Home > Essays > Carson McCullers in 1940
profile/annemarie-schwarzenbach.md
Translated from the German by Padraig Rooney
Published: Tue Jan 30 2018
Chitra Ganesh, The Condition of Womanhood (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist and Durham Press.
AGNI 84 Print Only

Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908–1942) was a Zurich-born writer, reporter, and traveler whose short colorful life obscures the variety of her literary expression. She published short stories and three novels, and reported from Russia, Afghanistan, Persia, Portugal, and the Congo. In 1936–37, and again in 1940–41, she traveled to the United States, chronicling in articles and photographs the aftermath of the Depression and the effects of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Her adventurous life and her lyric gifts as a writer were rediscovered by a new generation of German readers in the 1980s.

Padraig Rooney, an Irish poet and journalist who lives in Basel, Switzerland, is the author of The Gilded Chalet: Off-piste in Literary Switzerland (Nicholas Brealey, 2015). He recently finished translating a collection of Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s American journalism from the 1930s. (updated 10/2016)
Back to top