Renée Schwarzenbach-Wille
Renée Schwarzenbach-Wille (born 1883 in Thun, Switzerland; died 1959 in Konstanz) was a Swiss photographer.
Life
Renée Schwarzenbach was the daughter of Swiss General Ulrich Wille and Clara Countess Bismarck and a granddaughter of Count Friedrich Wilhelm Bismarck (1783-1860), the famous German soldier, writer and diplomat. Her father was head of the Swiss army during World War I. In 1904 she married Alfred Schwarzenbach, a wealthy businessman in the silk industry. They had five children.[1]
She was a passionate horsewoman, photographer (which she first became interested in at the age of 14) and music-lover—Wagner in particular. After her marriage she chronicled the family life of their country estate in a detailed photographic diary which filled 64 photo-albums by the time she died. Although she devoted herself to her husband and family she also had a long-term affair with the German opera singer Emmy Krüger.
Although she documented her short life, she had a difficult relationship with her second daughter Annemarie, a writer, photographer, traveller and drug-addict, partly due to Renée's controversial right-wing views.[2] Renée was politically sympathetic to Germany, regardless of whether the Kaiser, Hitler or Adenauer was in power. During her many stays in Munich, Germany, with her mistress, she saw Nazism as a way of overcoming the humiliating Treaty of Versailles which ended World War I. After World War II she helped those Germans who had fled to Switzerland to escape the Allies.[1]
Bibliography
- Bilder mit Legenden. Alexis Schwarzenbach (Scheidegger & Spiess Zürich, 2001, ISBN 3-85881-169-6)
See also
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