Essay

All the Roads are Open

Annemarie Schwarzenbach, (1908-1942) Swiss writer, photo-journalist, explorer

By Morelle Smith

What was it that moved me so much? Was it the farewell? Or perhaps a memory – but which one? For I can recall many other visions, the Lataband in the distance, the summits of the Hindu Kush, the hills of Thysville, the great spaces of the Congo and of Persia, Kurdistan or Lebanon, the shore of a lake, and those mountain slopes of the country of my birth – and these moments were always both at the same time a farewell and a reunion, tumultuous joy and a mood of melancholy: what is the secret of the golden hours? 

Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Many creative people show characteristics that are unconventional, unusual, often too, showing deep sensitivity and a direct and intimate acquaintance with suffering. Annemarie called her suffering a ‘thorn in the flesh’  but these ‘thorns’ can often provide the energy and impetus to express our experience in some creative way. In early life this feeling of difference can make life very difficult, as all the usual paths, the societal norms, rules and customs are seen as being deeply unattractive and even inimical to the young creative person who is following inner promptings that can put them at odds with their families’ values and expectations, their societal obligations. They do not fit in and they are not understood. Like most human beings they desire love and approval, yet they often find that – just because they are following their own path rather than the one their families would have them take – that approval is withheld, they are criticized and judged, with consequent suffering, inner conflict and even alienation. 

This was certainly the situation for Annemarie Schwarzenbach, as she grew up on the shores of Lake Zurich. Her family was well-off and her mother in particular was attached to the conventions of a social hierarchy that put her lineage at the top of the tree. Her father, who stemmed from an enterprising business background (more nouveau riche than gentry) was far less rigid when it came to social mores, concentrating on his flourishing business of silk production, and mostly left the upbringing of their five children to his wife. In Annemarie’s adolescence the rifts started to appear between her parents’ values and her differences and preferences, as she developed an ‘unhealthy’ (from the parents’ point of view) attachment to another young woman and was sent away to a more distant school as a boarder. 

Annemarie was clever, and the first of her family to pursue a university education. This was, if not particularly highly valued, at least acceptable to her parents. But after completing her undergraduate degree, and beginning post-graduate studies, she began to make friends with like-minded young people, particularly Klaus and Erika Mann, the son and daughter of Thomas Mann, and these friends were felt by her parents not to be suitable, in fact, to lead her astray. Annemarie described these conflicts in fictionalized form, in her first published novel, Freunde um Bernhard/Bernhard’s Circle of Friends. 

As a young adult, Annemarie was not going to give up these friendships with people whose company she loved and whose ideas – left wing, egalitarian, creative, freedom-loving, bohemian – she felt at home with. And so began the conflict with her parents – or more particularly her mother – which continued, off and on, through arguments, crises, severance of communication, then reconciliation, throughout her life. This was a source of suffering, and it was also a recurring theme in her thinking and her writing. How to be ‘herself’, how to follow her inner impulses and desires, how to create her own path in life, how to be close to those she loved, and also – how to keep or win back her mother’s love and approval, or at the very least, understanding.  For it seemed as though, if she was true to herself, parental love, backing and acceptance, was sacrificed. For Annemarie, with her extreme sensitivity, her capacity for profound attachment, her need for freedom, self-expression and creativity and her stubborn obstinacy in creating her own path, the emotional pain was intense and the crises, not just with her mother but with other loves too, frequent. Her profound attachment to others and her expectations of them to alleviate that pain, led to disillusionment and a recurring sense of loss. 

These characteristics baffled her friend and fellow-traveller, the writer Ella Maillart, whose character was very different from that of Annemarie. Both women were great travellers, seeking new experiences, places and cultures. Annemarie first travelled outside Europe as an archaeologist, visiting Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Two books came from these experiences, Winter in Vorderasian/Winter in the Near East and Bei diesem Regen/Rainfall. In the late 1930s, Annemarie became a frequent contributor, as a photo-journalist, to various Swiss publications such as Neue Zürcher Zeitung, National-Zeitung, Die Weltwoche etc. Ella Maillart had travelled across Asia, visiting parts of Soviet Russia, Kashmir, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and China, and had already published several books, including Turkestan Solo and Forbidden Journey – From Peking to Kashmir. 

In 1939, Annemarie and Ella undertook the long overland journey from Switzerland to Afghanistan. Their extraordinary adventures resulted in Ella’s The Cruel Way and Annemarie’s All the Roads are Open. But Ella’s patience was sorely tested by Annemarie’s drug addiction, of which, she had assured Ella before they started out, she had successfully been cured. Ella watched, uncomprehending, as Annemarie showed total commitment to her writing and to their shared journey across Europe and Asia, only to suffer a relapse into drug-taking, with all its physical and emotional side-effects. It took Ella a long time to understand that Annemarie’s choice of the path of suffering (‘the cruel way’) was not really a question of choice, but was an integral part of Annemarie’s character. Although Ella did believe in choice – and she demonstrated the basis of this belief in her psychological insights in that book.

According to many who met her, Annemarie was surrounded by an enigmatic aura, not just because of her androgynous beauty and graceful appearance, but she emanated a bewitching energy of mystery and allure. ‘A gifted being who charmed everyone who met her’ wrote Ella Maillart, and ‘the most true and honest person I had ever met’. 

Men fell around her like trees toppling in a storm. But it was women’s greater reserves of emotional resonance, sympathy and capacity for love that responded more directly to her needs. She loved men too but perhaps what is most striking about her relationships with others is that, once her heart was involved, she retained loyalty to that feeling and that person. She had high hopes, ideals and expectations of others, but if they could not live up to them, she took her pain and disappointment on board, without resenting or blaming them. She knew her own character, she knew that she could make excessive emotional demands on others which inevitably resulted in disappointments. But she remained intensely loyal to all of these people who had touched her heart, and kept up a correspondence with many of them, including Ella, Klaus and Erika Mann, Carson McCullers, to the end of her life. 

Annemarie wrote hundreds of articles for Swiss journals and magazines; she also wrote a biography, several novels, short story collections and récits de voyage, and many of these were not published in her lifetime, for different reasons. Some of her articles were too intensely personal, one novel was lost, and her short story collection Der Falkenkäfig/The Falcons’ Cage (written in the mid-thirties) despite recommendations by the great writers Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig, because of sympathetic portrayals of the plight of Jews at this time, was not accepted by the publisher because of fears it would not pass the censors.

For several decades after the war, Annemarie’s writing was ‘forgotten’. But renewed interest appeared in the late 1980s, her published writing was rediscovered, her archives revealed her unpublished novels and other manuscripts, and her work was translated into French and other European languages. This interest has continued, with fresh editions of her earlier novels coming out, and three of her books have even been translated into English. This renewed interest has partly been because of her unusual life; there has been a lot of interest in her relationships particularly with women (seen as an avant-garde gay writer) and her morphine addiction. But I think that Annemarie would have hated to be labelled or classified in this way or indeed in any way, for she was an explorer of the unknown, both literally and metaphorically, a seeker of truth, and despite the fears and dangers involved in this often lonely and singular life, she knew she had to discover and apply her own values, and to experiment in her life and in her writing. She followed no-one else’s rules. And like so many trailblazers, yes, she was avant-garde, she was ahead of her time. And perhaps it was only since the times or the Zeitgeist caught up with her, that her work experienced a revival and the manuscripts languishing in her archives were read, published and translated, and received with enthusiasm. 

She is well known in France. (Almost all of her books have been translated into French   thanks to the assiduous translations of her work by Dominique Laure Miermont who has also written a biography of her, Annemarie Schwarzenbach ou le Mal d’Europe) Just last year, 2020, a new edition of her first novel Freunde um Bernhard/Les Amis de Bernhard came out, and the reviewer in Le Monde said how good it was to read the work of a writer he loved. But despite the fact that three of her books have now been translated into English, Lyric Novella, All the Roads are Open and Death in Persia, her writing is still not well-known in the UK.  

My discovery of her writing began with a mystery. I picked up Ella Maillart’s The Cruel Way, in a second-hand bookshop. Ella wrote it after her Annemarie’s death, in 1942. In it, Ella named her companion ‘Christina’ (at the insistence of Annemarie’s mother, who wanted to avoid any scandal, as Ella wrote honestly about ‘Christina’s’ struggle with her drug dependency). I wanted to find out who this ‘Christina’ was, this writer ‘whose prose’ Ella wrote, ‘was more fluent than mine’. The mystery was solved when I went into a bookshop in France and discovered Annemarie’s books there. I then read all of her books that I could get hold of in French translation, as well as Dominique Laure Miermont’s biography. 

In The Cruel Way Ella wrote that for Annemarie, ‘Writing was the only ritual of her life: she subordinated everything to it’. And Annemarie herself wrote that ‘Truly, I only live when I write’.  Her writing and her life were inseparable. So what, I wondered, were the inner impulses which impelled her across continents, to face extraordinary hardships, to explore landscapes both inner and outer, to delve deeply into her own nature and to write about these experiences, both geographical and psychological? 

She described this seeking and searching as looking for truth, for life’s meaning, looking for ‘the Absolute’. And this, along with the vivid and lyrical qualities of her writing, is what interested me the most. All lives end in death, but some leave notes made on the way, a legacy which can inspire. They are like sketches, clues, pointers and paper trails which they leave behind. We do our best to put our experiences into words though often feel we fall short of capturing the full fanfare and profundity of our experiences. I interpret Annemarie’s search as one that has been described through the ages in different ways. But whatever words are used, the heightened awareness where truth can be found brings an understanding that goes beyond words, beyond the everyday awareness of struggle, emotional conflict and difficulties encountered in our daily lives. It gives us an experience of knowing who we really are, beyond the everyday self. It gives us an experience of oneness and connection – to ourselves, to all of life, and to all of time, an experience of homecoming. 

Such experiences can be momentary or long lasting, but their importance does not lie in time, but in their capacity to change us. For some, these changes can come incrementally, for others in one great overwhelming wave of Eureka-type insight. What fascinates about Annemarie’s life is that she gives a detailed account of her inner life, the obstacles and difficulties she faces, as well as the breakthroughs, the insights and the successes. Her life may have been short but her paper trails were abundant and I have found them inspirational. I hope you will too.

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