Fembio Special: Famous Lesbians
Alma M. Karlin
(Alma Ida Wilibalda Maximiliana Karlin)
born on October 12, 1889 in Celje, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Slovenia)
died on January 14, 1950 in Celje, Yugoslavia (now Slovenia)
Slovenian writer, journalist, explorer, world traveler and painter
135th birthday on October 12, 2024
Biography
She was one of the most popular and widely read travel writers in the German-speaking world in the 1930s. Her books about an eight-year trip around the world — Einsame Weltreise (The Lonely Journey,1929), Im Banne der Südsee (Enchanted by the South Sea, 1930) and Erlebte Welt (The Experienced World, 1933) — were all bestsellers despite the economic crisis.
Childhood and youth
Alma Maximiliana Karlin was the only child of Willibalda Miheljak, a teacher at a girls' school, and Jakob Karlin, a retired Austro-Hungarian army officer. She was born paralyzed on one side in 1889; a doctor foresaw a short life during which she would remain physically and mentally disabled. She was raised speaking German in the small town of Celje (then Austria-Hungary, now Slovenia). As it turned out, the doctor had erred: Alma M. Karlin was a highly intelligent child who would travel the world on her own as an adult.
Her only confidant and friend in early childhood was her father, who died when she was eight years old. The relationship with her mother was problematic; Karlin would later speak out against mothers working outside the home, believing that this would destroy a marriage. Her mother insisted on agonizing physical exercises to improve her posture, and throughout her childhood she also suffered under the emphasis placed on propriety and on what other people might think. She developed into a rebellious young woman completely indifferent to the opinions of others.
She believed she had been viewed as “nothing but an ugly, weak, stubborn and ornery child, whom people had tried in vain to bend and even break, and who had no domestic or other talents.” She felt that she did not belong in the family she was born into. Obedience, as she later noted, had never been one of her strong points.
She began writing poetry as a teenager and tried her hand at writing novels. Learning and continuing her education were important to her. By the age of 18, she had obtained her teaching qualifications for English and French. “I studied, dreamed and read while all around me people were living.”
First stays abroad
She found the small town oppressive and was desperate to leave. “I had one burning desire: to be myself, to be free of the admonitions of strangers, to escape from the influence of anyone in my family, and (to live) without arguments and fights. To be myself in complete freedom!” In 1908 she went to England. After a long and fruitless search for a job at a language school, she found employment in a translation agency, where she put in long hours and worked to the point of exhaustion. Outside the agency she dedicated herself to learning additional languages, using every free minute to learn something new. In all probability this also distracted her from the profound loneliness that troubled her greatly.
In 1914, she obtained her qualifications in numerous languages: English, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian. She also acquired a basic knowledge of Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese. She spent six months in Paris.
In London, she met the son of a wealthy mandarin, the Chinese Xu Sing Jung Lung, to whom she first gave private lessons and to whom she was later briefly engaged.
After the outbreak of the First World War, Karlin was afraid that sooner or later she would be accused of being a spy and would face internment. She therefore decided to travel first to Norway for a year, and from there on to Sweden for another year. She gave language lessons, improved her own language skills and got to know each country and its people. She also began to write again: “Up until then I had only ever poured things into myself, some into the right place, a lot haphazardly and just anywhere. Now, in the peace and quiet, it all bubbled up, and demanded an escape.” Most of what she wrote during that time, including a war diary, is no longer extant. Only one of her plays was published, which she was later to find unpleasant after too many people from her home town claimed - rightly or wrongly - to recognize themselves in it.
Inspired by the many books she had read about foreign countries, she developed the desire to travel and resolved: “When I go out into the wide world later, I want to get to know the inside of things, by which I mean the soul of the people, the flowers and animals of the inner worlds. But I especially want to discover the superstitions people in other parts of the world have. This is something I have been very interested in ever since my studies of comparative religion.”
After her return to Celje, she founded a language school in order to be able to finance her trip around the world. “I would use my savings to travel to the freedom in foreign parts of the world and seek to fathom the souls of peoples as no writer from my country had ever before done.”
World tour
She was only able to realize her plan after the First World War had ended. She set off with her portable Erika typewriter: “I trusted blindly in my knowledge, and boldly set out into the unknown - just like an unsuspecting child climbing onto a leaky boat. I thought of the world as like Europe ...”
She soon realized that the rest of the world was by no means like the Europe that would always remain the benchmark for her. She was unable to obtain a visa for many of the countries, with the exception of Japan. As it was not possible for her to go there directly, she was advised to travel first to South America and from there on to Japan. She set off from Genoa.
Upon her arrival in Barbados - and as yet unaware of what lay ahead - she noted with delight: “Even the dangers became joys.” She was initially enchanted by the novelty of everything she encountered and experienced, marveling over the “real tropics with their dazzling splendor,” the unfamiliar plants and animals, the wide variety of people and new foods such as coconut milk and sugar cane. She recorded everything she saw and experienced in writing, adding historical details; the style of her newspaper articles and later travel books was humorous and lively.
She traveled on through the Caribbean and then along the west coast of South America, recording that “South America filled me with a melancholy that I could not shake off despite all my efforts.” She felt as if she had been transported back decades, and the latent wildness there made her feel uneasy.
Eager to learn as much as possible, Karlin was assiduous in her search for information in the countries she visited: she worked in libraries, tried to make contact with the locals, studied the plant world, and collected insects, stones and shells. She wrote obsessively about everything, penning travel sketches, stories and novels. Some of her experiences she only processed after her return to Europe in additional novels, stories and travelogues.
From the very beginning, Karlin was subjected to assaults and attempted rapes in South America, which only reinforced her pre-existing racism. It also hardened her views on men. She was looking for a “connection of souls” and for “spiritual friendship,” not for physical love. She became increasingly harsh in her condemnation: men were “criminals,” “beasts,” “human animals,” and “bipeds with human faces.” She felt it was important to draw attention to these dangers in her books, because: “I want my fellow women to know what difficulties one has to struggle with when traveling alone in a distant foreign country with little means (everyone bows to money), wanting only to live for one’s art.”
From Los Angeles and San Francisco in the United States, and via the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii), where she barely earned enough to survive and was also robbed, she finally arrived in Japan after borrowing the money for the crossing. From there she travelled on to China, Formosa (now Taiwan), the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, the South Sea Islands (where she fell ill and where she reported that she had only narrowly escaped cannibals), the Solomon Islands, Java and Sumatra, Singapore, Burma, India and the north of Africa.
She initially described her journey in hundreds of articles, which were published in newspapers such as the German-language Cillier Zeitung and the Neue Illustrierte Zeitung.
The three-year trip around the world ended up becoming an eight-year journey. In 1927, she returned to Celje, where she concentrated fully on her writing.
Back in Celje
“I didn't want to write anything fictitious or falsely dreamed up about other parts of the world, I wanted to describe the realities and to frame them within their actual environments. For all those unable to travel I wanted to reveal the beauty that the wide world offered. I intended to capture the magic of other hemispheres and to be a mediator of foreign thoughts and feelings for my people.”
The travel books she wrote were humorous and full of (self-)irony. Her tone was personal, and her observations astute and detailed. The books quickly achieved great success: Alma M. Karlin was one of the most popular and most widely read travel book authors in the early 1930s. Yet despite all her publications and the many invitations from across Europe to give public lectures and to go on the radio, the publication of her autobiography was rejected in 1931. It was not published in Germany (under the title Sama) until 2018, after its publication in Slovenia in 2010.
From 1931, she lived with the painter Thea Schreiber-Gammelin, who had read her travel reports and was so enthralled that she had wanted to meet the author in person. Karlin had immediately invited her to Celje and soon afterwards Schreiber-Gammelin moved in with her. From 1934, she was Karlin's secretary, literary agent and also illustrator of her works. The two saw themselves as “soul sisters” who lived in a “spiritual community.” Presumably it was through this relationship that Karlin's interest in theosophy was awakened.
The time of National Socialism
In protest against National Socialism, Alma M. Karlin stopped publishing in the German press. Some sources speak of a publication ban, but her name does not appear on any of the known blacklists.
Unlike many of her compatriots among the German-speaking minority in Celje, she opposed National Socialism from the beginning; in 1937 and 1938, she helped political (mostly Jewish) refugees. Among them were the writer Edmund Otto Ehrenfreund and the journalist Hans Joachim Bonsack. The help she gave sparked hatred against her in Celje, and in 1941 she was one of the first to be arrested by the Gestapo when German troops occupied Yugoslavia. While imprisoned, she met Slovenians from the resistance. When her release from prison was secured in 1944 through the connections of her companion Schreiber-Gammelin, she joined the resistance. At the same time, she continued to work as a writer. All of the over one hundred stories and seventy poems she wrote during this time remain to date unpublished. She experienced the end of the war in Dalmatia, and then returned to Celje. Together with her companion, she moved into a small winegrower's cottage, where they lived on the Pečovnik mountain above the town of Celje in abject poverty. Karlin developed breast cancer, but she continued to write until she died on January 14, 1950.
Thea Schreiber-Gammelin outlived Alma M. Karlin by 38 years. Both now lie together in a grave in the mountain village of Svetina above Štore.
After her death
For a long time after the Second World War, German was considered the language of the occupying forces in Yugoslavia. As Karlin was also denied a passport by the new government, she was no longer able to market her unpublished texts from her years abroad.
It was not until Slovenia's independence in 1991 that her texts were gradually rediscovered, and many of her works were then translated into Slovenian. The little house on Pečovnik has become a small museum, the Celje Regional Museum has an exhibition about her travels around the world, and since 2010 a monument has stood in her honor: a bronze statue of a petite woman in a travel coat with a small suitcase in her hand.
In 2018 AvivA Verlag began reissuing Alma M. Karlin's works in Germany.
(Text from 2018; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.
Please consult the German version for additional information, pictures, sources, videos, and bibliography.)
Quotes
Everything unpleasant on earth - wars, hatred, annoying border closures, civil unrest, economic crises - has its origins in politics.
All my life I was a lonely arolla pine tree growing on rocks. Seedless, hard and gnarled, but standing strong in the winds.
Only today, in the maturity of my years and experiences, do I feel complete joy at the affection of a woman and enjoy talking to her just as much, often - if it's a witty woman - even more than with a man.
But I was not one of those people who accepted fate without complaint: I was always a fighter despite my pacifist attitude.
What I really desired (unfortunately without realizing it) was a good and cheerful study companion to keep me company in my leisure hours; not a husband or a lover, not someone from whom I would demand much, and not someone who would desire more from me than that.
The more I saw of it [i.e. war], the more inconceivable it seemed to me that any people could be hypnotized into such pointless madness.
But even when you only look at the lowliest and, let's say, most insignificant effects of war, in the hinterland, you could immediately become a pacifist.
(...) Years of misery and hardship, for victors and vanquished alike; that and not hurrahs and flag waving is - WAR!
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