring sisterhood. She had a sense of humour, as the photo below testifies (not a quality much noted about Annemarie).

Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Mercedes Mannheim, Spain, 1933. © Photo: Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, © Marianne Breslauer / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Annemarie and Marianne embarked in May 1933 on a three-week tour of Spain, Breslauer to take the photographs and Schwarzenbach to write up their travels. The Sun Also Rises (translated into German as Fiesta) was set in Spain, and Hemingway’s stripped down style influenced Annemarie’s own writing and their decision to head for Pamplona.  Annemarie was instrumental in putting Breslauer in touch with Lily Abegg of the Academia Photo Agency who was keen on the project. Abegg was the Yokohama-born daughter of a Swiss silk merchant and for many years East Asia correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. As a political science graduate, a career journalist and photographer, drawn towards Asia, Abegg epitomised Annemarie’s canny network skills and her drift towards travel writing, central to both their lives. They had much in common; it appears that Abegg and Annemarie had shared an apartment in Berlin for a brief period.  All three of these working lives – Breslauer, Abegg and Schwarzenbach – exemplary of women travelling, writing and photographing between the wars – were marked by Nazi power.

Sanary-sur-mer

The German diaspora had gathered in Sanary-sur-mer and other towns along the Riviera. Klaus Mann was there in advance of his parents, prospecting for a house. It was on this visit, at Les Roches Fleuries, that Annemarie and Klaus battened down on the idea for Die Sammlung, the pre-eminent but short-lived German exile magazine. Was it her idea or was it his? Three weeks beforehand she had corresponded with Klaus about doing something in opposition to political events. The new antifascist magazine, eventually called Die Sammlung (Compilation, Omnibus), ran from September 1933 to August 1935, published by Querido in Amsterdam with significant financial support from Annemarie.

Klaus Mann in Le Lavandou. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Swiss Literary Archives, Bern.

His sister, Erika Mann, and her partner, the actress Therese Giehse, were ensconced in the Les Roches Fleuries in Aiguebelle-Le Lavandou. The hotel, wrote Erika, sat “directly above the sea with a touch of Honolulu in the sense that it has small dependencies, with separate entrances and cute plant-covered terraces giving directly onto the beach”. Elizabeth and Michael Mann joined the company. The Mann family was beginning to consider more permanent exile after a lifetime in Munich from where they had been obliged to flee in a hurry. The German exiles were not alone in colonising the Riviera in the years following the Wall Street Crash: expatriate Americans, too, had drifted south, where life was cheaper and less hectic.

Katia and Thomas Mann, Le Lavandou, 1933. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Swiss Literary Archives, Bern.

Schwarzenbach had been infatuated with Erika Mann for a couple of years, ever since the Swiss writer had arranged a speaking engagement for Erika and her brother Klaus in Zurich. Erika kept up their friendship but was cool about the younger Annemarie’s princess ways and her tendency to cause scenes. Besides, Erika was involved with the Munich actress Therese Giehse, who would go on to play Mother Courage in Brecht’s play, premiered in Zurich during the Second World War.

Erika Mann, Le Lavandou, 1933. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Swiss Literary Archives, Bern.

By mid-May, picking Breslauer up at the train station in Montpellier, Annemarie at the wheel was motoring south across the Pyrenees into Catalonia. Wherever her classy white Mercedes Mannheim pulled in, with its German registration and attractive driver and passenger, they drew admirers.

Annemarie behind her Mercedes Mannheim, Spain, 1933. © Photo: Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, © Marianne Breslauer / Fotostiftung Schweiz

In Girona they visited the Moorish baths – Los Baños Árabesat the foot of the cathedral, and above Barcelona the 11th century Abbey of Montserrat. In Barcelona, Swiss resident Piet Meyer showed the two women the town and a transvestite show. Annemarie liked to smoke Chesterfields at the wheel, and drove at speed with assurance.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach in Girona, 1933. © Photo: Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, © Marianne Breslauer / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Marianne Breslauer’s photos are more composed than Annemarie’s; sharper, aware of different qualities of light in the same frame, altogether more professional. In the above shot of Annemarie crossing the Pont de les Peixteries Velles in Girona, Breslauer retains the cool aesthetic of her studio portraits, allowing the struts of the bridge to do the compositional work. She kept her negatives in better shape than Annemarie’s.

Annemarie writing in San Cujat, 1933. © Photo: Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, © Marianne Breslauer / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Annemarie’s travelling eye was often drawn to schoolchildren but also to the plight of girls in education – a focus sustained later in Persia, Afghanistan and the United States. “For Spanish girls there are hardly any good schools: they are taught deportment and their prayers. But all that goes by the wayside in the small country towns of northern Spain where the young girls between fourteen and twenty are as cheeky, loud and sassy as nowhere else.” 

Group of young people, San Sebastián, 1933. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Swiss Literary Archives, Bern.

They travelled along the southern slopes of the Pyrenees close to the French border, through Puigcerda and Seo de Urgel, enjoying driving on the white, hairpinning, almost deserted roads in the direction of Andorra. In the backcountry, encountering gypsies with wild hair and dirty hands, it is clear that the lure of nomadic life has taken hold of her imagination:

They overwhelmed us like wolves, we weren’t even able to take photographs… And here in the small working-class towns of the western Pyrenees all we come across is a lone woman with a nursing child who wants to read our fortune, just like in Paris or Berlin.

The harbour at San Sebastián, 1933. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Swiss Literary Archives, Bern.

In Pamplona and San Sebastián they followed in Hemingway’s footsteps. There were no bulls – it was not the season – but they stayed in the Hotel Quintana where Hemingway’s Americans fraternised with bullfighters. Glossed as Hotel Montoya, Hemingway described its charm:

I had stopped at the Montoya for several years. We never talked for very long at a time. It was simply the pleasure of discovering what we each had felt. Men would come in from the distant towns and before they left Pamplona stop and talk for a few minutes with Montoya about bulls. These men were aficionados. Those who were aficionados could always get rooms even when the hotel was full.

First edition of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), set partly in Pamplona.

Annemarie wrote not so much as a reporter but in the more personalised feuilleton style familiar to continental newspaper readers, what we might now call an op-ed piece. Her writing from Spain takes on local colour with no pretensions to profundity:

The Basques drink wine from skins, sport berets and long black coats, and speak the most impenetrable language we have heard so far. They travel in from the countryside by bus and head to market in Pamplona, to play pelota or for Sunday bullfights. Pamplona is animated and cheerful, the cafes lively, and the big pelota courts host professional games and players every afternoon. Inveterate gamblers lose as much here as in Monte Carlo or at the Auteuil racetrack. We’re staying at the Hotel Quintana where the matadors put up and negotiate their next engagements with their agents.

Spanish soldier, 1933. Photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Swiss Literary Archives, Bern.

In Zurich, on the return leg, Marianne Breslauer met her husband-to-be, the art dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt, and began her long exile from Germany. “The Nazis were in power, the press in Germany was the same, and the Academia Agency no longer saw any possibility of publishing my photos, unless I agreed to adopt the name Annelise Brauer… so-called non-Aryans were no longer allowed to be published.” Breslauer, baptised and brought up a Christian, stuck to her principles. “That meant that my photos, for the people who had contracted us, were lost. You need to remember that in 1933 we had no doubts about what was going to happen, or what could happen later.” Her photography career, begun in Paris under Man Ray and capturing Weimar womanhood, had effectively come to an end. She married Feilchenfeldt in 1936. It was many decades before her photographs of Annemarie Schwarzenbach and of their motor flight through northern Spain came to light once more. 

 

Works cited

Marianne Feilchenfeldt Breslauer, Bilder meines Lebens: Erinnerungen (Wädenswil: Nimbus, 2012).

Carla Mitchell & John March, Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain After 1933,  catalogue for the Insiders/Outsiders festival, March 2019-2020, https://www.anothereye.org/introduction

Annemarie Schwarzenbach, “Von Mittelmeer zum Atlantischen Ozean” in Insel Europa: Reportagen und Feuilletons 1930-1942 (Basel: Lenos Verlag, 2005) p. 45.

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner, 1996), p. 123.

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The extraordinary travels of Ella Maillart

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Ella Maillart’s Leica, from the documentary Les voyages extraordinaires d’Ella Maillart

Swiss traveller Ella Maillart was born in 1903 in Geneva of a Danish mother and a Swiss furrier father. Attractive, sporty, outdoorsy, she loved to be on the lake, especially with her childhood friend Hermine de Saussure. “Bobbed chestnut hair with a fairer lock in front, clear grey eyes, and a frank and delicate smile – there was a light in her face. Later, reading Homer, I felt that Pallas Athene must have looked like her.”

Still from the documentary Les voyages extraordinaires d’Ella Maillart

Hermine was “Miette” and Ella was “Kini”. This early pash blossomed into lifelong friendship. Surviving photos show a kind of 1920s sailor-suited lesbian chic – about which a new documentary on Maillart remains fairly circumspect. Ella played hockey, sailed, rowed and skied at a time when many sports clubs denied entry to women.

Ella Maillart (with pipe) on board her yacht.

She went on to represent Switzerland on the sailing team at the Paris Olympic Games of 1924 and to become one of those mythical between-the-wars travellers, a field dominated by British gentlemen of a certain stamp, such as Peter Fleming, whom she met and befriended in Sinkiang or Chinese Turkistan in 1935. They too became lifelong friends. She met the widow of American writer Jack London, and through that contact met Madame Tolstoy in Russia. She had a well-adjusted view of Europe’s position in the world: “Europe is a little peninsula of Central Asia.”

Traveller in furs, Peter Fleming, photographed by Ella Maillart in China, 1934

A new documentary about her life and travels, Les voyages extraordinaires d’Ella Maillart, is showing in French cinemas. I caught up with it recently in the Odeon Cinema in Morges near Lausanne, where it was screened as part of the book festival Le livre sur les quais. I was entranced from beginning to end, especially by Maillart’s photos of an Asia that has disappeared.

Director Raphaël Blanc makes wonderful use of the Maillart archive at the Élysée museum of photography in Lausanne. She was an accomplished photographer, an early user of a Leica III (a Leica F), with a good eye and an engaging manner with her subjects. That talent for friendship stood her in good stead. Peter Fleming (brother of the more famous Ian) described the advantage of the Leica:

… a large proportion of the photographs we took were taken from the saddle; and it made a lot of difference being able to hold your horse in with one hand while you focused the camera with the other.

The Golden Temple, Amritsar, India, photograph by Ella Maillart

Journalism and book publication paid for Maillart’s road trips. She wrote for Le petit parisien and other magazines of the day, and illustrated her own travel books. The film cuts between her still photographs, archival footage from the 1920s and ’30s, TV interviews with Maillart dating from the 1970s as well as contemporary interviews with people who knew her.

The documentary follows Daniel Girardin, art historian and curator of the Élysée museum, who rides and walks in Maillart’s footsteps across Central Asia. These travels are shot by Raphaël Blanc using high definition drone photography to capture the wide karst and mountain landscape of Kyrgistan and Afghanistan, the thousand year-old horse market of Karakol and scenes of transhumance that seem timeless. Maillart’s extraordinary travels, as well as her spiritual quest during the Second World War in India, are handled without too much hokus-pokus.

Ella Maillart’s luggage on the airfield, Samarkand, Ouzbekistan, URSS. 1932

In 1938 she teamed up with Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach and the two of them headed off in a Ford to revisit Afghanistan. Schwarzenbach was a troubled soul and addicted to morphine. The two travellers eventually parted ways. Ella’s account of their journey under the shadow of war, written after Schwarzenbach’s death, has wonderful photos of the androgynous Schwarzenbach as well as the enormous Buddha statues of Bamiyan, dating from the 4th and 5th centuries CE.

The Bamiyan Buddha, August 1939, photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach

They stood in the cliff-face niches of limestone from which they had been carved, looking out over the valley in the Hazarajat region of central Afghanistan for a millennium and a half. The Taliban dynamited them in 2001. Switzerland and Japan have pledged to reconstruct them.

Ella Maillart photo of the royal palace, Balaju, 1961

Maillart’s books and her style have dated a bit, and she was aware of her limitations as a writer. Her fellow traveller Nicholas Bouvier said of her: “I much prefer real travellers who write to writers who travel.” It’s an astute distinction.

Ella Maillart’s itineraries, courtesy of Zoé publications, 2013

Maillart retreated after the war for part of each year to the village of Chandolin, high in Switzerland’s Valais, where she kept a chalet, her books and her spiritual equilibrium. Her interest in eastern mysticism and religion was ahead of its time in the West. With this new documentary, its stunning photography and high definition aerial shots of Central Asia, perhaps more people will get to know of Maillart’s exploits and her groundbreaking life.

Philippe Vermès portrait of Ella Maillart

The tiny Ella Maillart museum at Chandolin in the Valais

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