America Through Foreign Eyes

This book collects over 20 original essays and a selection of photographs by Swiss writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, from her time spent travelling in the United States in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

This book collects over 20 original essays and a selection of photographs by the famous Swiss writer and photographer, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, from her time spent travelling in the United States during the late 1930s and early 40s. After a rediscovery of her work in Europe almost 50 years after her tragic death at age 34, Annemarie Schwarzenbach became a cultural icon and an emerging heroine of the early LGBT movement. Against a European background of interwar economic uncertainty, political turmoil and burgeoning fascism, Schwarzenbach carefully studied America’s underbelly during the late Depression, at a time of Jim Crow and the height of the US labor movement. Schwarzenbach traveled across the U.S., reporting on its cities and people, visiting factories and steel mills, and speaking with union leaders: at the headquarters of John Lewis in Pittsburg, for instance, or with Myles Horton at the Highlander Folkschool. She interviewed well-known personages like Dorothy Thompson and Carson McCullers, but equally focused her attention on textile workers and African Americans. Much like a female twentieth-century Alexis de Tocqueville, Schwarzenbach’s ambivalence regarding what she saw during her travels– her horror, but also her begrudging admiration for, and even hope in, America and its peculiar brand of democracy – are carefully recorded and translated here in English for the first time ever, along with a critical introduction to her life and work.

This book collects over 20 original essays and a selection of photographs by Swiss writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, from her time spent travelling in the United States in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Schwarzenbach’s work was rediscovered in Europe almost 50 years after her early death in 1942. Since then, she has become a cultural icon and an emerging heroine of the early LGBT movement.

Schwarzenbach’s photojournalist work was produced against a European background of interwar economic uncertainty, political turmoil and burgeoning fascism. She carefully studied America’s underbelly during the late Depression, at a time of Jim Crow and the height of the US labor movement. Schwarzenbach traveled across the U.S., reporting on its cities and people, visiting factories and steel mills and speaking with union leaders. She interviewed well-known writers like Dorothy Thompson and Carson McCullers, but equally focused her attention on textile workers and African Americans.

Schwarzenbach’s work revealed ambivalence regarding what she saw during her travels, her horror, but also her begrudging admiration for, and even hope in, America and its peculiar brand of democracy. This book carefully records and translates her observations in English for the first time, also providing a critical introduction to her life and work.