Alma Karlin
1889 – 1950 · Slovenia
Known for: Travelled the world alone with a typewriter
“She went out into the world alone and brought it home in words.”
Biography
Alma Karlin was born on 12 October 1889 in Celje, a Styrian town then in Austria-Hungary and today in Slovenia, the daughter of Jakob Karlin, a major in the imperial army, and the teacher Vilibalda Miheljak. Her father died when she was eight. She was born with a defect of the spine and spent her childhood in corrective devices, in a largely German speaking milieu that shaped her sense of herself. After finishing school in Graz she went to London in 1908 and set about languages with unusual appetite: English, French, Italian, Russian, Spanish and the Scandinavian tongues, later Persian, Chinese and Japanese. Six months in Paris brought courses at the Sorbonne and Esperanto, and in those years she began a dictionary of ten languages, never published.
The First World War found Karlin in London working as a translator, and as an Austro-Hungarian subject she was obliged to leave for Scandinavia, where the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf thought so highly of her work that she proposed her for a Nobel Prize. She returned to Celje in 1919, opened a language school, taught up to ten hours a day and saved. On 24 November 1919 she set out again, this time for nine years, carrying about 130 dollars, a typewriter and her dictionary. She paid her way as she went, interpreting and writing for newspapers and magazines, and travelled through the Americas, the Pacific islands, Australia and Asia, ending in India. She was long described as the first European woman to circle the globe alone; she was in fact the second, after Ida Pfeiffer.
Karlin came home in January 1928 at her dying mother's request, worn out by illness and depression, and never travelled far again. Her three volume account, Einsame Weltreise, appeared between 1929 and 1933 and made her name across Europe; in all she wrote more than forty books, and she gave up German as a protest against the Nazi regime, which burned her work. She sheltered the anti-Nazi journalist Hans Joachim Bonsack, was arrested after the German occupation of Lower Styria in 1941 and held in Maribor for deportation, and owed her release into house arrest to her companion Thea Schreiber Gammelin. In 1944 she escaped to partisan held White Carniola and spent the rest of the war in Dalmatia. She died of breast cancer and tuberculosis on 14 January 1950 at Pečovnik near Celje and lies buried at Svetina beside Gammelin. The objects she sent home are kept in the Celje Regional Museum, and much of her writing is still unpublished.