It's not an insult to the work of Swiss novelist/memoirist/archaeologist Annemarie Schwarzenbach that readers, in the decades since her death in 1942, have found her writing not quite as interesting as her life. After growing up in Zurich dominated by one of history's most scarifying mothers — one who destroyed many of her daughter's manuscripts — Schwarzenbach set out for the Berlin of the decaying Weimar Republic: the cabaret world of Isherwood and Dietrich, one of the few places on earth in the 1930s where a woman interested in women might fall profitably in love. There she relished the nightlife, avoided her mother, and wrote in a bare, confessional style, trying to wring the most overbearing of feelings from... More >>>