Literature and music: Alicia Aumüller reads Schwarzenbach

Love at first sight: There is hardly a work of world literature that portrays this lightning-eye moment as intensely as the short story "A Woman to See" by Annemarie Schwarzenbach, this Swiss icon of androgyny and literary genius.
At the age of 21, she is staying at the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz, celebrated as a mysteriously beautiful star of society, in keeping with the style of the wealthy family she comes from. And there, in the lift, she met the gaze of a woman in whom she sank as if into Lake Sils. The suspense of love for a foreign woman overarches the autobiographical account from 1929 from the first to the last sentence – in between, the language flickers and shimmers in all the pitches of longing for forbidden lesbian lust.
Annemarie Schwarzenbach was not only a travel writer who crossed all borders as far as Persia, but also a border crosser of love and drugs. Admittedly, under the pressure of taboos, she had mostly covered up her lesbian experiences in a genderfluid way. This manuscript, when it emerged from her estate, was all the more like a sensation: the coming out of the cult author who died in tragic loneliness in the Engadine in 1942 at the age of only 34 and with this work became the role model for a new generation, indeed the style icon of our present day.

Translated with DeepL.com