Sexual Revolution, Counterrevolution, Pedophilia in Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Freunde um Bernhard (1931)

How to tell a story from the perspective of the boy-muse? This essay undertakes a reparative reading of the first novel of the then 23-year-old Swiss writer, journalist, traveler, and androgynous icon Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-42), in light of trenchant critiques of its alleged compositional deficits. If one takes seriously the avant-garde compositional structure of Freunde um Bernhard (1931), its organization around an empty center, the novel becomes legible as being torn between revolutionary fantasies of queer kinship and melancholic counterrevolutionary impulses. The only possible interpretative reconciliation of these conflicting tendencies in the novel comes through a disturbing eroticization of childhood and children.