Frame and Preparation
Interview ohne Reporter
Conceptual Frames and Background
- Writing
- Gender roles/femininity
- Labor
- Journalism
- Transnational Germany/United States
- Great Depression
Introduction
A prolific journalist in the 1930s, Annemarie Schwarzenbach published this short “interview” with herself in Annabelle, a Swiss women’s fashion magazine founded in 1938 and still in publication today. In it, she reflects on her travels through the United States of the Great Depression, in which she documented with pen and camera the struggles of ordinary people, particularly Black Americans in the rural South. She ruminates on why she became an author and a journalist, what motivates her, and the intersection of her work with her gender as a woman. This piece offers us a first-person account of a female journalist’s experiences and emotions in a very male milieu, especially one who had ambitions and success as an international reporter in the United States, central Africa, Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan. She concludes by summarizing her approach to writing: to write what moves her and, in doing so, to move her readers to action.
Preparation
Schwarzenbach is an unknown entity in Anglo countries, so instructors should provide a biography of her life and of her works as both an author and journalist.
Text and Discussion
“Interview ohne Reporter” was published in Number 12 (February 1938) of the magazine Annabelle, pages 12-13.
Here are some questions to begin a discussion of this article:
1) How does Schwarzenbach answer the question, “Why did you become a writer?”
2) How do Schwarzenbach’s experiences as an international reporter and journalist influence her self-definition as a writer?
3) How does her gender inflect her work and her self-definition as a writer?
4) What does Schwarzenbach see as the goal of her writing?
5) How does Schwarzenbach describe her relationship to writing and to the typewriter?