A Lonely Odyssey: The Life and Legacy of Alma M. Karlin

‘I must go. Something inside me forces me to do this, and I will not find peace if I do not follow this force.’

These were Alma Maximiliana Karlin’s (1889–1950) farewell words to her mother, just before she got on a train in Celje, in what is today Slovenia, on 24 November 1919, and embarked on an eight-year journey around the world (see Karlin, 1931) (Fig. 1). She travelled entirely on her own, her only possessions an Erika typewriter, a ten-language dictionary that she had compiled herself, and a small suitcase. She took with her US$130 and 950 German marks (Trnovec, 2011, p. 27).

Karlin was by no means the first woman to travel around the world alone, but according to Barbara Trnovec, curator of the archive of materials and documents Karlin accumulated during the course of her journey at the Celje Regional Museum in Slovenia, she was one of the first women to travel on her own for such an extended period. Unlike other, more famous travellers, she could not count on personal wealth to finance her journey—in fact, after paying her first sea passage from Genoa to Peru, she was left almost entirely without funds. During her journey, Karlin supported herself through work as an interpreter and journalist, but was often compelled to take other jobs in order to survive. Ultimately, she would write for more than thirty different newspapers and magazines around the world, including a local German-language paper in Slovenia, Cillier Zeitung, and the German papers Neue Illustrierte Zeitung and Der Deutsche Bergknappe.

Fig. 1 Alma Karlin with her collection
Manuscript collection at the National and University Library, Ljubljana (Ms 1872)
(Image courtesy of National and University Library, Ljubljana)

Karlin saw herself primarily as a writer. Not only did she record the everyday life, customs, religious practices, and the flora and fauna of the places she visited, she also drew on her adventures for her novels and other prose. While she craved recognition as a novelist, it was her three-volume travelogue, Einsame Weltreise (Around the World Alone), published between 1929 and 1933 by German publisher Wilhelm Köhler, which would bring her fame. The first edition sold out quickly, and the later German-language editions sold more than 80,000 copies. The first volume of her trilogy was translated into English in 1933, into Finnish one year later, and was reviewed and discussed by more than 100 newspapers around the world, including The New York Times, while the Berlin daily Das Echo wrote: ‘compared to what Alma M. Karlin has experienced, the journeys of our greatest explorers were just pleasant jaunts’ (Jezernik, 2009, p. 137). In addition to Karlin’s literary legacy, the Celje Regional Museum in Slovenia also houses the collection of objects she acquired during her journey, which offers a tangible testimony to her travels (Fig. 1).

Who was this Slovenian woman, who wrote in German, travelled around the world on her own, financing herself as she went, and ended up selling 80,000 copies of her trilogy after her return? What is her legacy and what sort of objects did she accumulate during her travels? These are some of the questions considered in this essay.

Karlin was born in 1889 in Celje, the only daughter of Jakob Karlin (1829–98) and Vilibalda Karlin (1844–1928). Although her parents were of Slovenian descent—her father was a retired Austro-Hungarian army officer, while her mother was a teacher in the local German school—she was raised speaking German and would acquire only a limited knowledge of the Slovenian language. Her father, to whom she was close, died when she was nine, after which she was subjected to a very strict upbringing by her mother. Karlin was born with slight paralysis of her left side, and other physical problems that diminished as she matured (Trnovec, 2011, p. 10). Yet her mother was obsessed with her daughter’s ‘disabilities’ and Karlin grew up with a sense of inferiority that never left her. At the age of forty she wrote: ‘One human life is not enough to reconcile myself with my external appearance’ (Karlin, 2010, p. 8).

But Karlin was highly intelligent, and a gifted linguist. She soon realized that only knowledge could save her from the asphyxiating provincial world of conformity and norms into which she had been born. In 1908, aged nineteen, she decided to go into ‘voluntary exile’ in London, where she got a job as a translator at the City School of Languages, working on everything from legal documents and scientific papers to art reviews and business letters (Trnovec, 2011, p. 19). In Celje, she had studied French and English and had started learning Italian. In London, she began studying Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Sanskrit, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Russian, and in 1914 she passed the English, French, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish exams at the prestigious Royal Society of Arts (Trnovec, 2011, p. 21). With the start of World War I, as an Austro-Hungarian subject she was forced to leave England. She moved to Sweden, and then to Norway, even spending several weeks in Lapland before returning to Slovenia in 1918.

While in London, Karlin had begun compiling the ten-language dictionary that would become her chief companion during her travels. The many international students she met during this time stimulated her enthusiasm for foreign cultures, especially for the countries of Asia and South America. A key encounter was with a Japanese student known only as Nobuji G., who described his homeland in vivid terms, instilling in her a strong desire to see not only Japan but all of Asia. She later became engaged to a Chinese student, Xu Yonglun, and in 1913 brought him home to meet her mother in Celje, but later broke off the engagement. When she returned to Slovenia in 1918, she had already decided that she wanted to travel to Asia, and opened a private language school for the purpose of generating funds for the journey.

When she began her journey in 1919, Karlin had first intended to go to Japan, but circumstances led her to Genoa, where in 1920 she boarded a ship bound for Peru. All told, her travels eventually took her to at least 45 different countries over the course of eight years (see Trnovec, 2011, pp. 30–46). It is possible to reconstruct her journey through her watercolours of flowers and plants, which bear the date and place where they were painted, as well as by the postcards she sent to her mother and friends in Celje. She also took many photographs, most of which are undated. She had learned photography while working in a photographer’s studio in Panama in 1920, and bought her first camera in Japan (Trnovec, 2011, p. 58) (Figs. 2 and 3).

Karlin was more than two years into her journey when she arrived at Yokohama, in early June 1922. Based on her signed postcards and watercolours, we know that she visited Kamakura, Nikko, Odawara, Fuji, Hokkaido, Nara, Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe and Kyushu. She first lived in a guesthouse in Yurakucho Sanchome in Tokyo, not far away from the main shopping street Ginza, and then in the traditional Japanese house of her student, Itu, and his family (Jezernik, 2009, p. 60).

To support herself during her year-long stay in Japan she worked at the German Embassy, taught languages at the University of Tokyo and became a reporter for a major newspaper, Asahi Shimbun (Trnovec, 2011, p. 33). While she met a number of important political figures and leading journalists, her most memorable encounters were with other artists. She notes in her travelogue:

The most interesting people for me were the Japanese artists at Tadaichi Okada-San. There, I met the court player, Suzuki, many modern painters, some state dignitaries and other people, both men and women, who were quite knowledgeable and actually had something to say.
(Karlin, 2007)

Young Japanese artists probably inspired her to begin to learn how to paint in the Japanese style, and at the request of German Ambassador Wilhelm Solf (1862–1936), Karlin remained in Japan three months longer than she had originally intended. She continued her journey on 1 July 1923, armed with a letter of introduction from Solf, and it is quite likely that her subsequent travels in Korea, China and Taiwan were planned with the aid of her Japanese friends and hosts. Before going to China, she visited the Korean peninsula, at that time under Japanese occupation, for up to three months, most probably from July until the end of October 1923 (Shigemori Bučar, 2016).

Fig. 6 Letter box (*jōsashi*)
Japan, late 19th/early 20th century
Lacquer, 34 x 11 x 23 cm
Celje Regional Museum (PMC K 151)

From Pyongyang, Karlin travelled to Shenyang, and then by train to Beijing. ‘When you arrive in Beijing you cry, and when you leave it, you sob’ she wrote in her travelogue, adding that ‘the scent of the East, that magic mixture of fragrance and stench, is unforgettable’ (Karlin, 2007). During her time in Beijing, she worked as the secretary of Erich von Salzmann (1876–1941), the famous correspondent who wrote for the Berliner Morgenpost, the Kölnisher Zeitung and other German newspapers, and who likewise gave her a letter of introduction when she resumed her journey. In mid-November 1923 she arrived in Tianjin, the hometown of her former fiancé Xu Yonglun. She had no desire to meet him, and only took a short stroll around the European area of the city before embarking on a ship bound for Shanghai. From Shanghai she continued her journey to Taiwan—the ‘Island of Dreams’ as she called it in her travelogue—where she met the ‘fairytale prince’ known only as Mr I. This gentleman, who is frequently mentioned but never fully named in her text, came to Keelung to meet her, and the two stayed in the Daito-tei district of Taihoko (now Taipei). Karlin visited the local museum and met the museum’s director, who showed her the collections and spoke to her about the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. She was especially interested in the Tayals, or ‘headhunters’ as she called them, and even managed to visit a group of these tribesmen in Taoyuan. Her watercolours reveal that she stayed in Taiwan from December 1923 to the end of January 1924, when after a brief trip to Tainan, she headed to Xiamen, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and then on to Australia.

The Celje Regional Museum houses Karlin’s collection of ethnological and art objects, donated by Karlin’s friend Thea Shrebeir Gammelin (1906–88) between 1957 and 1960. The bequest to the museum consists of 1,392 items (Trnovec, 2011, p. 57), and includes a wide range of objects that Karlin collected and had sent home, ranging from seeds and tropical plants to wedding and funeral garments, to jewellery, baskets, statuary and weapons. She had a particular passion for fans, such as that illustrated in Figure 4. Painted in ink and colours by an unknown artist, it bears a Japanese maple motif, while on the reverse are depicted two figures in traditional dress of the Edo period (1615–1868). In addition to ethnological objects, the collections include art objects such as brass gongs, lacquer ware, embroidered fabrics, and ukiyo-e (‘pictures of the floating world’) woodblock prints by such artists as Hiroshige Utagawa (1797–1858) and Kunisada Utagawa (1786–1865).

The black lacquer container with floral and animal motifs in Figure 5 is a letter box, or jōsashi, which was usually affixed next to the front door of Japanese houses. It was probably made for the Western market around the turn of the 20th century. Figure 6 shows an embroidered dragon motif from China, probably dating from the early 20th century. The finely embroidered dragon on dark green silk has four claws, and was a motif commonly used among the nobility and high-ranking officials. Further analysis is necessary in order to establish its exact date and provenance. Figure 7 shows a woodblock colour print by Utagawa Hiroshige, entitled: ‘Yamato Province: Tatsuta Mountain and Tatsuta River (Yamato Tatsutayama Tatsutagawa)’, from the series, Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces (Rokujūyoshū meisho zue), 1853.

Fig. 7 ‘Yamato Province: Tatsuta Mountain and Tatsuta River’ (‘Yamato Tatsutayama Tatsutagawa’), from the series *Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces* (*Rokujūyoshū meisho zue*)
By Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), 1853
Woodblock colour print, 30.1 x 19.5 cm
Celje Regional Museum (PMC K 825 / PMC G/V. – 11)

In conclusion, I would like to examine one specific object in Karlin’s collection, a 30-centimetre-high statue that she received as a gift from one of her students in Peru in 1920 (Fig. 8). While the student told her it was ‘an Incan treasure in the image of the Devil’, the figure actually represents Li Tieguai, one of the eight Daoist immortals. It was identified for Karlin by Ferdinand Lessing (1882–1961), a German linguist, ethnologist and sinologist whom she met in China (Trnovec, 2015). Li is generally depicted as an old man, with dishevelled hair and a bearded, unpleasant face, who walks with the aid of an iron crutch. Although characterized as irascible and ill-tempered, he is also considered a benefactor who helps the sick and needy by means of a special medicine made from pumpkins. Indeed, in addition to the iron crutch, he is usually depicted with a pumpkin hanging over one shoulder or held in his hand. Because Karlin’s Li Tieguai lacks the pumpkin, some specialists have expressed doubts regarding this identification. But Karlin herself records that she carried this image with her for six years, and that at some point during this period the pumpkin was lost (Trnovec, 2015). A close examination of the figure reveals a slightly damaged area on the left arm, where the pumpkin may once have been attached. While it is difficult without detailed material analysis to determine the exact origin of the statue and method of manufacture, it was most likely made either in China and brought to Peru by Chinese labourers during migrations in the middle of the 19th century following the Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60), or it was manufactured in Peru. Karlin’s student had claimed that the statue had been unearthed more than 200 years earlier, near Lake Titicaca, and that his grandfather had received it as a gift from a native Peruvian (Trnovec, 2015). Works such as this give tantalizing hints regarding the scholarly potential of Karlin’s collection, and it may be that researchers have only scratched the surface of her material legacy.

The Celje Regional Museum will commemorate the centenary of Karlin’s journey with a special exhibition in 2019. There are also plans to publish a full monograph about Karlin to promote her legacy internationally, and the Regional Museum and the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Ljubljana are formulating a joint research project aimed at completing a full study of East Asian objects from Karlin’s collection. When completed, the project will provide the first comprehensive description and source for these materials and resources in Slovenia.

Fig. 8 Li Tieguai
Possibly China, possibly 19th century
Talc and wood, height 26.2 cm
Celje Regional Museum (PMC A 95 / K 841)

Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik, Associate Professor of Chinese Art History, Department of Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.

The author would like to express her gratitude to the Celje Regional Museum and in particular to the curator, Barbara Trnovec. The author also thanks Professor Chikako Shigemori Bučar, of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Ljubljana, for her expertise regarding the Japanese art objects.

Selected bibliography

Jerneja Jezernik, Alma M. Karlin, državljanka sveta: življenje in delo Alme Maimilliane Karlin (1889–1950) (Alma M. Karlin, Citizen of the World: The Life and Work of Alma Maximiliana Karlin [1889–1950]), Ljubljana, 2009.

Alma M. Karlin, Ein Mensch wird—aus Kindheit und Jugend von Alma M. Karlin, Manuscript Department of the National and University Library, Ljubljana (1931), first published in Slovenian translation in Celje, 2010.

—, Samotno potovanje v daljne dežele: tragedija ženske (A Lonely Journey to Distant Places: One Woman’s Tragedy), Celje, 2007.

Shigemori Bučar Chikako, ‘Alma Karlin in Korea: A Slovenian Woman’s Observations of Land and People’, in Andreas Schirmer and Christian Lewarth (eds.), Koreans and Central Europeans: Informal Contacts up to 1950, Vol. 3: Central Europeans in Korea, Praesens, Vienna, 2016.

Barbara Trnovec, Kolumbova hči: Življenje in delo Alme M. Karlin (Columbus’s Daughter: The Life and Work of Alma M. Karlin), Celje, 2011.

—, ‘Skrivnostni Li z železno palico se vrača’ (‘Mysterious Li with an Iron Crutch Returns’), in Delo, Ljubljana, 14 March 2015 (www.delo.si/sobotna/skrivnostni-li-z-zelezno-palico-se-vraca.html, accessed 3 March 2016).

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