So the last in our quartet of venturesome Swiss folk this week is writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who died this day in 1942.

Schwarzenbach was wild, troubled and beautiful – a “ravaged angel” in the words of novelist Thomas Mann. Like her compatriot Isabelle Eberhardt (whom we met on Friday), she was always more comfortable in men’s clothes, and likewise possessed of a raging wanderlust. She pursued a Tintin-esque existence from the nightclubs of Weimar Berlin to the treacherous shadows of Stalin’s Moscow, from occupied Eritrea to America’s segregated South. A string of lovers, including American author Carson McCullers, were captivated by her boyish allure; adventure and intrigue followed at her heels as faithfully as Snowy.

While battling morphine, alcohol, love and other addictions Schwarzenbach wrote and photographed her impressions. She herself was extraordinarily photogenic; numerous images from her wanderings depict her kitted out as a between-the-wars gentleman traveller of independent means – booted, suited and modishly coiffed.

Schwarzenbach’s death was a threefold tragedy. Firstly, at 34 she was much too young. Second, the cause — falling from a bicycle in her native Switzerland— seemed like a bad punchline to a life which had been lived with such passion and courage in the furthest corners of the world. After all, Schwarzenbach’s idea of a country drive was to drive across whole countries, most memorably a journey which saw her motoring from Geneva to Kabul. To Kabul.

And lastly, after years of battling drug and alcohol problems Schwarzenbach was just starting to get her shit, as they say, together. She had survived a suicide attempt the previous year and seemed to have turned a corner. But in the end she died alone, her possessive mother having instructed the clinic not to admit friends. As Schwarzenbach herself once wrote, “a lonely death is the symbol of a lonely life.”

Curiously, almost a half century later another drug-addled mitteleuropa beauty, singer and actress Nico, would like Schwarzenbach meet her demise not through the needle but rather after embarking on a health kick, during which she fell from a bicycle.

Three cities, three exhibitions, (at least) three strange flowers.

So just for a moment I am going to imagine that Strange Flowers readers have funds as limitless as their curiosity and suggest a trio of attractions in different European locations. You know, kind of like Wallpaper* used to do. Remember the late ‘90s, when everyone was flush with cash and all Wallpaper* had to do was write “Sofia is the new La Paz” and we’d be setting off in our titanium private jets, desperate to be seen there before the buzz of temporary modishness wore off? Actually is Wallpaper* still going? (I could Google it, but…y’know, busy busy busy). Do you think they’d be open to a merger? “Wallflower*: For Weird People Who Don’t Get Out Much”. Catchy.

OK, I’m rambling. On with the information.

After the excellent 2007 exhibition Surreal Things at the V&A, London is once again host to a show of applied Surrealism in The Surreal House, running until 12 September at the Barbican. The curators promise “haunted rooms, delirious forms, blasted architecture and cinematic dreamscapes”, with an accompanying film programme offering rare showings of works by Strange Flowers favourites Maya Deren and Joseph Cornell.

Until 19 December, Kartause Ittingen in the Swiss canton of Thurgau offers the exhibition Steps into the Arcane, which will incorporate material related to pugilist poet Arthur Cravan. I’m not sure what form this contribution takes, but curator Adrian Notz has been travelling in Cravan’s footsteps in recent months, sending SMS-length updates and photos from Mexico to the blog rebell.tv. It’s just occurred to me that, having seen dozens of photographs of Arthur Cravan, I’ve never seen him smiling. Just like Queen Victoria.

Cravan’s compatriot Annemarie Schwarzenbach is one of the stars of an exhibition I caught on the weekend at the Berlinische Galerie, dedicated to Berlin-born photographer Marianne Breslauer. Among the works is Breslauer’s classic portrait of gamine beauty Schwarzenbach (main image, above). Both photographer and subject were perfect examples of the “New Woman” who arose in the 1920s – independent, forward-thinking, dynamic (incidentally, if you speak German there is a new book of Schwarzenbach’s reports from the Middle East). They travelled to Spain together in 1933, but the resulting reportage was never published, banned by the Nazis due to Breslauer’s Jewish heritage. Also included are portraits of her mentor Man Ray as well as artist Oskar Kokoschka and photographer George Hoyningen-Huene, along with fascinating sidelong glimpses of Picasso and Braque at an art auction. Until 6 September.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach (she's on the left)

Back again. With a question:

What is a Strange Flower?

The common denominators are generally: active sometime in the last 200 years, now dead, in some way eccentric (without being cartoonishly madcap…*shudder*) and relatively obscure.

All of these qualities mean you’re unlikely to find them plastered all over a building site, so it was a pleasant surprise to spy the arresting, androgynous features of Annemarie Schwarzenbach staring from posters in Berlin’s Kreuzberg, advertising an exhibition of photographer Marianne Breslauer I mentioned a while back.

Sorry…that’s not much to show for my absence. Much as I would like to blame it on the Sommerloch, the German equivalent of the Silly Season, I have actually been beavering through the heat on another writing project. But I’ll be back later in the week to celebrate the 150th birthday of the extraordinary Baron Corvo.

See you then…

As the final part of our Berlin tour begins, we find ourselves outside Zoo Station. In search of aesthetic diversion we head to the adjacent Museum of Photography, which includes a permanent exhibition dedicated to the late Helmut Newton. The display optimistically assumes that one’s interest in the influential German photographer might go beyond his signature images of Amazons conducting entry-level S&M in five-star hotels and extend, for example, to his cancelled passports or a dummy clad in an outfit he once wore on a shoot (jeans and a shirt, wow!). But at least its presence signals a revival of interest in this area, robbed of some of its prestige and significance with the general eastward momentum post-Reunification. The most visible symbol of this upturn is a towering luxury hotel currently under construction, which will be accepting bookings from vertiginously-heeled überfrauen and their cowering companions from next year.

Long distance trains don’t stop at Zoo anymore, but this was once a major junction for the walled city of West Berlin. It was a point of arrival for teenage runaways and angry dropouts, in an area which offered a concentrated dose of everything that every provincial tearaway’s mother ever warned them about. This was the setting for Christiane F.: Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, a gruelling first-hand account of teenage heroin addiction and prostitution published in 1978. The book was read worldwide and spawned a successful film while Christiane Felscherinow, the book’s author, became a media star, Germany’s most famous ex-junkie. Against all odds she is still alive, almost 50 and apparently clean, though there have been relapses along the way.

This, however, is an aside. The era we’re really interested in lies even further back, at the dawn of the 20th century.

BAHNHOF ZOO TO BABELSBERG

We move on to Kurfürstendamm, or Ku’damm, West Berlin’s prestige shopping boulevard. What we see before us is a low-slung post-war building with a roof extension which looks like a flying saucer in drag. But we are at this corner to remind ourselves that there was a viable Berlin bohemia which pre-dated the Weimar era. Because this is where the Café des Westens stood, an all-important meeting point for artists, writers and those who wished to bask in their vicarious glory.

It was here that Bertolt Brecht conceived Die Dreigroschenoper and Friedrich Hollaender wrote “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt” (the original of “Falling in Love Again”).  Erich Mühsam and Frank Wedekind were regulars, and it was a compulsory stop for visiting literati glitterati like André Gide, T.S. Eliot and Vladimir Nabokov. But the café’s true star was “Red Richard”. The nickname drew attention to the bearer’s ginger hair while tactfully ignoring his hunchback. Red Richard had the crucial position of newspaper waiter. In the era of Café des Westens’ apogee, Berlin produced and consumed an extraordinary amount of newspapers every day, and the man who had first dibs on fresh editions at the city’s uncontested hot spot was an important man indeed.

One of Café des Westens’ regulars was Else Lasker-Schüler (see part 3). Austrian actress Tilla Durieux witnessed the writer with her husband Herwarth Walden and son Paul, and was not impressed: “This couple, with their unbelievably spoilt son, could be seen from midday to late in the night in Café des Westens, surrounded by the crazy art crowd. The little family lived, I suspect, on nothing but coffee.” Else was shocked, shocked when management barred her entry one day, on the grounds that she didn’t consume enough. “Is a poet who consumes a lot even a poet?” she fumed. And so as the First World War approached, Café des Westens fell out of favour with the avant-garde. Red Richard, at least, skipped call-up and saw out the war here (as Joseph Roth quotes him: “You know – just between you and me – I’ve got – flat feet…”). Fast forward to the early 1920s, and bohemian Berlin has moved on to the Romanisches Café.

But before we join them there, I draw your attention to a bedraggled figure selling newspapers outside on the corner. No, it’s not Red Richard, it’s Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who we saw back in part 2. Time has not been kind. Her golden age, such as it was, is behind her. For much of the last ten years she’s been in New York, where she married a compatriot nobleman. She became known as the “Dada Baroness”, but even the Dadaists were freaked out by the found objects which comprised Elsa’s wardrobe. Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay remembers her in New York, “always gaudily accoutred in rainbow raiment, festooned with barbaric beads and spangles and bangles, and toting along her inevitable poodle in gilded harness.” Few look beyond the exotic plumage to give her poetry or her art the consideration it deserves.

And now she’s back, impoverished, in her impoverished homeland. McKay, quite by chance, encounters her on this corner, “a shabby wretched female selling newspapers, stripped of all the rococo richness of her clothes, her speech, her personality.” Along with her meagre earnings, Elsa is dependent on hand-outs from friends like Peggy Guggenheim, Djuna Barnes and artist Pavel Tchelitchew. Disastrously, she tries to blackmail Stefan George with compromising letters.

Others might have been desperate to come to Berlin in this era but Elsa can’t wait to leave. On her 50th birthday, she marches into the French Consulate with a birthday cake on her head – with lit candles. This bizarre displays results, unsurprisingly, in her application for French residency being turned down. But after a breakdown which sees her institutionalised outside Berlin she is finally approved, moving to Paris in 1926. It is a short-lived relief: she dies there the following year.

A short stroll and we’re at an intersection which, in the early 20th century, was one of the great crossroads of Europe. Then as now it was dominated by the Gedächtniskirche, though its severed spire is now pointedly (or unpointedly, really) left unrestored after the War, a warning from history which has become a symbol both of Berlin and its self-induced suffering.

But at least it did better than the Romanisches Café, built by the same architect as the church, which is entirely gone. Its site is occupied by a shopping centre; the branch of café chain Mövenpick which is now there (which makes Starbucks look edgy) is poor compensation for the loss. The roof of the shopping centre, with its rotating Mercedes star, is yet another site featured in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.

The Romanisches was the meeting point of progressive Weimar-era culture. To separate the serious practitioners of arts and letters from the mere scene-crashers, the café was divided into two rooms, or the “non-swimmers’” and “swimmers’” sections. Else, naturally, floated freely in the latter section, along with Erich Maria Remarque, Billy Wilder, Stefan Zweig, George Grosz, Rudolf Steiner and many, many others.

We head off down Ku’damm and after veering south we are now in the solidly middle-class district of Wilmersdorf, where we find the home of Anita Berber.

Now, knowing what we know about Anita Berber and imagining how she may have lived, the most daring woman of the most liberated city in its most licentious era, what do we come up with? A basement in purple crushed velvet? A turret lined in black flock with heavy drapes drawn against the break of day? A police cell? Whatever we come up with, it is unlikely that we would conjure something like the orderly, tree-lined streets where we now find ourselves. And we probably wouldn’t imagine the comfortable, multi-generational family home she enjoyed here.

This was Anita’s first home in Berlin, which she shared with her mother, grandmother and two aunts. She arrived during the First World War, and it was while living here that she began her training as a dancer, at age 16. This would be her last Berlin residence as well, after a catastrophic tour of Europe which scandalised Mitteleuropa and brought Berber to the brink of extinction, a destination she would finally reach in Bethanien.

Berber had few equals as a succès de scandale in 1920s Germany, but one man came close. To find him, we slip out of this quiet bourgeois neighbourhood and head north to the proletarian district of Moabit. For Berliners, Moabit is synonymous above all with the prison located here. We’re in a neighbourhood filled with mietskaserne, “rental barracks”, the disdainful name once given to working-class tenement blocks. It’s here that we find Harry Domela. He is operating a small cinema in this quiet back street, a “people’s cinema” as he calls it. As strange as the location is, the programme is stranger still. It consists of one film played over and over: Der falsche Prinz (“The False Prince”). Strangest of all: it stars – and concerns – Domela himself.

Harry Domela was born in 1905 near Riga, in what was then the Russian Empire, to German parents, “Baltic Germans” forming a distinct minority in the region. He served as a child soldier with the German army after the First World War but was denied a passport, and spent the first half of the 1920s in Germany doing menial jobs as an undocumented labourer.

Domela’s keen mind and hunger for a better life expressed itself in a string of assumed identities, usually titled. German aristocrats had lost their privileges and protected status in 1919, so it’s hard to say if this was any more illegal than claiming to be Santa Claus. But his deceptions took an unexpected turn when strangers, particular ex-nobility, came to the unlikely conclusion that these titles were not alibis for a humble nobody, but rather for a more exalted personage altogether. Around 1926, stories started circulating that this stateless labourer with the rich imagination was in fact Prince Wilhelm, grandson of the last Kaiser, travelling incognito.

The two were approximately the same age and physically not dissimilar; Domela’s complicity in the ruse relied largely on suggestion and ambiguity. In any case, the success of his adventure owed little to Domela’s efforts, but rather the old order’s yearning for the imperial golden age which led them to fill in the blanks.

After enjoying a few weeks’ luxury on his credulous supporters’ coin, Domela was finally found out in early 1927 and sentenced to seven months’ jail. He used his time well, writing up his story which was published by the Malik publishing house (which we saw in part 3) as Der falsche Prinz.

It was a sensation. Not only was it a bestseller, Domela’s native eloquence and storytelling abilities also attracted praise from the kind of literary heavyweights we saw back in the Romanisches Café. Domela starred in the film version of his book (actually there were two film versions; Domela unsuccessfully sued the makers of the other) and, in 1929, opened this cinema to show it.

Unfortunately Domela’s prosperity was nearly as short-lived as his putative royalty. The cinema consumed all his money and he left Germany to launch himself on a journey through further multiple identities which took him to the end of the world. It’s too much to go into now so let’s leave with some keywords of his later adventure – André Gide, Spanish Civil War, disappearance in South America – and a promise to return to his story.

From down-at-heel Moabit in the north we describe a west-bound quarter-circle which takes us through semi-industrial streets and, by way of contrast, the landscaped gardens of Schloss Charlottenburg, to arrive on a busy north-south arterial road.

Annemarie by Marianne

Perhaps it was precisely this location, which offered the constant option of escape, that appealed to Swiss writer and traveler Annemarie Schwarzenbach. She arrived in Berlin in September 1931 and spent much of the next 18 months there. She would undertake a number of trips from this base, but the journeys that marked her out as one of the great adventurers of the 20th century, to Persia, Russia, Sub-Saharan Africa, were yet to come. Schwarzenbach brought with her two addictions – alcohol and sleeping pills – and by the time she left she had added morphine to the portfolio. Liberated from conservative Zurich and her over-protective family she was driven to explore the city’s louche underbelly, often in the company of her friends Klaus and Erika Mann. Everywhere she went, Schwarzenbach was noted for her evident fragility but even more so for her boyish beauty. “Annemarie was the most beautiful creature I ever met,” proclaimed friend and photographer Marianne Breslauer. “I later met Greta Garbo, whose features seemed perhaps even more flawless, but with Annemarie you really couldn’t tell if she was a man or a woman; she seemed to me like the Archangel Gabriel standing before Heaven.”

Annemarie explored Berlin by night as night fell on the Weimar Republic, troubled by addiction and ill health and romantic entanglements, but her stay coincided with one of her most prolific periods, producing numerous articles, Lyric Novella, which was recently translated into English, a lost novel and her only play, Cromwell.

We next draw an imaginary line from Schwarzenbach’s home to Spandau, once an independent town, now absorbed into Berlin. At the halfway point of that line we find Ruhleben, an U-Bahn terminus with a major westbound road running through it. There are two modes here: deafening or deathly still, depending on whether you are loitering on that road, or anywhere else. The name “Ruhleben” (something like “peaceful life”) is either mockingly facetious or utterly appropriate when applied to our destination: the local graveyard.

Even for a cemetery in an outlying district, this is unnervingly quiet. There is no-one about and only the occasional roar wafting from the Olympic Stadium as Berlin’s ill-starred football team, Hertha BSC, draw 2:2 with F.C. Augsburg. I’ve spent quite a bit of time, perhaps too much time, in Berlin graveyards. One thing I’ve learnt: it’s never too soon to sort out the lettering on your grave. Maybe we will have more pressing priorities in the afterlife, maybe it doesn’t matter what the memorial looks like, it’s the message that counts. Oh, who am I kidding! I have seen so many crimes against typography on Berlin graves, and can only urge you to engage a graphic designer for your eternal abode as soon as possible.

And if you want to know how to get it right, come to Valeska Gert’s resting place. Her gravestone is a punchy black slab with her signature in shocking pink, as if written in lipstick on a mirror, and the one-word description, “dancer”. You see? That’s how you do it.

In her 1968 autobiography Ich bin eine Hexe (“I am a witch”), Gert foresaw her lonely death on the island of Sylt. “Only the kitty will be with me. When I’m dead, I can’t feed him anymore. He’s hungry. In desperation he nibbles at me. I stink. Kitty’s a gourmet, he doesn’t like me anymore. He meows loudly out of hunger until the neighbours notice and break down the door.” And you know what? She was right on the money – that is more or less exactly what happened in 1978.

The football fans are going home, the sun is going down…but we’re not going to do this, are we? I mean, end like this, in a graveyard, like we did in London. Let’s keep going, chasing the setting sun, aiming for the opposite side of the city from where we started. Moving beyond death, we’re seeking out a garden, the kind of garden that supposedly awaits the righteous post-demise.

We head south, past the Olympic Stadium, and death snaps at our heels. We pass Charlottenburg’s Jewish Cemetery where Lotti Huber lies (can’t stop…), on to the huge Grunewald forest which defines the city’s western edge, past another cemetery, last resting place of singer Nico (must keep going…), along the Wannsee glinting in the late afternoon sun where, across the water, we see the site of the Wannsee Conference which posited the Final Solution.

But death falls back and we reach our final destination: Babelsberg. This area is associated above all with the film studios located here for almost a hundred years, turning out early cinema landmarks like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The Blue Angel and Metropolis through to Valkyrie, Inglourious Basterds and The Ghost Writer. This well-preserved historical district has buildings which could well have witnessed the arrival of our final strange flower: Hermann von Pückler-Muskau.

Park Babelsberg was originally laid out by Peter Joseph Lenné, also largely responsible for the present form of Tiergarten. But it was Pückler-Muskau who defined the current format in the mid-19th century, an expression of his passion for a particularly English style of gardening which presented a deceptively carefree landscape, actually rigorously planned. Winding paths (“silent guides”, as Pückler-Muskau called them) continually drew the eye to new enchantments, just as our eccentric path through Berlin has offered us an ever-changing cast of rare blooms.

To a greater degree than anyone we have encountered so far, Pückler-Muskau was a grenzgänger, someone who transgressed boundaries at will. He moved between the Orient and the Occident, fired by democratic ideals and funded by inherited privilege, the Prussian who felt more French than German. I’m not sure, then, if it is ironic or apposite that post-World War Two borders have carved through his two most famous creations. At Muskauer Park, the re-drawn German-Polish border along the Oder-Neisse Line ran right through his ancestral property, while here at Babelsberg the death strip of the Berlin Wall indelicately carved through the landscape which he had tenderly crafted.

Where the death strip once gouged through the park, the woods grow again and we say goodbye to Berlin, for now, as the sun sets on Park Babelsberg. Berlin still hasn’t decided on a government, there’s still a big hole where the Schloss should be, the “forest boy” still hasn’t been claimed. On the other side of Berlin, Charlotte’s gramophones creak into action.

♦

And here we also farewell Pückler-Muskau, who has served so far as Strange Flowers’ turbaned mascot. Today is his 226th birthday – high time to let him retire, I think. As it happens, today is also Strange Flowers’ birthday: two years ago today we encountered the “arch, alien glamour” of another German eccentric, the illustrator Alastair, which began this adventure. And so flushed with anniversary enthusiasm, over the next days and weeks I’m going to try out a new banner, some new features and have a go at a redesign. Please do forgive me for the work in progress to come.

And meanwhile: thanks for your interest and support.

It’s a sad, oft-sung refrain on Strange Flowers: numerous works by or about our fabulous subjects published in foreign languages have never been translated into English.

Annemarie in Berlin

Swiss writer and adventurer Annemarie Schwarzenbach is a perfect example. There is no biography of her available in English, and very few of her writings. So it comes as a very welcome development that not one but two of her books have recently been translated. They’re published by Seagull Books whose intriguing list offers, among other things, translations from French (Antonin Artaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Guy Debord) and German (Thomas Bernhard, Heiner Müller, Max Frisch).

Lyric Novella, as we saw recently, was written during Schwarzenbach’s Berlin period in the early 1930s (though it was actually penned in Rheinsberg, north of the city). It concerns a young man’s obsessive love for a nightclub singer, but as Schwarzenbach biographers Nicole Müller and Dominique Grente point out, the real model for the hero is obvious. “What contemporary critics were forced to overlook, or didn’t want to see, that is, that it was a representation of a lesbian love affair, is clear to today’s readers. The mask of the sensitive, youthful protagonist is too thin to prevent Annemarie’s face from shining through.” The translation is by Lucy Renner Jones.

Ella and Annemarie put some junk in the trunk

The second of the two books, All the Roads are Open (translated by Isabel Fargo Cole) relates Schwarzenbach’s remarkable car journey from Geneva to Kabul around the beginning of World War Two, in the company of compatriot Ella Maillart (who produced her own account in The Cruel Way). The website To the Edge of the World shows this and her other extraordinary trips, along with Schwarzenbach’s own photographs. Sadly the adventure also coincided with Schwarzenbach’s worsening depression and addictions of which she would never be entirely free until her death, on this day in 1942.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach‘s most famous journeys took her East, but in 1937 she travelled through the southern states of the US, still suffering from the Depression and divided by segregation. Schwarzenbach took photographer Barbara Wright (seen in the first photo) along for the ride. The images are full of telling detail, such as the prison washing line where even the clothes form a chain gang, or the cinema hoarding advertising ‘Damaged Lives’.

Further reading
Ravaged angel
Three shows
Where have all the Flowers gone?
Strange Flowers guide to Berlin: part 4
Schwarzenbach in English

Sometimes Berlin can get to you in all the worst ways. It can be intensely irritating, its weather miserable, its people likewise (and rude, and thoughtless), its streetscapes mute and uninspiring and its rhythms relentlessly mid-paced.

And then, sometimes, on a mild spring evening just as the last of the trees along your cobbled street has greened and great pink rococo clouds of blossoms weigh heavy on the cherry trees in the park, you get to hear a talk about one of the most fascinating European women of the 20th century, in your neighbourhood, in your native tongue.

And you realise – actually, you’re kind of lucky.

A few nights ago the small but perfectly-formed English-language bookshop Dialogue Books hosted A Life Spent Searching: The Travels and Writings of Annemarie Schwarzenbach. The main speaker was historian Alexis Schwarzenbach, great-nephew of the Swiss traveller-writer in question, and author of the lavishly illustrated biography Auf der Schwelle des Fremden (“On the Threshold of the Foreign”). Actually you could translate it as “On the Threshold of the Other”, if you were in a ’90s-identity-politics kind of a mood (scare quotes around “other” optional). In any case the fact that there is no English version I can reference points to the ongoing mystery of Annemarie’s low profile in the Anglophone world.

The evening was a cross between a reading and a slide show. But what slides! A young Annemarie, for instance, dressed as the Rosenkavalier, in a costume which belonged to her mother’s lover, a female opera singer. Leaving aside for a moment the dizzying layers of gender invested in the Rosenkavalier character, the back story instantly punctures the convenient myth of Annemarie as an unconventional offshoot of a solidly conservative family.

I thought myself reasonably well-versed in Schwarzenbach’s life but I still learnt a lot. Motifs recur; Alexis Schwarzenbach pointed out the similarity between two of Annemarie’s favourite places in the world, a valley in Persia and her beloved Engadin in Switzerland, where she would eventually die. Many of Annemarie’s own photos flashed up and at appropriate points in the narrative, there were readings from two of her works which have recently appeared in English. Even better, they were each read by the translator responsible.

The two volumes book-end the 1930s. Lyric Novella, translated by Lucy Renner Jones, was written during Schwarzenbach’s Berlin stint in the early 1930s, and in it she puts herself into the Rosenkavalier role of a young buck about town infatuated with an older woman. All the Roads are Open, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, is a chronicle of Schwarzenbach’s car journey to Afghanistan just as the Second World War got underway. Although she was travelling with countrywoman Ella Maillart, the account was, as the translator pointed out, often rendered in the first person singular.

Both of these beautifully translated, handsomely bound editions are highly recommended, and an English version of Death in Persia is expected later in the year. These publications, and events such as this, will hopefully secure a greater profile for Schwarzenbach’s vivid writing and amazing life story among English readers.

But the magic of travel, the mystery of names which only now fill up with matter and life, the coming-true of a dream, the rapture of discovery! That a city whose name you have read on a map exists in today’s reality, rearing out of the evening mist with churches and portals, that you drive through the hot interior for days and then reach the wind-lashed coast and the sea in its serenity and foam-capped blue!

Further reading
Ravaged angel
Three shows
Where have all the Flowers gone?
Strange Flowers guide to Berlin: part 4
Schwarzenbach in English
Annemarie Schwarzenbach | The South, 1937
A life spent searching

Swiss writer and adventurer Annemarie Schwarzenbach died 70 years ago today, which means – if my extensive knowledge (read: brief Googling) of Swiss copyright law is correct – that her work now enters the public domain. Hopefully this will lead to greater availability of her books in English; that the anniversary of Schwarzenbach’s tragic, premature death is marked this year by the publication of Death in Persia (translated by Lucy Renner Jones) is a promising sign. It follows last year’s double treat of All the Roads are Open (translated by Isabel Fargo Cole) and Lyric Novella (also translated by Jones).

Schwarzenbach visited Persia a number of times throughout the 1930s; it was the scene of her lavender marriage (with a French diplomat, Claude Carac) and a number of liaisons, including a passionate encounter with the daughter of the Turkish ambassador. As well as her writings, she took numerous outstanding photographs of her Persian journeys.

Gustaf Gründgens, Erika Mann, Pamela Wedekind, Klaus Mann

This latest instalment of my bloody-minded exercise in making semi-legible diagrams of semi-marginal figures in cultural history was inspired by the above photo, posted on paris/berlin. It shows Erika and Klaus Mann, the eldest of German novelist Thomas Mann’s six children, with actors Gustaf Gründgens and Pamela Wedekind. As the caption notes, “At the time of this photo, Erika was engaged to Gustaf but was having an affair with Pamela, who was engaged to marry Klaus, who was romantically involved with Gustaf.” Also they were appearing in a play, Anja und Esther, which was written by Klaus and was based on the affair between Erika and Pamela.

Got that?

Klaus, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Erika and Ricki Hallgarten, shortly before the latter’s suicide.

Andrea Weiss’s highly recommended 2008 book In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain tells the story of the two inseparable Mann siblings, their committed anti-fascism and years of exile from Nazi Germany along with the dense web of connections they shared. These include Klaus’s numerous lovers, the astonishing collection of people living at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights in the 1940s, as well as Erika’s lavender marriages and late-life switcheroo to unfeigned heterosexuality. Both Pamela and Erika, daughters of famous writers, ended up with men of approximately their fathers’ age. And along with all these real-world relations there were fictional variations on the same themes, including the aforementioned Anja und Esther and Klaus Mann’s most famous work, Mephisto. When it comes to the Manns (it’s hard to resist writing “the Menn”), a diagram can only be a gross simplification, but here is my attempt.

click through for a more legible view

Further reading
Faustian act (Gustaf, Erika, Klaus and Mephisto)
Strange Flowers guide to Berlin: part 2 (Gustaf Gründgens)
Ravaged angel, Three shows, Strange Flowers guide to Berlin: part 4, Schwarzenbach in English, Annemarie Schwarzenbach | The South, 1937, A life spent searching, Pearls: Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Death in Persia (Annemarie Schwarzenbach)
Pearls: René Crevel
Rex Luna, Let them eat kuchen, Sewell on Ludwig, Ludwig at the movies, An eternal mystery, Circles: Ludwig II/Sissi (Ludwig II)

In his book Auf der Schwelle des Fremden, Swiss writer Alexis Schwarzenbach presents the most compelling portrait we have of his great-aunt, the writer, photographer and adventurer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who died on this day in 1942. The insights into Schwarzenbach’s early life are particularly valuable, showing us that the self-willed androgyne of legend had already asserted herself in childhood, emerging after the birth of her younger brother Freddy:

It must have been rapidly apparent to Annemarie that her parents favoured Freddy above all because he was a boy. This is presumably the reason that she transformed herself into a boy, assuming this new identity in 1917. In January the eight-year-old had her long hair cut off and she wore it short from that point on. Having always worn the same dresses as her sister, she now began dressing like her younger brothers. She even wore the same bathing costumes as Freddy and Hasi when she went swimming. Her favourite piece of clothing was a pair of lederhosen which her mother had brought back from Munich. Annemarie wore them everywhere, and when she visited her grandparents at Mariafeld she was even thrown out of the Meilen church for her unseemly appearance. A new name completed the transformation. In September 1917, the nine-year-old signed her earliest extant letter to her father with the words “Best wishes, Fritz”.

Here, the timeless, ageless, genderless, effortless, deathless, fearless chic of Annemarie Schwarzenbach (beware of imitations):

Further reading
Ravaged angel
Strange Flowers guide to Berlin, part 4
Annemarie Schwarzenbach | The South, 1937
Schwarzenbach in English
A life spent searching
Pearls: Annemarie Schwarzenbach
Death in Persia
Circles: Klaus and Erika Mann

In honour of the Chinese New Year and the Year of the Horse which begins today, here is a look at some of our favourite strange flowers in equestrian elegance mode.  There’s Renée Sintenis (again), Hermann Pückler-Muskau in an early drag race with a coach, while Lord Berners, ever the individualist, has decided to paint rather than ride his mount. Sissi‘s imperial sidesaddle glamour could never be encompassed by just one post; find more here.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Count D’Orsay

Lady Hester Stanhope

Gabriele d’Annunzio

Renée Sintenis

Lord Berners

H.D.

Ludwig II

Natalie Barney

Hermann von Pückler-Muskau

Sissi

Pity the poor old Marchesa Casati, just lounging about there in the past being her reliably daft self, her eternal repose interrupted twice a year as fashion designers – on deadline, naturally, and not even stopping for tea – dash out of the present and strip her of surplus finery with which to pad out their collections. Beginning with John Galliano in the late 1990s, it seems most major designers have paraphrased her dark enchantments at some point (not least the label named for her), attempting to imitate the inimitable, a paradoxical process covered at greater length here.

Further pieces of the Marchesa littered about the present can be found in a recent book about her son-in-law, Jack Hastings, the “Red Earl“, as well as a film hommage to Jean Cocteau. Right now, however, the best place for an unmediated hit of Casatian wonder is in Venice, once the Marchesa’s home, where the Palazzo Fortuny is presenting an exhibition which promises to “immerse the visitor in the atmosphere of the Divine Marchesa’s life” by way of numerous portraits, personal effects and of course clothes. As the exhibition reflects, Casati’s self-willed singularity wasn’t entirely without precedent, and she had her own dead dame muses, particularly the Countess de Castiglione and Elisabeth, a.k.a. Sissi. The latter, as it happens, has her own exhibition in the Hofburg which pays hommage (how about I just stop using that word now?) to her wardrobe and runs until her birthday, Christmas Eve.

The Marchesa is naturally not the only quirky old broad to appear on the runways. The recent spate of ready-to-wear shows alone has given us Nancy Cunard, Marjorie Cameron and Annemarie Schwarzenbach (the latter coming from the house if not the hand of Jil Sander). Berlin-based maker of ladies’ underthings Lost in Wonderland recently issued a range inspired by great danseues of yore; their references are shameless Strange Flowers bait, featuring Anita Berber, Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan and Valeska Gert.

Finally, while we’re in a fashiony kind of mood, I urge you to read the recent-ish article about Nicolas de Gunzburg, socialite/arthouse ghoul/glossy mag luminary (and a mentor to the recently departed Oscar de la Renta). It’s one of those “partygoers of yesteryear” pieces Vanity Fair uses to soften the transition from its puddle-deep cover stories on the celebrity du jour to the long-winded forensic scandal reports templated by the late Dominick Dunne. I’ve always had a soft spot for ‘Niki’ Gunzburg, but was won over entirely by this reported exchange with Diana Vreeland: “Vreeland once inquired of Niki, ‘What is the name of the Seventh Avenue designer who hates me so?’—to which he replied, ‘Legion.'”

Premiering this year at the Berlinale film festival, Je suis Annemarie Schwarzenbach reads on paper like the most artsy, obtuse reality show imaginable. Watch Pop Idle as five contestants battle it out in a country house to see WHO will be the next star of louche, gamine ennui! See the cocktails fly as Annemarie and Erika Mann clash in The Real Housewives of Weimar Berlin! Marvel as our rich-girl-gone-bad picks her fragrant beau in My Big Fat Lavender Wedding!

Why exactly someone would want to make a film about a woman who was beautiful, androgynous, ferociously talented and highly complex, who left her patrician family behind to ride the tempests of the between-the-wars era before succumbing to addiction and dying at a tragically young age – well I think the preceding speaks for itself. In fact the Swiss writer and adventurer has already been the subject of two full-length treatments. In 2000 Une suisse rebelle offered some extraordinary early home footage of the young Annemarie and family, as well as interviews with the ageing witnesses to her life: husband Claude-Achille Clarac, sister Suzanne Öhman, photographer Marianne Breslauer, travelling companion Ella Maillart (you can see it online here, though only in French I’m afraid). The following year, The Journey to Kafiristan dramatised Schwarzenbach and Maillart’s Amazing Race-style overland journey from Geneva to Kabul on the eve of the Second World War (trailer here).

So with documentary Annemarie and fictional Annemarie already taken, what to do? Blend the two, apparently, which is more or less what French filmmaker Véronique Aubouy does with Je suis Annemarie Schwarzenbach. However the line between orchestrated and incidental is at times extremely difficult to discern.

It’s worth noting that the title predates the terrorist attacks in Paris last month, and that it isn’t a tasteless riff on the ensuing motto of empathetic identification, “Je suis Charlie“. But empathetic identification is very much at the heart of this film, as we see around ten young actors auditioning for the part of Annemarie Schwarzenbach by sharing their own experiences, reading text and posing languidly. Aubouy rightfully acknowledges the centrality of the subject’s self-presentation and particularly Breslauer’s immortal portraits; Schwarzenbach herself was highly conscious of her image and constantly pestered the photographer for new prints.

The applicants are encouraged to find some point of commonality with Schwarzenbach – sexuality, boyishness, even a Swiss background – as if clicking on keywords in an imaginary word cloud. The film then switches from Paris to a house in the country, overlaying the casting format with the artificial constraint. But instead of living like the Amish, being an Osbourne or foraging a meal of grubs and leaves from the forest floor, the five chosen applicants – four female and one male – spend their days trying to out-Annemarie each other.

Their challenges consist in performing passages from Schwarzenbach’s writing. One exercise requires two contestants to poke and prod and otherwise hinder a third who is trying to read from a script, at another point they sing/shout phrases over a garage band backing. In between, in “real life” (but sheesh, who knows at this stage) they conduct the kind of conversations any one of us might have, or will have, conducted in our early twenties, full of airy proclamations on gender and sexuality. These are words uttered less for any insights that they might offer in and of themselves than for their value in establishing our liberal credentials with our peers. And that’s fine, that’s life, but it is not clear why we should be witness to it on this occasion.

The sincerity of the director’s enthusiasm for Schwarzenbach is evident, and she plainly wants to share her life and work with us by having her live through others. The living text is clearly a passion: Aubouy’s immense Proust project is one of the most ambitious conjunctions of film and literature ever conceived, with over 100 hours of footage to date of readings which when finished (c. 2050) will cover the entirety of A la recherche du temps perdu. With over 1000 readers, it suggests that there is something in this vast body of work for everyone.

Je suis Annemarie Schwarzenbach is a chamber piece by comparison, and risks robbing the text of its potential universality by fitting it with tags. It suggests that access to the work and and its creator is conditional on presentation of the right badge of identity. If one is Swiss and/or lesbian and one dons a tie, does that make one Annemarie Schwarzenbach? I’m a gay Australian with some pretty swishy cufflinks but it hardly makes me Robert Helpmann. Does it not betray some disrespect for the performers’ craft that the actors are not simply allowed to…act?

Je suis Annemarie Schwarzenbach is nominally listed as a documentary, although it fatigues and finally defeats that label. So here it might be instructive to compare it with another film under that rubric which appears to be at the other extreme of authorial interference. Jean-Gabriel Périot’s Une jeunesse allemande, also showing at the Berlinale, is the product of editing rather than filmmaking, consisting entirely of footage related to the Rote Armee Fraktion, better known to the rest of the world as the Baader-Meinhof Group. But this apparent lack of intervention in fact serves to highlight the impossibility of objectivity. You can’t condense the most tumultuous decade of post-war Germany without making some intensely individual choices, passing thousands of hours of footage through a personal filter.

So is Aubouy just being more honest, more transparent about her manipulation of “real life”? Possibly, but she also offers very little we haven’t seen in dozens and dozens of scripted reality shows, with all their squalor and sadism. The contestants must come with an emotional back story, they must be pushed (literally, in this case) to catharsis, there must be tension, ideally sexual. Our five suitors woo the director, the unseen bachelorette. She, a disembodied presence, at least acknowledges the cruelty of it all.

All of this will presumably result in an actual dramatised account of Schwarzenbach at some point, although that’s never entirely clear. Here the preparation is the project, and with no apparent outlet for the conflicts and emotions which arise in the process, inertia sets in. Towards the end of Keeping up with the Claracs, sorry, Je suis Annemarie Schwarzenbach, we see someone dressed as a bear, and a fat man dancing in his underpants. Why? The snarky answer would be “because art film”. The director herself vaguely suggested that they might symbolise the dangers these young people face in the outside world. But frankly, with this film in the can I’d say the worst is behind them.

Julia Perazzini emerges as the most compelling performer, even though she bears the least resemblance to the film’s subject. She smoulders with ambition, and so when she appears to fall for the other apparently unattached female of the group, it is unclear if this is happening in real life, or in “real life”, or if she is simply pushing method as far as it will go to prove that no-one can take this away from her. She also does a highly convincing turn as Annemarie’s butch, controlling, Nazi-sympathising mother (if someone wants to make Je suis Renée Schwarzenbach, I’ll be first in line).

Perazzini’s is the last face we see, so does this mean she’s the Next Top Annemarie Schwarzenbach? Were the other Annemaries voted off the island? The ultimate question here, though, if we’re talking empathetic identification: would someone as wary and self-possessed as Annemarie Schwarzenbach ever have submitted herself to such an invasive process?

Further reading
Ravaged angel
Three shows
Strange Flowers guide to Berlin: part 4
Schwarzenbach in English
Annemarie Schwarzenbach | The South, 1937
A life spent searching
Pearls: Annemarie Schwarzenbach
Death in Persia
Circles: Erika and Klaus Mann
Dress-down Friday: Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Somehow it is already the first day of Advent, which means we are drawing ever closer to that most wonderful time of the year, the day that brought the birth of our saviour Quentin Crisp. You are doubtless wondering how you can mark the season with gifts to passive-aggressive co-workers, Brexit-voting cousins and flag-flying neighbours in a way that will leave your reputation as an inscrutable recondite snoot intact. Allow me to present a round-up of giftable cultural history with which you can unmistakably signal your degenerate cosmopolitan values:

… because if you were to wind the clock back 100 years (the kind of thing we’re given to doing around here; witness a proto art intervention, an early milestone in marriage equality and the respective deaths of the ‘heathen madonna’, the ‘sandwich man of the beyond’ and a yellowface magician) and you were to find yourself in Munich, you really would need a copy of Dreamers to know what the hell was going on. Volker Weidermann’s book (translated by Ruth Martin, who talks about it here) describes a moment when poets, anarchists and chancers impetuously seized the reins of power in Bavaria in the immediate wake of World War One. It couldn’t last, of course, but as you read this magnificently rendered account you will find something extraordinary on just about every page.

… because while that was going on in Munich, Berlin’s artists were preparing a revolt of their own amid the post-war ferment, although the Scheisse wouldn’t well and truly hit the Ventilator until January. Because it’s where Dada met Bauhaus (and in fact predates the formal establishment of Bauhaus) and not nearly enough people are familiar with the Novembergruppe, a radical, revolutionary, multi-genre, interdisciplinary movement that encompassed everyone from Kurt Weill to Hannah Höch, Walter Spies to Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to Otto Dix. Because Monday marks the 100th anniversary of the group’s first meeting (although their name celebrated the inspiration of the previous month), and an exhibition reflecting its insanely varied output is currently on in Berlin, accompanied by a catalogue.

… because women have been written out of the canonical narrative of early Modernism long enough and because five years after I saw and was astonished by a show of her work in Berlin it is great to see that Swedish abstract pioneer Hilma af Klint is having an actual MOMENT, oh yes she is, a proper uptown-exhibition, multiple-monographs, articles-in-foldy-out-newspapers moment, and it’s wonderful and so richly deserved. Paintings for the Future accompanies the Guggenheim show while Notes and Methods draws the reader further into her profound, idiosyncratic mysticism.

… because women have been written out of Surrealism long enough, here’s The Milk Bowl of Feathers, an anthology of Surrealist fiction which complements over-familiar names like Louis Aragon, André Breton and Salvador Dalí with the likes of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Mina Loy and Leonora Carrington.

… because Leonora Carrington brings us to her compadre, Spanish artist Remedios Varo whose written work can now be enjoyed in a new Wakefield anthology, Letters, Dreams & Other Writings (translated by Margaret Carson).

… because for some unfathomable reason there is STILL no Annemarie Schwarzenbach bio in English, and while this is in German, Jenseits von New York (Beyond New York) at least features her outstanding photos of segregation- and Depression-ravaged rural America.

… because having done devastating between-the-wars verité you may be interested in its aesthetic antithesis which you will duly find in Jane Stevenson’s Baroque between the Wars, which brings to mind Stephen Calloway’s masterly compendium Baroque Baroque.

… because I recently had a MAJOR BIRTHDAY and not to boast or anything, but I got a signed Alfred Kubin lithograph from my partner. How good is that? It’s an image of the prophet Jeremiah playing the harp and bitching, because ‘I thought you might relate to a complaining old man’. This catalogue is from an exhibition currently showing in Munich which explores the Austrian artist’s relations with that city’s avant-garde Blaue Reiter group, and while it, too, is in German it is at least a quality trove of Kubin images, something that is surprisingly hard to find.

… because we love Pierre Loti around here and are pleased to see him take his place in the Reaktion ‘Critical Lives‘ series, right there between Lenin and Jean-François Lyotard. Because author Richard M. Berrong is well-versed in Lotiana, having published In Love with a Handsome Sailor: The Novels of Pierre Loti and the Emergence of Gay Male Identity. Because – speaking of handsome sailors – on page 120 there is a photo you really must see of Loti’s special friend Léo Thémèze. Woof! as I believe no one says any more. And because there is also an extraordinary photo of La Loti herself in circus attire on page 44. Run, don’t walk. Run.

… because in rooting around at Reaktion I stumbled across this, Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present by Jane Desmarais, a study of one of the great Decadent motifs.

… because hothouse flowers made me think of the wonderful vignette of Aubrey Beardsley scenting his carefully cultivated blooms in the utterly essential account of the English Decadence, Passionate Attitudes, and that book’s author Matthew Sturgis has a new life of Oscar Wilde, and if there is anything more to say about said life I would certainly trust him to say it.

… because that in turn reminded me that last year there was a great article in the London Review of Books by Colm Tóibín in which ‘De Profundis’ framed a fascinating double portrait of Ma and Pa Wilde, and that he followed it up with studies of the respective fathers of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce and it made me want to read more, and now in Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know I can.

… because you might be curious to know how Joyce shaped up as a father himself, which you can in a fictional account of the life of his troubled daughter Lucia, by Alex Pheby.

… because that brought to mind the curious intersections in the lives of Lucia Joyce and Antonin Artaud who were both treated by the same doctor in the same Parisian psychiatric clinic and had both been discovered roaming Dublin, manic and dishevelled. Artaud’s disjointed thoughts from his erratic pilgrimage through Ireland are recorded in letters now issued by Infinity Land Press as Artaud 1937 Apocalypse, translated by Stephen Barber.

… because even though a lot of my conscious hours are monopolised by translation and I am never less than fascinated by the process I sometimes feel like I understand it less the more I do it and reading Mark Polizzotti’s Sympathy for the Traitor makes me grateful that smarter people than I are giving more thought to it than I ever could.

… because if you ever wondered what went down in the sessions between Sigmund Freud and his analysand, the great Modernist poet H.D. (and who among us has not?), Kath MacLean can offer you an idea in Translating Air.

… because this is unexpectedly turning out to be a great year for uncovering unjustly neglected stories and although Gentleman Jack, Angele Steidele’ study of lesbian Regency diarist Anne Lister, orginally appeared in German it has been translated by Katy Derbyshire so you know it must be good.

… because, like I said, the unsung are having their moment, as Ria Brodell’s illustrated Butch Heroes um… illustrates, and it also reminds me that next year will bring Diana Souhami’s No Modernism without Lesbians, a title that is brilliant, bold and true.

… because untold stories always contain more untold stories, as evidenced by Joan E. Howard’s We Met in Paris, in which Grace Frick steps forth from the shadow of her partner Marguerite Yourcenar.

… because Spurl Editions are congenitally incapable of a dull book. I have reviewed three of them and I never write book reviews (this? darlings, this is a shopping list). Because their unerring sensibilities have turned up another treasure in Luigi Pirandello’s 1926 novel One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (translated by William Weaver), which boldly busies itself with ‘The definition of madness, the problem of identity, the impossibility of communicating with others and with being (or knowing) one’s self’.

… because when I was flying into Thessaloniki earlier in the year I was reading Owen Hatherley’s Trans-Europe Express, specifically the chapter describing 20th century development in said city (which is entitled ‘No, No, No, No’… spoiler alert: he’s not a fan) and as fond as I am of Greece’s second city the book was so fascinating and well-argued I couldn’t hold it against him. Because from Lviv to Madrid, it ably defines and analyses the nature of the European city in a book abounding in erudition, observation and discernment.

… because of the numerous people to live out their penniless decline in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, couturier Charles James, ‘the Ovid of fashion’, was possibly the most unlikely and most interesting, as reflected in Michèle Gerber Klein’s Charles James: Portrait of an Unreasonable Man.

… because the Decadence and Translation Network recently got under way and it’s always good to see more Decadent works appearing in translation, such as Jean Lorrain’s withering satire Errant Vice and Lilith’s Legacy, an anthology of works by Renée Vivien. Because both are translated by Brian Stableford who judging from his translation output alone is actually a sleepless compulsive – and what could be more Decadent?

… because it’s always fascinating to see how the recherché literary modes of Belle Époque Paris mutated throughout space and time, as reflected in And My Head Exploded: Tales of desire, delirium and decadence from fin-de-siecle Prague (translated by Geoffrey Chew) and Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology.

… because if you only know occultist Pamela Colman Smith from her tarot cards, or not at all, Stuart R. Kaplan’s authoritative, exhaustive and superbly realised monograph The Untold Story will open your eyes to an extraordinarily gifted and characterful artist whose work ranged from fairy tale illustrations to graphic representations of Beethoven sonatas.

… because if you had a choice of taking life lessons from a) a guy who hung out with Gertrude Stein and André Gide, tattooed bikers, slept with hundreds of men (including Rock Hudson and Lord Alfred Douglas) and kept meticulous notes thereof, penned gay erotica while introducing a hitherto absent transgressive note to the Illinois Dental Journal or b) oh, I don’t know, Alain de Botton or some insufferable ballache like that – who would you choose? The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward is lost no more. Hallelujah.

… and because if there is anything I have absorbed from the teachings of Christ, it is to love others as I love myself, to remember those less fortunate and (I’m paraphrasing here) to celebrate His birth by flogging my latest product. Ilse Frapan’s visionary feminist novel We Women Have no Fatherland, originally published in 1899, is reflective, despairing, exorbitant, inspiring, sentimental and angry.

Just like Christmas.

If you’ve been reading for a while now, you’ll know what to expect – each year around this time I select a bunch of books with a Strange Flowers flavour which you might like to share with intimates who share your skewed sensibilities, to enlighten/scare off those who don’t, or of course to treat yourself. And you’ve survived your ride on this sorry-go-round of a year, so knock yourself out.

I am full of admiration for anyone who published a book in 2020; it’s more than I managed. But this year, the question of how to buy seems as pressing as what to buy and now more than ever I would implore you to support local bookstores and independent publishers; the link for each title will take you to the publisher’s page. And because convenience and principle needn’t be mutually exclusive, you’ll also find links (where available) to buy the book at the UK and/or US versions of Bookshop.org, “an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores”. Bookshop is still in beta and comes with an unfussy layout  – perhaps a little too unfussy; an option to sort or filter by date, name and other criteria would be welcome. But why don’t we, collectively, aid them in improving the site and help keep passionate booksellers in business rather than showering venture capitalists and tax avoiders with our cash so they can further over-engineer our lives?

OK, enough with the PSA and on with the books. Christmas is fast approaching so I’m going to try and keep this brief – let’s see how that works out, eh?

The intersection of the occult and graphic arts is a recurring theme this year, with a particular focus on divination – perhaps it’s just an understandable collective desire to see what will emerge from this busted crank hole of a year? Zoom out with The Art of the Occult or the major survey of Not without My Ghosts – although it looks like the catalogue for that exhibition may have been held over until next year – and lay your cards on the coffee table with a large-format graphic survey of the Tarot from Taschen (who are also issuing a new edition of Salvador Dalí’s tarot set). The Leonora Carrington revival continues with The Tarot of Leonora Carrington by Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq in a range of typically handsome editions by Fulgur. Last year the same publisher issued a survey of Ithell Colquhoun’s abstract tarot designs; the artist’s entire career of images and text is covered in the highly recommended Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern-Loved Gully by Amy Hale (and I’m honoured that it includes one of my images of Lamorna, where the artist and writer spent much of her life). In the catalogue Pamela Colman Smith: Life and Work we discover more about the most celebrated tarot artist of all, a Jamaican-born bisexual bohemian who died penniless even though her works have been reproduced in the millions.

Colman Smith appeared in Arthur Ransome’s 1907 Bohemia in London as “Gypsy”, inhabitant of a milieu that James Gatheral examines in The Bohemian Republic: Transnational Literary Networks in the Nineteenth Century (UK) as he moves from the Parisian origins of bohemianism under the July Monarchy to highlight comparable communities that emerged in the Anglophone world, a theme that Sherry L. Smith takes up in Bohemians West: Free Love, Family, and Radicals in Twentieth Century America (US). Their spiritual descendants offer seasonal day drinking inspiration in Darren Coffield’s Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia (UK), celebrating the London bar notorious for hostess Muriel Belcher’s salty welcome and the Homeric quantities of alcohol consumed by its artist and writer patrons; Barry Humphries recalls his pre-teetotal days in the foreword. As an archetype the bohemian combined the vagabond’s disdain for the bourgeoisie with the hauteur of the dandy, figures captured – respectively – in The Lives and Extraordinary Adventures of Fifteen Tramp Writers from The Golden Age of Vagabondage by Ian Cutler (UK/US) and Dandyism: Forming Fiction from Modernism to the Present (UK/US), in which Len Gutkin pursues some immaculate coat-tails through literary history.

The dandyish Gabriele d’Annunzio represents a particularly dark glamour. In The Fiume Crisis (UK/US). Dominique Kirchner Reill details the episode that began when d’Annunzio, writer and war hero, led a group of loyalists to capture a city with a majority Italian-ethnic population in the newly created Yugoslavia after the end of the First World War. The short-lived state which resulted was a paradoxical endeavour; the glorification of power, violence and ethno-nationalism – not to mention d’Annunzio’s title of “Duce” – clearly inspired Mussolini. But there was a carnival-esque atmosphere to Fiume, where fur-lined caves hosted coke-fuelled orgies; note, too, the Fiume constitution, which was surprisingly progressive. This and other former sovereign states and geopolitical anomalies are included in Gideon Defoe’s An Atlas of Extinct Countries (UK/US), the kind of larky, middle-brow survey of historical and geographical quirks to which I am all too susceptible. In Saffron Jack (UK), meanwhile, Rishi Dastidar offers a narrative poem which brilliantly burlesques the conventions of treaties and foundational documents to explore nationhood, identity and belonging. Nicholas Daly’s Ruritania (UK/US) offers nations of no map in a notional Baedeker of fictional realms from the original Ruritanian adventure, The Prisoner of Zenda, to The Princess Diaries. The “Princess” of The Princess and the Prophet (US) was Eva Brister, Noble Drew Ali the Prophet and in them and other variety performers of the 1920s Jacob S. Dorman locates the origins of the Nation of Islam, a search for a conception of belief and society that transcended the segregation of Jim Crow America. It was a story continued in Claude McKay’s Harlem: Negro Metropolis, but in the major recent rediscovery Romance in Marseille (UK/US) the Jamaican author reaches even further with a Transatlantic tale of race, class, sexuality and disability.

A booted and suited Flowers favourite returns in Annemarie Schwarzenbach: Aufbruch ohne Ziel, a major survey of Schwarzenbach’s outstanding photographic work; the text is in German but if you can wait until next year, Seagull are reissuing her All the Roads are Open and Death in Persia in translation (and here let me add my annual note of bafflement and regret that no one has published an English-language bio of Schwarzenbach). I don’t know for sure if the Swiss writer and photographer encountered the striking figure of sculptor Renée Sintenis in the lengthening shadows of late Weimar Berlin, but it’s highly likely. Renée Sintenis: Between Freedom and Modernism (US), includes what I believe to be the first English text on the artist. Another particularly welcome English survey is Karla Huebner’s Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic (UK/US). As I mentioned a few years back on encountering her work in Prague, Toyen’s erotica is among the most vivid and fearless that Surrealism had to offer. And completing our quintet of androgynous between-the-war image-makers are Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, although Jeffrey H. Jackson’s Paper Bullets (UK/US) takes us through the (second) war itself, with a non-fiction account of the step-sisters/lovers and their extraordinarily brave campaign of subversion against the Nazis, as movingly fictionalised by Rupert Thomson in Never Anyone But You.

Who are you Alexander Smith Cochran, and why are you here? Walter Goffart’s The Industrialist and the Diva (UK/US) introduces the “millionaire carpet manufacturer, noted philanthropist, and avid yachtsman” who started an Elizabethan club at Yale. It sounds … well, thou do thou Alex, but not gonna lie you don’t really sound us. But who is the “diva” of the title? Ah, that would be your wife, the sublime Ganna Walska, who (partly) inspired the figure of Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane by pursuing an opera career in which she offered little by way of musical accomplishment but big-ticket glamour without end, with her turn as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni costumed by none other than Erté. The stone cold roué returns in Brigid Brophy’s reissued novel The Snow Ball (UK). Detailing the author’s core obsessions of “Mozart, sex and death”, it’s the perfect New Year’s Eve reading if you’re not going out (chances are you aren’t, and shouldn’t). And it includes a “two-page orgasm”, so there’s that. Staying in costume, we recall one of Cecil Beaton’s most celebrated and mocked images which showed Stephen Tennant, the photographer himself and other Bright Young Things dressed for a fête galante, included in the catalogue for Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things (UK/US), an exhibition of the photographer’s face work from London’s National Portrait Gallery; the accompanying Cecil Beaton’s Cocktail Book (UK/US) offers further day-drinking inspiration. Meanwhile Catherine Hewitt’s Art is a Tyrant (UK/US) tells the story of Rosa Bonheur, an eccentric French artist who enjoyed considerable fame in the 19th century, while dressed as a bonhomme of the previous century and living openly with her female partner and a menagerie of animals. British-born French writer Renée Vivien greeted the Belle Epoque dressed as though she had just emerged from a Versailles wormhole. Her short fiction is included in The Woman of the Wolf and Other Stories (UK) (translated by Karla Jay & Yvonne M. Klein), her life threaded into the fabric of The Passion according to Renée Vivien by Catalan writer Maria-Mercè Marçal (translated by Kathleen McNerney and Helena Buffery).

If A Night at the Amazon’s sparked your fascination for Vivien and the rest of the circle around Natalie Clifford Barney, we have another short fiction set by another of La Barney’s lovers in The Last Siren and Other Stories by Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (translated by Brian Stableford). Publisher Snuggly also offer a new version of Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Bougrelon (translated by Brian Stableford) with extra short stories, also available in a splendid deluxe edition by Side Real Press with illustrations by Drian (longer term readers will know of my love for a previous translation of Lorrain’s novel, by Eva Richter). Translated by Lawrence Venuti, Fantastic Tales (UK/US) collects works by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, who lived a restless existence, plagiarised wildly, and died young, remembered as a key figure of 19th century Italy’s Scapigliatura movement, whose bohemian provocations cast a bridge between Romanticism and Decadence. Also found in translation this year is Munchausen and Clarissa: A Berlin Novel (UK/US) in which the eccentric bohemian polymath of Wilhelmine Berlin, Paul Scheerbart, visits my home country of Australia (in his mind, at least); translation by Christina Svendsen. Freshly arrived from there in another millennium I saw a London stage adaptation of Street of Crocodiles by Polish writer Bruno Schulz and remember – more vividly than just about anything else of the period – the play’s traumatised protagonist desperately trying to recreate tableaux of the past, moving figures around on the stage to concord with his memory of a lost world. Now a slim volume translated by Frank Garrett offers Schulz’s first published piece, the recently rediscovered Undula (US). Try this for a 2020 opening: “It must’ve been weeks now, months, since I’ve been locked up in isolation. Over and over I sink into slumber and rouse myself anew, and real-life phantoms get jumbled up, blurring into drowsy fragments.” And a reissue of The Man of Jasmine & Other Texts by the deeply troubled Unica Zürn (translated by Malcolm Green) joins a recent rediscovery of the radical author, The House of Illnesses (UK).

Exhibitions throughout the year – inevitably rescheduled – introduced New York to two of the most singular apparitions of the Belle Epoque and we can – at least – enjoy the catalogues. Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde (UK/US) at MoMA was a survey of a caustic art critic and radical catalyst barely known to English readers, while the Morgan Library & Museum presented a no less anarchic and avant-garde existence in Alfred Jarry: The Carnival of Being (some of the exhibits are online); the catalogue is by Sheelagh Bevan. Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism (UK/US) by Martin Lockerd shows how fin-de-siècle posturing amid the smells and bells of the Mother Church became a crucial touchpoint for a certain strain of prose stylist in the 20th century. Decadent, Catholic and wholly absurd, Montague Summers is still referenced for his research into witchcraft, the Gothic novel and adjacent fields, which also informed his works of fiction as here in The Bride of Christ and Other Fictions (UK/US). And we get to see what the Russian avant-garde was up to around the same time in Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia’s Silver Age by John E. Bowlt (UK/US); the Munich edition of this series is one of my essential references.

We cast adrift with two women whose privilege and genius for reinvention propelled them far from the safe harbour of dull upper class society. Nancy Cunard, Perfect Stranger by Jane Marcus (US) rejects reductive readings of the poet, publisher and activist and reconsiders her place in literary Modernism. Peggy Guggenheim: The Last Dogaressa (UK/US) revisits the later life of the great patron and highlights the works she collected during her time in Venice (edited by Karole P.B. Vail, Vivien Greene). Like many moneyed gay men of the time, Oscar Wilde was drawn to the sympathetic legal environment and sun-dazed sensuality of Italy as captured in Renato Miracco’s Oscar Wilde’s Italian Dream 1875-1900 (UK/US). It was to the island of Capri that he decamped on his release from prison, a haven for sexual minorities as authoritatively detailed in Pagan Light by Jamie James, who sadly died earlier this year. It was home for many years to Norman Douglas, subject of Unspeakable (UK/US), a work of moral genealogy by Rachel Hope Cleves which reveals the uncomfortable truth that many in Douglas’s circle were aware that he sexually exploited minors, and not especially disapproving of the fact it would seems. And while it wasn’t solely high-brow sex tourism that drove Christopher Isherwood and W. H.  Auden to 1920s Berlin, it wasn’t exactly a deterrent as Colin Storer details in Britain and the Weimar Republic (UK/US).

I hope there’s something for you in that lot. And here’s to 2021, when with any luck we shall return to our routine of masked orgies, full-body poetry slams and foam lute recitals.

In Berlin, the first snow has fallen and the first Advent candle is lit. I better get a move on.

We finished part 1 of our book round-up with Decadence, we begin part 2 with the Father of Decadence (and modernism and just about everything else) who had the big two-oh-oh this year and gets his own Bicentennial Birthday Baudelaire bundle. That includes a catalogue of the exhibition Baudelaire, la modernité mélancolique currently on at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (only in French it seems, but appears to be image-heavy), a digital graphic novel treatment of his Haitian-born mistress Jeanne Duval in Mademoiselle Baudelaire by Yslaire, a new translation (by Aaron Poochigian) of his magnum opus The Flowers of Evil, plus a new rendering (by Rainer J. Hanshe) of the flânerie ur-text Paris Spleen.

As we stroll on into the Walk the Talk and Talk the Walk bundle we ask, where did the flâneurs go? Did all the psychogeographers become nature writers? Perhaps New Directions in Flânerie (edited by Kelly Comfort and Marylaura Papalas) might tell us, or a new edition of Walking and the Aesthetics of Modernity (edited by Klaus Benesch and François Specq) for those of you who can’t put one goddam foot in front of the other without a critical apparatus. Antonio Muñoz Molina accompanies us on a less academic, more personable urban amble in To Walk Alone in the Crowd (translated by Guillermo Bleichmar), and as ever our thoughts in these matters turn to Fernando Pessoa who is still, it appears, having a moment. Maybe we should accept that Pessoa is always having a moment. This year brings Richard Zenith’s toe-crusher of a biography and a new edition of The Mad Fiddler, a suite of verse which, like many of Pessoa’s works, is almost impossible to corral into a definitive version.

I’m calling this bundle French Letters and your objections on the matter are powerless. From Seagull (who are having a 50% sale until Christmas Eve!) comes The Three Rimbauds, in which Dominique Noguez plays alternative history with everyone’s favourite teen tearaway, the most famous disappearing act in French literature (translated by Seth Whidden, also author of a Rimbaud study in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series). Some achieve disappearance, some have disappearance thrust upon them; Surrealist Robert Desnos turned away from the movement’s self-anointed pontiff André Breton (always a good sign), joined the Resistance and died at just 44 shortly after liberation from Theresienstadt. From his surprisingly prolific late period Wakefield offers The Die is Cast (translated by Jesse L. Anderson), which portrays “a band of opium, cocaine, and heroin users from all walks of life in Paris, a motley group who share nothing but their addiction and their slow and steady descent into ruination and despair”. Hervé Guibert died of AIDS-related illness in 1991 at just 36, but not before leaving Arthur’s Whims (here translated by Daniel Lupo), an outré, transgressive, hallucinatory text which can hold its own with Lautréamont in the canon of illustrious perversion; another fascinating find from Spurl. In The Mysterious Correspondent it is the text itself which disappeared – nine recently rediscovered stories by Marcel Proust (translated by Charlotte Mandell). Proust may have challenged Jean Lorrain to a duel for effectively outing him but here he brings relative candour to the theme of same-sex desire. Contains the immortal phrase “I am the fairy of misunderstood sensitivities” (snap girl!).

If you’re anything like me, you begin each day propped up in bed with an organza shrug wrapped snugly about your shoulders and a finger pressed to your cheek as a thought bubble rises languidly above your head toward the eau-de-nil baldachin, in it the words “what news of Djuna Barnes?”. As well as two imminent academic studies which pair La Barnes with H.D. and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven respectively, our Emphatically Queer bundle offers a slim, recently rediscovered text from early on in her career: Vagaries Malicieux, in Sublunary’s eclectic and highly recommended Empyrean Series. Barnes biographer Phillip Herring calls it an “unmalicious, if rambling, article describing her first trip to Paris” in which Barnes encounters Joyce around the time he published Ulysses (expect centennial noise re same in February). While the author herself was dismissive of the piece, it holds literary historical value and offers winning descriptions, such as that of the “accidental aloofness” of Joyce. Here I will offer my customary lament that another year has passed without an English-language study of Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Except – gasp! – in The Buoyancy of the Craft, Morelle Smith offers just that, in a book which brings the sweep of the writer and adventurer’s life into novel form. And we offer thanks to Feral House and Sarah Burns for The Emphatically Queer Career of Artist Perkins Harnly and His Bohemian Friends. Read this, watch the video below, ask yourself – why am I only now finding out about this magnificent fairy of misunderstood senstivities?

Our Dames and Showgirls bundle draws inspiration from an audiobook, Simon Berry’s The Dame and the Showgirl which fictionalises the meeting between Edith Sitwell and Marilyn Monroe (which as fictional as it sounds did actually happen). The pair are voiced by Emma Thompson and Sinead Matthews respectively. The Institut du monde arabe in Paris this year hosted an exhibition entitled Divas d’Oum Kalthoum à Dalida, a celebration of the greatest female singers of the Arab world. The catalogue is in French but even for the non-Francophone it offers an introduction to the iconography of artists like the enigmatic Asmahan and the immortal Oum Kulthumm, subject (sort of, but also not) of a 2017 film which provides the cover image. That year also brought the biopic Nico, 1988, with the German-born singer and model also the subject of Jennifer Otter Bickerdike’s You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone. Like Annemarie Schwarzenbach (and Franziska zu Reventlow), Nico met her sad end after a bicycle accident. I have also recently discovered that Nico was discovered at Berlin’s premier department store KaDeWe, and I don’t really know what to do with that information but pass it on to you.

Our Dreaming Rebels bundle begins with me feeling bummed that I will probably not get to the major exhibition of works by Czech Surrealist Toyen currently showing in Hamburg (*shakes fist at global pandemic*). But – as I have said before – at least we have the catalogue! This recurring phrase is starting to feel less like a book recommendation and more like a diagnosis of our current condition; we can’t experience reality but we can admire the pretty pictures thereof. Anyway, Toyen: The Dreaming Rebel (edited by Anna Pravdová, Annie Le Brun and Annabelle Görgen-Lammers) is probably the best introduction to one of the most fascinating figures of 20th century art available in English. The subject of Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel (edited by Nancy Ireson) left school at 11 to become an acrobat, modelled for Puvis de Chavanne’s enormous Allegory of the Sorbonne (including the men) for over three years, by which time she knew enough to become a highly accomplished artist in her own right. Suzanne Valadon gave birth to son Maurice Utrillo out of wedlock when she was 18, and later made an artist of him in an effort to get him off booze and then married a man even younger than him and painted him sans togs – apparently (and amazingly) the first female painter to ever depict a male nude. So – yeah, I’d say there’s a story there. in Jugendstil Women and the Making of Modern Design, Sabine Wieber goes in search of the rebel women of Wilhelmine Germany including Anita Augspurg and Sophia Goudstikker, who lived in relative openness as a couple and whose Elvira studio was not only the first solely female-owned business in Germany, housed in the most emblematic Jugendstil structure (designed by August Endell), it was also an important focal point for the progressive thinkers of Munich around the beginning of the 20th century, a time when the Bavarian capital was producing new ideas in industrial quantities. In Catherine Prendergast’s The Gilded Edge we explore the fate of women living in bohemian Californian configurations around the beginning of the 20th century. Meanwhile the remarkable Gertrude Abercrombie, the “queen of the bohemian artists” who was praised as “the first bop artist” by none other than Dizzy Gillespie, appears in Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time, along with choreographers Katherine Dunham and Ruth Page, art historian Katharine Kuh and poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Finally (and I realise that chronologically I’m all over the place) we have a welcome, serious study of clairvoyant women in Emily Midorikawa’s Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice, spiriting us away to a “lamp-lit world on both sides of the Atlantic, in which women who craved a public voice could hold their own.” Subjects include the Fox sisters, Georgina Weldon and Victoria Woodhull, first female candidate for the US presidency.

In Communicating Vessels we join hands and summon the Purchase button with a bundle of occult and occult-adjacent dainties. The book of the same name (not to be confused with the book of the same name by Friederike Mayröcker, which is not to be confused with, yet was inspired by, the book of the same name by André Breton) offers artistic responses to the life and work of Ithell Colquhoun. Communicating Vessels includes an introduction by Amy Hale, who in her biography Genius of the Fern Loved Gully mentions an unpublished novel about a witch cult by Colquhoun written in the mid-1960s. Unpublished no more: Destination Limbo is appearing in print for the first time, with an introduction by Richard Shillitoe. Colquhoun was intimately connected to the Cornish landscape where she lived and worked, and to the pagan and occult lore of the region. Her beloved stone circles are part of the terrain covered in the imminent Hellebore Guide to Occult Britain, which also takes us to “the Cotswolds town that worshipped Pan”, “the ancient forest where Gerald Gardner’s coven performed a ritual to prevent the German invasion” and “the Scottish mansion where Aleister Crowley summoned the Lords of Hell” among many other sites. Meanwhile in Aleister Crowley in England (actually coming out early in the new year), Tobias Churton continues his protracted global stalking of the Great Beast, while a little later we can narrow him down to the capital in City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley by Phil Baker, who has also provided a guide to Austin Osman Spare’s time in the city.

Our Modernism & Exile bundle offers Gallery of Miracles and Madness in which Charlie English shows all too clearly how a culture war (here, the Nazis’ loathing for Modernist art of artists by then scattered throughout the world) can presage actual war. Their “degenerate art” found a more sympathetic audience in exile as Lucy Wasensteiner’s The Twentieth Century German Art Exhibition, now in paperback, reveals. In Caroline Maclean’s Circles and Squares: The Lives & Art of the Hampstead Modernists, exiles like Walter Gropius meet locals like Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore, with such outcomes as the “Unit One” group of Modernist artists. Swedish-born Nell Walden left both her adoptive home of Germany and her husband, key modernist catalyst Herwarth Walden, in 1933. While my sympathies will forever be with the first Mrs Walden, Else Lasker-Schüler (and I’ll be issuing a collection of her prose next year), Nell Walden was a creative force in her own right – an artist, poet and art collector, as we discover in Nell Walden, Der Sturm, and the Collaborative Cultures of Modern Art by Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe.

Lastly we come to our Happy Place, or the idea of a happy place at least. The utopian project, humanity’s ceaseless quest to start again and refigure society in idealised microcosm is a saga of repeated failure which nonetheless offers extraordinary stories driven by compellingly wayward individuals. In Gary Kornblith and Carol Lasser’s Elusive Utopia (which I missed when it first came out, but appearing here in paperback) we travel to Oberlin, Ohio to discover an inspiring experiment in racial harmony established prior to the Civil War, but eventually overrun by the realities of the society around it. Anna Neima’s The Utopians takes us to intentional communities in India, Britain, Japan, France, Germany and the US, with figures like Gerald Heard, Rabindranath Tagore and G. I. Gurdjieff. While hardly germane and certainly nothing to do with the community he founded in France, my favourite story about the Armenian mystic relates how once, when he was broke, Gurdjieff upcycled sparrows by dyeing them yellow and selling them as canaries. We also visit the ambitious, progressive Dartington School, further fleshed out in The Elmhirsts of Dartington, one of Routledge’s new series of six 20th-century texts dealing with utopia, both as an abstraction and attempted reality. Mirra Alfassa’s planned town of Auroville, in India (built in the late 60s and still going) is the setting for Akash Kapur’s investigation of his own complex family history in Better to Have Gone. And finally, Utopia’s Discontents by Faith Hillis follows the trails of Russian émigrés and examines how their “communities evolved into revolutionary social experiments in the heart of bourgeois cities. Feminists, nationalist activists, and Jewish intellectuals seeking to liberate and uplift populations oppressed by the tsarist regime treated the colonies as utopian communities”. These outposts sprang up in places like London, Paris, Geneva and – bringing us ouroboros-like back to where we set out from in the beginning of part 1 – my own happy place, Berlin.