With Rebel Angel, Irish poet-novelist Padraig Rooney provides the first biography in the English language of the complex Swiss writer, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who died after a cycling accident in 1942, aged 34. Her writings, travels and photographs began to be rediscovered in the 1980s. All Schwarzenbach’s work is in print, including English translations of several titles.
In Rooney’s artful portrayal of Schwarzenbach’s fast-paced life – often propelled by expensive cars gifted by her phenomenally wealthy industrialist father – the biographer finds a pleasing balance between scholarship and gossip, art and social history.
Schwarzenbach published her first novel aged 24. She was beautifully androgynous: long-limbed and lithe, with a sculpted movie-star face. Men and women were magnetised by her. She blazed intensely through precocious success, tempestuous lesbian love affairs, multicontinental travel, a marriage of convenience to a French male diplomat for travel documentation, acclaimed social justice reportage, and partying with the bohemian elites of the day.
Schwarzenbach’s relationships and creative potential were stymied by alcohol and morphine addiction; self-centredness, neediness and scene-making; and regular bouts of serious mental ill-health. Violent psychotic episodes resulted in straitjacketing and incarceration, including in the same sanatorium as James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia.
While admiring Schwarzenbach’s work, Rooney also exposes her blind spots. Financed on wealth generated by exploited workers in her family’s silk factories, Schwarzenbach produced incisive articles on racism and the capitalist exploitation of labour and the environment while travelling in the US. Yet 10 months in the Belgian Congo produced barely a word on European white supremacist plunder and oppression.
What was consistent, however, was Schwarzenbach’s anti-Nazism. Immersed in risky semi-clandestine LGBTQ+ culture, with many arty, left-leaning and Jewish friends – including Nobel Prize-winning author, Thomas Mann, and his son and daughter Klaus and Erika, both also queer writers – Schwarzenbach saw early on where Hitler’s thuggery was leading. Her stance brought her into conflict with her pro-Nazi family, especially her mother, Renée, an enthusiastic lifelong Hitlerite.
As per its title, Rooney’s book brings to vivid life Schwarzenbach’s times as well as her life. Brilliant historical writing on the global violence and chaos generated by fascistic despots makes Rebel Angel prescient reading for our times.
