In June 1939 Annemarie Schwarzenbach and fellow writer Ella Maillart set out from Geneva in a Ford, heading for Afghanistan. The first women to travel Afghanistan’s Northern Road, they fled the storm brewing in Europe to seek a place untouched by what they considered to be Western neuroses. The Afghan journey documented in All the Roads Are Open is one of the most important episodes of Schwarzenbach’s turbulent life. Her incisive, lyrical essays offer a unique glimpse of an Afghanistan already touched by the ‘fateful laws known as progress’, a remote yet ‘sensitive nerve centre of world politics’ caught amid great powers in upheaval. In her writings, Schwarzenbach conjures up the desolate beauty of landscapes both internal and external, reflecting on the longings and loneliness of travel as well as its grace.
Maillart’s account of their trip, The Cruel Way, stands as a classic of travel literature, and Schwarzenbach’s memoir rounds out the story of the adventure.
‘Few of Schwarzenbach’s own writings have been translated into English, and even fewer are available in print...
Finally, we have the opportunity to read her: Seagull Books have reissued two recent and excellent translations of Schwarzenbach’s literary travel writing. Death in Persia was only published in German in 1998, long after Schwarzenbach’s death, and first published in English translation by Lucy Renner Jones in 2012. All the Roads Are Open, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, was first published as a full English collection in 2011. Together, they map Schwarzenbach’s dual struggle to overcome her own inner conflicts and, somehow, to resist the fascism that overran Europe as she made her way to Afghanistan in 1939.' — Helen Finch, Times Literary Supplement
‘All the Roads Are Open ...collects the wonderful newspaper articles Schwarzenbach wrote during the journey. “With our Afghan friends we felt as safe as in Abraham’s bosom,” she declares, although the cover photo of her — trousered, lanky, David Bowie with an Elroy Jetson haircut — will inspire readers today to wonder what all she might have left out.’ — Alan Scherstuhl, Village Voice
Introduction A Note on the Text and Translation Part One: Mount Ararat Balkan Borders Therapia Trebizond: Farewell to the Sea Mount Ararat Part Two: The Steppe The Steppe The Prisoners No Man's Land: Between Persia and Afghanistan Part Three: The Women of Kabul Herat, 1 August 1939... The Hind Kush Three Times In the Garden of the Beautiful Girls of Qaisar The Women of Kabul Part Four: The Bank of the Oxus The Neighbouring Village The Bank of the Oxus The Potters of Istalif The Grip to Ghazni Part Five: Two Women Alone in Afghanistan Two Women Alone in Afghanistan Chehel Sotun Part Six: Onward to Peshawar... Onward to Peshawar... Aden, a Morning Vision The Trip Down the Suez Canal Text Sources Afterword: 'My existence in the exile of distant adventure' Roger Perret
Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-42) was a writer, journalist, and photographer who worked periodically as an archaeologist. She is the author of the poem Aus Tetouan, Der Krater der Tiere, Das Wunder des Baumes. Isabel Fargo Cole is a US-born, Berlin-based writer and translator.
Reviews for All the Roads Are Open: The Afghan Journey
Above all, [Schwarzenbach's] discovery of the Orient was a personal one. But the author never loses sight of the historical and social context. . . . She shows no trace of colonialist arrogance. In fact, the pieces also reflect the experience of crisis, the loss of confidence which, in that decade, seized the long-arrogant culture of the West. --Suddeutsche Zeitung Through lyrical prose and a keen sense of wonder, the long road to Afghanistan is never tedious. Complete with picturesque descriptions of passing mountains, fields, valleys, deserts and their enigmatic denizens, All the Roads Are Open still enchants more than 70 years after its conception. --The National (Abu Dhabi) All the Roads Are Open . . . collects the wonderful newspaper articles Schwarzenbach wrote during the journey. 'With our Afghan friends we felt as safe as in Abraham's bosom, ' she declares, although the cover photo of her--trousered, lanky, David Bowie with an Elroy Jetson haircut--will inspire readers today to wonder what all she might have left out. --Alan Scherstuhl The Village Voice
