Open Access

Petra Heinrichs

• During 1933 and 1939, the Swiss author, journalist and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach visited the so-called »Orient« four times. In the intellectual history of the West this part of the world was considered the topography of the »Other«. So the model of dichotomy between the two sexes, predominating the society of the 19th century, got an equivalent outside. A male and strong Europe was opposed to a female and weak East so that the »Orient« became the embodiment of challenging sexuality and devoted feminity. First Schwarzenbach regarded Turkey just as one station of the first and last journey on her way to Persia and Afghanistan, but in her texts it turns out to be a country, which is characterized by a male force („eine männliche Kraft“). Turkey’s female inhabitants get a specific role: They are the standard according to which women from other countries are described. For the European protagonists Turkey is the starting point of their search to a border („Schwelle“) to cross. This process also shifts the established borders of hegemonic discourses. Categories like »me« versus »the other« or »own« versus »strange« become deconstructed for the benefit of polyphonic concepts of identity, which in turn include breaks and contradictions. Thus the literary subject moves between finding and dissolving itself. The article demonstrates that Schwarzenbach´s texts about Turkey include writing techniques that evolve different processes regarding the identity of gender and culture.