Annemarie Schwarzenbach was 29 when she came to Knoxville in 1937. Acclaimed in Europe, the Swiss writer lived a short, colorful, and painful life. Her descriptions of that Knoxville trip have never been translated into English, until now.
by Jack Neely
She probably stayed at the Andrew Johnson Hotel that November, but she stood out from the tourists staying there, the others who had come to explore the newly opened Great Smoky Mountains National Park or to watch Coach Neyland's remarkable Tennessee Vols play football at Shields-Watkins field.
She didn't look much like anyone else on Gay Street in 1937. Though she was something of a celebrity in Switzerland for her exotic travelogues and her erotic novels, she was little known here. She likely turned heads anyway. Twenty-nine and tall, she had an aristocratic, arrestingly serious face that some called beautiful. She dressed like a man, with a wide-lapel jacket, and wore her blondish hair short. If Knoxvillians noticed that she spoke strangely, it was probably her German accent. Or it may have been that she was on morphine.
She carried a camera. She took pictures of things Knoxvillians rarely even looked at. She was working on an illustrated essay called Auf der Schattenseite von Knoxville, on the shadow-side, or dark side, of Knoxville.
The essay would appear the following month in a Swiss magazine called the National Zeitung. Many years later, it would also appear, with six photographs of Knoxville, in a book about industrial America during the Depression. Its title was Jenseits von New York, which translates, roughly, "Beyond New York." Published in Switzerland in 1992, it has apparently never been published in English. This fall, scouts for a Swiss TV documentary were attempting to retrace Annemarie Schwarzenbach's steps.
What they found here, and what Schwarzenbach found 63 years ago, were very different cities. The differences between the Knoxvilles of 1937 and 2000 show how far we've come, in some respects—but the Swiss visitors' impressions also emphasize that we've come up with newer problems to replace the old ones.
You may have seen them this past October, on the day of the Georgia game: two tall, slim men in their 40s, stalking around downtown, standing on the retaining wall over Neyland Drive, lurking underneath the Gay Street Bridge. One carried a notebook and a green paperback: a German-language edition of Jenseits von New York. The other carried a good camera. The one with the book was Swiss filmmaker Rudolph Straub, who led this expedition. The other was his friend, freelance photographer Livio Piatti.
The jovial Piatti had difficulty trying to find the precise perspectives of some of Schwarzenbach's photographs. One was taken from a place that's now underground. For another, he had to stand on a retaining wall in front of Riverside Tavern, inches away from 50 mph traffic on Neyland Drive.
On the riverwalk, the intellectual Straub pauses to remark on the dense prose in an inscribed excerpt from Cormac McCarthy's novel, Suttree. Looking up at the old apartment buildings of Maplehurst, Straub comments that some of downtown's buildings and streets remind him vaguely of Copenhagen.
They left the next day for Lumberton, N.C., following Schwarzenbach's trek around the darker corners of the South.
For someone who died before her 35th birthday, she led a remarkable life.
Born a wealthy silk heiress in Zurich, she had a peculiar childhood, estranged from her mother and raised more or less as a boy. She studied history there and in Paris, and as a very young woman she befriended the family of the German writer and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, especially his children Klaus and Erika, with whom she often lived and traveled. Based in wild, pre-Nazi Berlin, the Berlin of Marlene Dietrich and Bertolt Brecht, she experimented with ideas, people, and substances.
During the Nazi years, Schwarzenbach allegedly helped desperate refugees flee to neutral Switzerland. She traveled the world, writing books about Persia, Scandinavia, and the Baltics. In one book she exposed Austria as a pro-Nazi state and not just a victim of Hitler's fascism.
In Tehran she'd met and married an embassy bureaucrat named Claude-Achille Clarac, but it didn't take. The isolation she felt was so keen that some scholars blame it for her renewed morphine addiction. She returned to Switzerland alone, and soon made her way on to America.
Straub thinks Schwarzenbach's travel journalism is much better than her fiction, which indulges in the melodramatic. According to her friend Thomas Mann, her best journalism was her essays about America:
"very good and clear texts," he wrote, "with a pronounced point of view...." When Swiss magazine Mass und Wert rejected some of Schwarzenbach's American essays, Mann protested.
In 1937 she took a trip into the industrial bowels of America. Accompanied by her American companion, Barbara Hamilton-Wright, she visited Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and other northern towns, but she was especially interested in the South; she spent time in Montgomery and Savannah, as well as industrial towns in North Carolina.
Dominique Miermont is an author who lives in Paris. She has already translated much of Schwarzenbach's work into French, including Death In Persia and Jenseits von New York. "She hated New York because of the noise and the traffic and what she felt was an inhuman way of life," explains Miermont. "I think she was especially interested in the South because she felt very close to the poor, and she took a great interest in the trade unions' efforts to defend the rights of the workers."
Miermont is now working on her own biography of Schwarzenbach. "Her reports are the result of the very human way she looks at the world, and specifically at the needy. She was herself very unhappy and she found safety only in writing.
"I think it was the best period in Annemarie's life," Miermont says of Schwarzenbach's U.S. tour in 1937. "She could do the work she loved to do; she could travel in the company of a woman she loved and admired."
Schwarzenbach visited Highlander Folk School, the already famous union-organizing and political activist center where more than a decade later a young Martin Luther King would study civil disobedience. In 1937, Highlander was at Monteagle, in remote Grundy County. Piatti thinks she may have been just a little bit smitten with Highlander's founder, the charismatic Myles Horton; a portrait of him sitting on a rocky crag illustrates the text, which describes Highlander admiringly and outlines Horton's efforts with the CIO and other workers' organizations.
And then, behind the wheel of a Ford, she came to Knoxville. This destination may have attracted her on several accounts: it was a decaying industrial city in the South, which seemed to appeal to her sense of the tragic and the exotic; it was home to thousands of underpaid workers, and had recently witnessed textile strikes; and it was also the headquarters of the internationally famous experiment known as TVA.
The essay she wrote about Knoxville originally appeared in German in the "radical democratic" Swiss journal, National-Zeitung, on Dec. 16, 1937. Jeff Mellor, a German professor at UT, translated it for us. He says Schwarzenbach's writing is impressive, poetic, impressionistic. This is, as far as we know, the first time Schwarzenbach's descriptions of Knoxville have been quoted in English.
"The vision of a better life, the long-cherished American dream, turns shadowy the farther the roads lead South," she begins.
"The river languishes slowly toward the plains of the Ohio, and along its banks the traces of destruction from the rains and flood times follow," she writes. "High above the river arch the bridges which lead us into Knoxville. A city like many others...with a red-brick market house where the farmers sell apples and tomatoes, corn and peppers—with businesses and movie houses, a garishly lit main street and dark neighborhoods where the workers in the T-shirt factories must live in abject poverty. With its 100,000 citizens, Knoxville is one of the urban centers in a region poorly endowed by nature...."
Much of that passage will be familiar to longtime Knoxvillians; the "red brick Market House" on Market Square was torn down in 1960. The "garishly lit main street" is obviously Gay Street, then clustered with movie theaters, restaurants, and other businesses open long after dark. The "T-shirt factory" was probably Standard Knitting Mills, one of Knoxville's biggest employers in 1937. But that phrase, "poorly endowed by nature" may surprise readers today. It was probably an honest first impression. Schwarzenbach visited during a time of flooding and erosion, unchecked clearcutting, and farmland exhausted by unplanned crops, when some rural stretches around East Tennessee looked like red-clay deserts. In 1937, visitors weren't always impressed by our natural beauty.
She then describes a four-year-old federal agency's solutions. "And the strings of this multi-faceted activity all come together in the city of Knoxville where a staff of engineers and experts is tirelessly at work in the offices of TVA headquarters. Across from the old market hall where the mules and vegetable carts of the farmers stand and where on Saturdays the American Legion holds its patriotic speeches and dances—across from a garishly lit movie house where love stories and Wild West movies from the good old days are playing—across from the cheap displays of ladies' fashions and drug stores—runs a row of large, soberly framed show windows" highlighting TVA projects.
It's pretty clear she's describing a scene along Union Avenue at Market Square. It was then home to the Roxy Theater, which featured westerns for kids and sometimes even burlesque dancers. Included in the book are seven photographs of Knoxville street scenes, some of which are easy to identify. One eerie picture shows impassive mannequin heads in a display window marked "the Vogue." It was Abe Schwartz's ladies shop on the Union end of Market Square; its neighbor, Bab's Slipper Shop, is visible in the window reflection.
The TVA show windows may well have been here in the Arnstein Building, where we put this paper together. "At night the show windows are lit from within and vie with the neon signs of the main street."
Like most European visitors of that time, she was especially interested in TVA. A big chunk of her discussion of Knoxville is a paean to the agency. With Arthur Morgan at the helm, it was still in its idealistic phase, a comprehensive cooperative touted around the world as the shape of things to come. Belgian author Odette Keun, H.G. Wells' former mistress (whose footloose and wildly bohemian life bears some similarities to Schwarzenbach's) had written her book, A Foreigner Looks at TVA, that same year; it remains the most poetic description of the agency and its work.
Schwarzenbach describes the marvel of the new hydroelectric dam at Norris, which strikes her as a "bitter irony" considering some other scenes only a few blocks from TVA's offices.
"One doesn't need to walk far in Knoxville to come to the dark side," she writes. "Here, 30 miles from Norris Dam, whole neighborhoods are provided neither with electric light nor with running water. A wreath of such dark neighborhoods closes about Knoxville as it does about any other industrial city in the South."
Down the steep slopes on the edges of the bluff of downtown Knoxville, especially to the east and along the riverbank on the south side, were dense clusters of working-class homes, a few of them century-old houses, many of them cheap shacks.
"But Knoxville, the center of TVA, has still another very particular dark side. The city lies high over the river, and the bank falls off so steeply that one might think the city ends here. Like a fortified tower next to the bridge, the Andrew Jackson [sic] rises on high, Knoxville's finest and most expensive hotel, with bathtubs and electrical refrigerators in every room." She means the Andrew Johnson, of course, a forgivable error; Tennessee's last president isn't nearly as well known in Europe as Tennessee's first president. "A line of mirror-polished limousines is parked in front of the hotel entrance. A gas station across the street stays open the whole night. The two lanes of the bridge are floodlit in white."
Then she turns to the city's underbelly, the Schattenseite.
"One's eyes must get accustomed to the darkness when one leans over the [Gay Street] bridge railing and peers down to the river. On the steep hillside stand houses, lightless and lifeless like theatrical backdrops, no fire in the fireplace, the doors locked. Nobody lives here, you might think, nobody can live here. But meanwhile you've discovered that the streets of the bright city of Knoxville do not end at the bridge nor at the steep drop of the embankment, but that they simply undergo a metamorphosis, turn gray and unpaved, dark and bumpy, and thus...shamefully hidden from view, drop down steeply into the wet void of the river."
The hotel sign's "glowing gigantic letters...cast their sheen onto one of these streets and I am able to read the sign: West Front Street. Above that, scarcely discernible, on the boards of the old house wall: Tavern. They told me later that this building is the oldest hotel in Knoxville, which had its origins down here on the riverbank.... Today it is the quarters of the poorest inhabitants."
It seems more than likely she's describing Chisholm's Tavern. The three-story weatherbeaten wooden tavern of the 1790s still stood on the hillside beneath Blount Mansion. Though it was one of the oldest buildings in Knoxville, and arguably historic—in 1937 it was a slum, a dormitory for the poor. After some controversy, it was demolished in 1966.
"Pale children play under the pillars of the bridge, climb in the steel latticework, thrive in the shadows," she continues. "Black youths, skinny and wobbly in their too-skimpy clothes, lean on the walls of the barracks or slip through the bushes on the bank, languorously, cigarettes between their slim fingers. An Indian woman suckles her youngest, a sickly boy, which she holds up for me to see. 'He doesn't want to live,' she says. 'I don't know what's wrong with him.'
"By day West Front Street is filled with sadly bustling life. I walk about and ask the people what they live on. The people of West Front Street sometimes don't know themselves. Many of the people are 'on relief'...many are looking for work, many go hungry. They don't seem to know that up there, 10 minutes away, there are highways, gourmet markets, and the modern smartly arranged show windows of TVA telling us about the future.
"Among their miserable quarters in a roomy garage stand six large, mirror-polished, black-lacquered limousines. When the motors start and the cars turn onto the street, we recognize that they are hearses. That is the only glamour on West Front Street."
In 1937, Mann's Mortuary kept its fleet of hearses in a garage at 210-14 West Front, east of the Gay Street Bridge. A photograph in the book is captioned, in German, "presumably in Knoxville." It clearly is Knoxville, and in fact shows one of Mann's shiny hearses, looking out of place among the shacks of Front Street, with the Gay Street Bridge in the background.
As harsh as Schwarzenbach's picture of the old riverfront is, it concurs with descriptions of the same neighborhood in Suttree, which is set about 15 years later.
"When I walk down the steep street in the evening," she continues, "a policeman steps out of the shadows under the bridge and asks me if he may accompany me 'home.' And he follows me until I have again reached the area of neon signs and brightly lit streets. I once again bend over the railing. West Front Street is veiled in darkness and river fog. The 'vision of a better life' shimmers above it like the fading sliver of the moon...."
In five pages about Knoxville in 1937, she doesn't mention the university, which was apparently not an obvious part of Knoxville's cultural life, even during a Neyland football season. Nor does she mention the crowds at the live-radio country music shows, where Roy Acuff and Archie Campbell were then rising to stardom.
Accompanying the text in the book's most recent edition are the photographs she took here with her Rolleiflex: some of them illustrate key passages; some are unexplained. According to the minimal captions, several are from her Knoxville trip. One shows a billboard for Koolmotor, "the Custom Built Gasolene" on a junky hillside overlooking automobile traffic, perhaps on Henley Street. Another is an unnamed photography shop, with a sign on the window: "A Cozy Nook / Have Your Picture Took." Another a movie poster on a brick wall. Another shows a dirty, ragged little girl of about three standing alone in an alley beneath the Gay Street Bridge.
In the book there's one unexplained photo of a grave of a couple named Hunziker in Gruetli, Tenn., which is in Grundy County, not too far from the Highlander Center. It's likely she knew Gruetli had been founded in the 1860s as a utopian Swiss colony, by immigrant Peter Staub; though the colony was a failure, Staub later built Knoxville's first opera house and, later still, became mayor of the city.
Schwarzenbach's life had its own schattenseite. She had trouble publishing some of her pro-Roosevelt essays in conservative Switzerland, which was suspicious of the New Deal, perhaps including TVA. We don't think of Europeans as being leery about liberalism, but in 1937, conservative Swiss businessmen saw Roosevelt's quasi-socialist New Deal as a threat. Schwarzenbach's own mother threatened magazines that were considering publishing her American reports.
She slipped deeper into morphine addiction. Just as war was tearing apart Europe as she had known and loved it, she was becoming disenchanted with America. "I have seen enough of New York...to feel deeply discouraged," she wrote a friend. Her strange relationship with the Mann family reached a crisis around Christmastime in 1939 when she was in New York, a city she disliked. While there, in a fit of rage, she attacked a close friend, the Baroness Margot von Opel, wife of the German auto manufacturer. It resulted in a spell at Bellevue.
In New York in 1940, she met a younger writer, a 23-year-old from Georgia named Carson McCullers. Just weeks before, McCullers had published her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. A married woman who later generations might call a bisexual, McCullers was smitten with Schwarzenbach, nearly to the point of obsession. They likely made a provocative bohemian party in New York that summer: McCullers, her tolerant husband, German exiles Erika and Klaus Mann, English poet W.H. Auden, Schwarzenbach, and Carson's good friend, stripper Gypsy Rose Lee.
Schwarzenbach was fond of McCullers but rebuffed her advances. In a letter to another friend she explained that she did not want to injure the younger American writer who struck Schwarzenbach as naive, innocent of "certain fatalities" of life.
In early 1941, McCullers dedicated her second book, Reflections In a Golden Eye, to the Swiss journalist she was still frankly in love with. The book, later interpreted as a movie with Marlon Brando, deals with latent male homosexuality on a Southern army base. Some scholars think McCullers' next book, The Ballad Of the Sad Cafe, was more directly inspired by her complicated relationship with Schwarzenbach, among others.
Schwarzenbach's relationship with McCullers is the only reason there's anything in English written about her. Those few English-language references to Schwarzenbach call her Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, using her married name—perhaps only because that's the way McCullers styled it in her dedication. In European sources, she's simply Annemarie Schwarzenbach.
Schwarzenbach returned to Switzerland. She died less than five years after she walked in the dingy shadows of Knoxville, but not in any of the ways you'd expect of a sometimes-violent morphine addict. In the summer of 1942, she hit her head in a seemingly minor bicycling accident in Switzerland, and later died of the injury. Some say McCullers, whose health was already impaired by a recent stroke, never recovered from the shock of hearing about it.
In Europe, Piatti and Straub say there's a new interest in the life and work of Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Besides that 1992 publication of Jenseits von New York, her photographs have appeared in several recent shows and books; an exhibit in Strasbourg last month featured her Jenseits photos. Some have compared her work to that of American photographer Walker Evans, whose most famous work was his collaboration with Knoxville-born James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Television stations have broadcast documentaries of her life. In Paris, Miermont, with whom Straub has been corresponding, is working on the third full-length biography of Schwarzenbach. In addition, an Italian author named Zuccha is working on a romanesque version of her life. And Jenseits von New York, with its Knoxville essay and photographs, is due to be republished still again.
Straub, who's fascinated with Schwarzenbach's story and has read most of her work, wanted to help with the rediscovery of her career. "I personally find her American reports the most convincing part of her writing," Straub says. "She also wrote about Austria, the Baltics, Scandinavia—nevertheless, the ones she wrote in the States are the best. They are so full of a clear vision, so full of warm and intelligent compassion. And they have a very clear position on the New Dealers."
What compelled him to retrace her steps through the Southeast 60 years later had to do with the fact that Europeans still "don't know anything about America, and the fact that still, jenseits von New York, there is a continent to be rediscovered. Not in general—of course we know about car-mania and fast food—but in detail. And what could be more attractive than to compare places that were described in a very intelligent way by a European 60 years ago, when the economy was as low as it could be."
Rudy and Livio didn't pick an ideal day this fall to see Knoxville. First they drove around town a good deal, even met jazz pianist Donald Brown at Harry's. But then they went downtown, where they figured the real city was.
Saturdays are slow enough, but this one was gray and cold. They had a look at the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame and "the little wooden house of the first settler" and saw the Lord Lindsey, which had just hosted a wedding. They had fun with the Rowboat Man on Gay Street. They didn't find the extreme poverty and squalid living conditions Schwarzenbach observed in 1937; the riverbank slums were cleared in the '50s, replaced by Neyland Drive and other terrain-altering developments. Straub and Piatti had trouble even finding the sites of the poor neighborhood she describes, the landscape has changed so much. For all the problems of housing projects today, there's little question that housing for the poor is much safer than it was in 1937. But downtown's progress hasn't all been positive.
"My first impression, driving through all the neighborhoods surrounding Knoxville was, 'Wow, that must be an important and lively city.'" They live in Zurich, the European banking center whose population is hardly more than that of Knox County, but which has a large and obviously lively downtown. "Getting there, I was more than disappointed at first glance. A small, seemingly deserted old town, which obviously does not matter to these suburbians." Except for the Tomato Head, Barley's, a show at the Bijou, and the waterfront restaurants, downtown Knoxville was deserted.
Straub adds, "I could, though, from the beginning feel the important industrial past of Knoxville, and I think that these huge brownstone buildings could have a glorious future for a new type of lifestyle not yet so strongly developed outside of the big cities." They were especially interested to see the large Sterchi building; they recognized that as a familiar Swiss name; unlike most newcomers, they pronounce it correctly.
To be sure, they did much of their walking and shooting during the televised Georgia game. In spite of the cars crowding the riverfront parking lots—Straub was amazed at the size of the SUV's parked near the Riverside Tavern, proof, he thought, that there was no problem with gasoline prices in the U.S.—Volunteer Landing seemed deserted at dusk. The riverwalk was utterly empty, but they were startled to see people crowded inside some of the buildings, watching the football game.
Down there, they were impressed with Neyland Stadium, more its size than its form, which they called "functionalist." They were so astonished to hear that the stadium was typically used only six days a year that they disagreed with their guide: "No, it's impossible," they said. Downtown Knoxville seemed so vacant they could not imagine that stadium filled.
Piatti, who may not be involved in the actual filming of the documentary, calls their journey "an interesting trip, so much better than any time on a beach."
Piatti elaborates. "What astonished me there was the size of the belts around the cities, made of highways, freeways, gas stations, fast-food restaurants, and concrete—and the small size of the town itself. Knoxville in this point of view was extraordinary. I often have the impression that all these towns have imploded, crumbled into almost nothing and like shockwaves grew in rings outwards. First wave with '50s or '60s smaller malls, then newer and bigger ones, eating their way into the landscape as if it might go on forever, leaving wasted town centers behind, producing an architectural No-Man's Land further and further out."
Their overall impression of Americans was positive. "The strongest impression that stayed with me is the kindness and readiness to help we have encountered everywhere we showed up," says Straub. "I can say honestly that I don't think two American guys showing up in a Swiss small town with the same kinds of questions would encounter the same kind of reception. Hopefully I'm wrong. Come over and try.
"Generally the interest in my project was clear and immediate. There was an unexpected high level of knowledge and awareness of their own place in its history. All the people we met were highly interested and engaged in keeping alive a critical historical picture of their town and region. This contrasts strongly with the image of the 'average American' in Europe, where we think that history is a European invention, and that Americans have such a short history of their own they cannot possibly have a distinct notion of it."
The Schwarzenbach-in-America documentary has suffered some setbacks since Straub and Piatti were here, largely due to the serious illness of the ARTE television editor and producer who launched the project.
Straub admits he's not certain who will do the producing and financing of his project, but he says, "I am ready and determined to shoot next fall."
That kind of devotion to a project would have appealed to Annemarie Schwarzenbach.
December 7, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 49
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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