A few years ago, walking out of the railway station at Celje, a small city in Slovenia north-east of the capital Ljubljana, I came upon a statue. It was a couple of hundred yards in front of the station on a cobbled street in the oldest part of the city, curiously placed off the kerb and on the street itself.
The statue was of a woman in a coat and wide-brimmed hat carrying a small suitcase in her right hand. Her back was to the station as if she had just arrived and she stood with her feet apart, left arm raised slightly away from her body, looking into the distance with a mixture of apprehension and determination. She was alert, ready for anything, a traveller who has clearly seen things and is here to see more.
The statue, I learned, was of Alma Karlin, of whom I was unaware until that day but whose bronze likeness intrigued me enough to learn more.
As the second Trump presidency began in a torrent of lickspittle sycophancy, crackpot executive orders of unprecedented bigotry and open Nazi-saluting, I found myself thinking again of Alma Karlin and wondered what she might have made of it all.
Hers is a name far from familiar today, but a century ago Alma Karlin was one of the best-known female writers in the world. She was also one of the bravest and most intrepid, a woman way ahead of her time, a pioneering writer and independent spirit who faced almost every conceivable personal and political challenge fearlessly and against the odds.
“I must go,” she had told her mother one blustery November morning in 1919 before boarding a train at Celje station. “Something inside me forces me to do this and I will not find peace if I do not follow this force.”
She left with savings of $130, a typewriter and a handwritten dictionary of 10 languages she had compiled herself, boarded a ship at Genoa and commenced a journey that would keep her away for eight years. She sailed to Peru and from there travelled to Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Hawaii, Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand, after which she spent two years among the islands of the South Pacific.
There was a lengthy stay in Japan followed by further adventures in Thailand, Myanmar, India and what is now Pakistan.
A fiercely independent traveller, Karlin survived penury, poisoning, police harassment, an attempted rape and several uncomfortably close brushes with death, but still it took pleading from her ailing mother to persuade her to return home from Karachi in 1927.
In some ways Karlin’s itinerance is no surprise, given the geography of her upbringing. She was born in 1889 when Celje was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire with an overwhelmingly German population. Karlin was ethnically Slovenian, born an Austro-Hungarian and grew up speaking and writing in German. Such geopolitical baggage meant she would become a true citizen of the world, transcending borders and boundaries literal, cultural and social. As the world changed around her, Karlin herself came to supersede borders and the restrictions of imposed identity, determined to be “a free spirit and a paragon of disobedience”.
There had been other independent women travelling the world but most of them were already wealthy enough to fund their own adventures. Karlin had none of that privilege and was compelled to pay her way almost as soon as she had bought her ticket to cross the Atlantic, working a range of jobs including as an interpreter for the Panama Canal administration and for the German embassy in Tokyo, not to mention dashing off travel articles about her adventures that would later form the backbone of the books that would make her name.
This was all an unlikely destiny for the daughter of an Austro-Hungarian military officer raised in the dying embers of an empire. Karlin was born a sickly child with a spine defect that meant long childhood hours strapped into excruciatingly painful devices designed to correct her posture. Her father, who was 60 years old when she was born, died when Karlin was six, after which her mother became over-protective of her daughter’s physical ailments to the point where Karlin felt defined by them.
Such parental stifling only fuelled her yearning for more than Celje. In 1908 at the age of 18 she travelled to London to study a string of languages including English, Spanish, Italian, French and Russian while compiling the homemade dictionary that she carried with her on her odyssey.
On completing her studies in May 1914 with a Royal Society of Arts diploma in languages, Karlin remained in London to work as a translator but, as a citizen of Austria-Hungary, the outbreak of the first world war necessitated a speedy departure from Britain before she was interned.
She spent the war in Scandinavia – as a natural linguist she had already mastered Swedish and Finnish during her time in London – and returned to Celje in 1918, where she set up a language school to raise funds for the global travels she was already planning. Her restlessness increased, however, to the point where she embarked on her odyssey when she had saved little more than her fare for the ocean crossing. No matter, she thought, she would literally work her way around the world.
As soon as she had returned to Slovenia after her eight-year odyssey, and following the death of her mother early in 1928, Karlin began organising her journals, notes and the articles she had written into what would become a landmark trilogy of travelogues published between 1929 and 1933 under the collective title Einsame Weltreise (Alone Around the World).
“For all those unable to travel I wanted to reveal the beauty that the wide world offered,” she recalled later. “I intended to capture the magic of the hemispheres as a mediator of foreign thoughts and feelings for my people.”
The books proved wildly popular. Her story was extraordinary enough, no woman had made such a lengthy journey alone before, and the fact she was an immensely gifted writer helped. Most travel writing at the time was by pompous men recounting imperialist missions, yet Karlin combined a gift for description, a deep interest in and respect for other cultures and religions and a self-deprecating wit that was happy to make herself the butt of a joke.
There were occasional observations about races that read a little uncomfortably to the contemporary eye, but Karlin displayed a natural empathy with the oppressed as well as an innate bravery and sense of adventure.
Once her books began selling in great numbers she was on the road again making lecture tours of Europe – on which she met the woman who would become her life companion, her “sister soul” the artist Thea Schreiber Gamelin – until the looming spectre of Nazism changed everything.
The moment Hitler assumed power in Germany, Karlin stopped writing in German, her first language, and refused to write for any German publications. Her vocal criticism of the rise of fascism saw her books banned by the Nazi authorities but, undeterred, in 1937 she took in the persecuted anti-Nazi writer Hans Joachim Bonsack and sheltered him at home in Celje for two years as well as assisting Jews fleeing Germany. The axis invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 saw her arrested and imprisoned in Maribor awaiting extradition to Serbia for inevitable transfer to a concentration camp.
Karlin was one of the lucky ones, however, as one of the Gestapo officers who interrogated her turned out to be a fan of her books, something that combined with vigorous campaigning by Gamelin to ensure that instead of being sent to a camp she was placed under house arrest. In 1944 she staged a daring escape, however, slipping away from under Gestapo noses to join the Slovene communist resistance in the south of the country.
While she became active in the resistance it was freedom she was fighting for, not a political ideology. As appalled by communism as much as she was by fascism, Karlin soon fell out with the partisan hierarchy and when she was taken ill early in 1945 they refused to help her escape south to Bari, then under allied control. Instead the partisans relocated her to Dalmatia where she remained until the end of the war, in effect under house arrest again.
Returning to Celje after the conflict she found the city much changed. Where in the 1930s she had been ostracised by her own community for her open distaste for fascism, making her one of the first to be denounced and arrested by the Gestapo following the invasion, after the war she found her perceived Germanness made her an outcast in the new Yugoslavia. Karlin and Gamelin were forced out to a remote winegrower’s cottage in the hills overlooking the city, where they lived in poverty until Karlin’s death from breast cancer in 1950.
Alma Karlin had seen everything the world and the turbulent 20th century had to offer and lived among the best and worst of humanity. She opposed authoritarianism wherever she found it, whether on her doorstep or on the other side of the world.
Passionate about the cause of freedom, she distilled the world and her experiences into the pages of her books, looking ever outwards, disregarding borders as inconveniences at best, arteries of bigotry at worst. Her work celebrated difference while finding the bonds that unite humans wherever in the world they might be. “She set out to make an impression on the world but the world made an impression on her,” said the Observer in 1933. “Many of her experiences would have deranged a less vigorous mind.”
Alma Karlin’s strength and defiance in the face of every challenge, from childhood disability to corrupt South American police to the Gestapo turning up at her door, is what has made me think repeatedly over the last couple of weeks of a statue in a strange city of a woman I had never heard of, yet whose indomitable presence emanated from the bronze to make the encounter unforgettable. As we face the challenges of the next few years we could certainly do worse than being a bit more Alma.
“How strange it is when you look back on life,” she wrote. “When you are experiencing something, everything seems so big. But when you look back, everything is so small.
“If we didn’t have a heart that measures hours, we might think we have been dreaming our whole lives.”
