Westward. Encounters with Swiss American Women

Linda visits her Anabaptist relatives in Dover, Ohio. (1961)

This was the beginning of a great love story and a life-long friendship. “We enjoyed the life in Berlin before the Wall. And I sent Peter for his studies on Paul Klee to [Felix] Klee and said he could stay with my parents. They felt the young American was very nice. Peter returned to New York and I followed him in 1961 after I had played Lisi from Ziberlihoger after the novel Annebäbi Jowäger by Jeremias Gotthelf.

“Upon arriving I told him right away that I hadn’t come to marry him, but rather because I found that we were the ‘couple of the century’ in the sense that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were a couple. I did not need a swimming pool nor was I truly keen on having children. Already as a young girl I had the strange idea that I would die if I had to give birth to a child. This is a fixed idea that is still with me today.”

For the first few months the couple lived in an apartment in the East Village. “At that time New York was a city without money, a bit run down just like Berlin. Not bombed out, but also rather shabby. We lived between Avenues C and D in Alphabet City on the Lower East Side.