Eine Frau zu sehen by Annemarie Schwarzenbach

From her reflections on individual responsibility in the lead-up to World War II to her reactions to accusations from her friends of having deserted Europe and the antifascist cause for Tehran, Schwarzenbach recorded a great deal about daily life in Persia, and, most personally, her ill-fated love affair with Jale, the daughter of the Turkish ambassador. Available in English for the first time and beautifully translated by Lucy Renner Jones, Death in Persia is a collage of the political and the private, documenting Schwarzenbach's intimate feelings and public ideas during four trips to Persia between 19. These ambivalent depictions of same-sex desire invite new understandings of sapphic selfhood at this critical moment in the conceptualisation of modern lesbian identity.Since the rediscovery of her work in the late 1980s, Annemarie Schwarzenbach-journalist, traveler, archaeologist, opium addict, and antifascist novelist-has become a European cult figure among free spirited bohemians. My analysis identifies the gothicised aesthetic used in interwar lesbian narratives, such as Weirauch’s Der Skorpion and Schwarzenbach’s Eine Frau zu sehen, in order to convey internalised anxieties regarding lesbianism. The thesis offers a sapphic Gothic reading of the chosen corpus of texts, broadening Paulina Palmer’s notion of lesbian Gothic and Terry Castle’s perception of the lesbian as an apparitional figure. It then outlines the sapphic uncanny aesthetic established in Schwarzenbach’s novella and the third volume of Der Skorpion, engaging primarily with Freud’s theory of the Uncanny. My analysis considers the reimagining of vampiric figures in the first volume of Weirauch’s trilogy and Döblin’s fictionalised account of the scandalous 1923 Ella Klein and Margarete Nebbe case. It also illustrates how the appropriation and modification of Gothic tropes, such as vampirism, haunting and doubling, reflect the ambivalence and hostility toward homosexuality internalised by the sapphic subject during the interwar period. This thesis examines the use of established Gothic motifs in Alfred Döblin’s Die beiden Freundinnen und ihr Giftmord (1924), Anna Elisabet Weirauch’s Der Skorpion (1919-31) and Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Eine Frau zu sehen (2008).

Existing scholarship on interwar German lesbian narratives has largely overlooked the role of Gothicism in their portrayal of sapphic sexuality.

Eine Frau zu sehen by Annemarie Schwarzenbach