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Annemarie Schwarzenbach (left) and Ella Maillart on their Ford Deluxe in May 1939, before their adventure. (Keystone/Photopress-Archiv)
"Our last view of Switzerland. Why are we leaving this, the most beautiful country in the world? What's pushing us to drive over desolate roads heading east?" The Simplon Pass, 1939 (Swiss Literary Archive)
Haymaking in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. (Swiss Literary Archive)
Men washing their feet in front of the Imam reza Shrine in Mashhad, Iran. (Swiss Literary Archive)
Maillart in front of the British consulate in Mashhad. (Swiss Literary Archive)
A minaret of the partially destroyed Musalla complex, a place of worship in Herat, Afghanistan. (Swiss Literary Archive)
On the way to Shewaki, Afghanistan. (Swiss Literary Archive)
Between Peshawar and Lahore, British India. (Swiss Literary Archive)
Madhogarh, British India. (Swiss Literary Archive)
At Massaua port, Italian East Africa. (Swiss Literary Archive)
Waiting at Massaua. (Swiss Literary Archive)
Back in Switzerland: Airolo, January 25, 1940. (Swiss Literary Archive)
Galerie mit Fotos der Nahostreise von Annemarie Schwarzenbach 1939-1940
The plans for an Asian adventure took shape in Sils, southeast Switzerland. Schwarzenbach, weakened by various withdrawal treatments for her morphine addiction, was recovering in her Swiss residence.
With the Geneva travel writer Ella Maillart, she planned to jump into a Ford and head towards Afghanistan. The trip began in the summer of 1939, taking them from Bulgaria across Turkey and Iran into mountainous Afghanistan. After that, Schwarzenbach and Maillart made it to India, at the time still occupied by Britain.
Relations between the two were strained by Schwarzenbach’s drug problems, resulting in them going their separate ways in October 1939. Maillart stayed in India and waited for the end of the war, while Schwarzenbach joined some French archaeologists and went to Eritrea, then part of Italian East Africa.
At the Eritrean port of Massaua, she took a ship through the Suez Canal to Egypt and from there headed back to Switzerland. In January 1940, her Ford pulled into Airolo, in the Italian-speaking southe canton of Ticino.
Schwarzenbach died in November 1942 after falling off her bicycle. Seventy-five years later, the Swiss Literary Archive has released more than 3,000 digitalised photographs. In our series #swisshistorypics, we travel with Annemarie Schwarzenbach to the most diverse coers of the world – in black and white.