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Ravaged angel
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...
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Three shows
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...
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Where have all the Flowers gone?
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...
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Strange Flowers guide to Berlin: part 4
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...
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Schwarzenbach in English
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...
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Annemarie Schwarzenbach | The South, 1937
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....
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A life spent searching
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...
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Pearls: Annemarie Schwarzenbach
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...
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Death in Persia
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...
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Circles: Erika and Klaus Mann
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...
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Dress-down Friday: Annemarie Schwarzenbach
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...
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Dress-down Friday equestrian special
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),...
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Dress-down Friday, hommage edition
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...
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Je suis Annemarie Schwarzenbach
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...
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Secret Satan, 2018
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...
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Secret Satan, 2020
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...
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Secret Satan, 2021 part 2
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...
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