Annemarie Schwarzenbach was born in the city of
Zurich, Switzerland. When she was four, the family moved to the
Bocken Estate in
Horgen, near
Lake Zurich, where she grew up. Her father, Alfred, was a wealthy businessman in the silk industry. Her mother,
Renée Schwarzenbach-Wille, the daughter of the Swiss general
Ulrich Wille and descended from German aristocracy, was a prominent hostess, Olympic equestrian sportswoman and amateur photographer. Her father tolerated her mother's bisexuality. In 1930, she made contact with
Erika and
Klaus Mann (daughter and son of
Thomas Mann). She was fascinated by Erika's charm and self-confidence. A relationship developed, which much to Schwarzenbach's disappointment did not last long (Erika had her eye on another woman: the actress
Therese Giehse), although they always remained friends. Still smarting from Erika's rejection, she spent the following years in Berlin. There she found a soulmate in Klaus Mann and became a frequent visitor to the family Mann's house. With Klaus, she started using drugs. She led a fast life in the bustling, decadent, artistic city that was Berlin towards the close of the
Weimar Republic. She lived in
Westend, drove fast cars and threw herself into the Berlin night-life. "She lived dangerously. She drank too much. She never went to sleep before dawn", recalled her friend
Ruth Landshoff. Her
androgynous beauty fascinated and attracted both men and women. In 1932, Schwarzenbach planned a car trip to Persia with Klaus and Erika Mann and a childhood friend of the Manns, the artist Ricki Hallgarten. The evening before the trip was due to start, on 5 May, Hallgarten, suffering from depression, shot himself in his house in
Utting on the
Ammersee. For Schwarzenbach, this was the first time she encountered death directly. Schwarzenbach's lifestyle ended with the Nazi takeover in 1933, when bohemian Berlin disappeared. Tensions with her family increased, as some members sympathised with the far-right Swiss Fronts, which favoured closer ties with Nazi Germany. Her parents urged Schwarzenbach to renounce her friendship with the Manns and help with the reconstruction of Germany under
Hitler. This she could not do, since she was a committed anti-Fascist and her circle included Jews and political refugees from Germany. Instead, later on, she helped Klaus Mann finance an anti-Fascist literary review,
Die Sammlung, which helped writers in
exile from Germany by publishing their articles and short stories. The pressure she felt led her to attempt suicide, which caused a scandal among her family and their conservative circle in Switzerland. She took several trips abroad with Klaus Mann, to Italy, France and Scandinavia, in 1932 and 1933. Also in 1933, she travelled with the photographer
Marianne Breslauer to Spain to carry out a report on the Pyrenees. Breslauer was also fascinated by Schwarzenbach: "She was neither a man nor a woman," she wrote, "but an angel, an archangel" and made a portrait photograph of her. Later that year, Schwarzenbach travelled to Persia. After her return to Switzerland, she accompanied Klaus Mann to the Soviet Writers Union Congress in Moscow. This was Mann's most prolific and successful period as a writer. On her next trip abroad, she wrote to him suggesting their marrying, although they were both attracted mainly to the same sex. Nothing came of this proposal. |250px In 1935, she returned to Persia, where she married the French diplomat
Achille-Claude Clarac, also a homosexual. They had known each other for only a few weeks, and it was a marriage of convenience for both of them, since she obtained a French diplomatic passport, which enabled her to travel without restrictions. They lived together for a while in
Tehran, but when they fled to an isolated area in the countryside to escape the summer heat, their lonely existence had an adverse effect on Schwarzenbach. She turned to
morphine, which she had been using for years for various ailments but to which she now became addicted. In Kabul, they split up, Maillart despairing of ever weaning her friend away from her drug addiction. They met once more in 1940 as Schwarzenbach was boarding the ship to return her to Europe. The trip is described by Maillart in her book
The Cruel Way (1947), which was dedicated to "Christina" (the name Maillart used for the late Annemarie in the book, maybe at the demand of her mother, Renée). It was made into a movie,
The Journey to Kafiristan, in 2001. She is reported to have had affairs with the Turkish Ambassador's daughter, who was suffering from tuberculosis, in
Tehran and a female French archaeologist in Turkestan. McCullers dedicated her novel,
Reflections in a Golden Eye, which was actually written before the two women met, to her. Schwarzenbach was also at this time involved in a difficult relationship with the wife of a wealthy man, Baronessa Margot von Opel, and was still struggling with her feelings for Erika Mann. This contributed to another bout of depression and another suicide attempt, which saw her hospitalised and released only under the condition that she leave the United States. , Portugal In March 1941, Schwarzenbach arrived back in Switzerland, but she was soon on the move again. She travelled as an accredited journalist to the
Free French in the
Belgian Congo, where she spent some time but was prevented from taking up her position. In May 1942 in
Lisbon, she met the German journalist
Margret Boveri, who had been deported from the United States (her mother,
Marcella O'Grady, was American). They liked each other personally, but Boveri was unimpressed by Schwarzenbach's work. In June 1942 in
Tétouan, she met up again with her husband, Claude Clarac, before returning to Switzerland. While back home, she started making new plans. She applied for a position as a correspondent for a Swiss newspaper in Lisbon. In August, her friend the actress Therese Giehse stayed with her at Sils. On 7 September 1942 in the
Engadin, she fell from her bicycle and sustained a serious head injury, and following a mistaken diagnosis in the clinic where she was treated, she died on 15 November. During her final illness, her mother permitted neither Claude Clarac, who had rushed to Sils from
Tétouan via Marseille, nor her friends, to visit her in her sick bed. After Annemarie's death, her mother destroyed all her letters and diaries. A friend took care of her writings and photographs, which were later archived in the
Swiss Literary Archives in
Bern. Throughout much of the final decade of her life, she was addicted to morphine and was intermittently under
psychiatric treatment. She suffered from depression, which she felt resulted from a disturbed relationship with her domineering mother. "She brought me up as a boy and as a child prodigy", Schwarzenbach recalled later of her mother. "She deliberately kept me alone, to keep me with her […]. But I could never escape her, because I was always weaker than her, but, because I could argue my case, felt stronger and that I was right. And while I love her." Her family problems were exacerbated by family members supporting National Socialist politicians, while Annemarie hated the Nazis. Despite her problems, Schwarzenbach was productive: besides her books, between 1933 and 1942, she produced 365 articles and 50 photo-reports for Swiss, German and some American newspapers and magazines. Schwarzenbach is portrayed by Klaus Mann in two of his novels: as Johanna in
Flucht in den Norden (1934) and as the Angel of the Dispossessed in
Der Vulkan (The Volcano, 1939). == Personal life ==