UNESCO rescues from oblivion the adventures of two Swiss writers ahead of their time.

Travelers and freethinkers , Swiss women writers Ella Maillart (1903 - 1997) and Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908 –1942) embodied female emancipation in a first half of the 20th century that was still very conservative for so many other women, and their lives, somewhat forgotten in recent decades, have been vindicated this year by the UN through its Memory of the World register.

At Switzerland's request, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has agreed to include the archives of these two figures in its registry , which includes important documents from the history of humanity, from the Gutenberg Bible to the Treaty of Tordesillas and the manuscript of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, among many others.

The Memory of the World is now joined by letters, diaries, photographs and many other documents from these two pioneers of great journeys, often alone, to places such as Africa, India, China and Persia . These documents are kept in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, the Photo Elysée Museum in Lausanne and the Geneva Library.

This last institution showed the media some of the most precious pieces from these archives, kept under surveillance systems and in temperature and humidity conditions that facilitate their preservation.

" Maillart and Schwarzenbach were two nonconformist women who sought to discover spaces of freedom, in an existential and spiritual quest through travel," summarized the library's curator, Paule Hochuli, during the presentation of the archives.

The Geneva collection contains everything from the diploma Maillart won at the 1924 Paris Olympic Games , where she was the only woman to compete in sailing, to her letters with the British spy Peter Fleming , brother of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, with whom she travelled through Manchuria, then occupied by the Japanese.

Most of Schwarzenbach's papers are kept in Bern , but archived in Geneva are documents commemorating the journey she and Maillart made by car from Geneva to Kabul, a journey during which the latter tried, unsuccessfully, to wean the former from her addiction to drugs such as morphine.

" They were pioneers in travel writing, with an independent, autonomous spirit that was unusual for their time," emphasized the curator of the library, an institution that in 2011 also secured the inclusion of the archives of one of Geneva's most famous philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the UNESCO list.

Maillart began his adventurous life as a teenager when he became interested in sailing and, together with another prominent woman of the time, Hermine de Saussure, crossed the Mediterranean alone between Marseille and Athens.

In the 1930s she began her long journeys to Asia , a continent that fascinated her for its vast open spaces like the sea, and she often traveled alone to places like the Caucasus, Chinese Turkestan, and India, where she spent the years of the Second World War with gurus who introduced her to Hindu spirituality.

After the war, he adopted a more sedentary and contemplative life at his home in the Swiss Alps , where he lived until the age of 94. In 1994, shortly before his death, he donated some of his letters and documents to the Geneva library.

Schwarzenbach's life, shorter but no less intense , was marked first by the excesses of bohemian and avant-garde Berlin between the wars, from which he had to escape after the arrival of Nazism, whose ideology he publicly rejected and condemned despite pressure from his family to accept it.

Androgynous in appearance and openly homosexual , he had many lovers and admirers, although many of the letters he exchanged with them were destroyed by his mother upon her death.

Alone or with great friends like Klaus Mann, son of the writer Thomas Mann who would end up taking his own life, she traveled to different countries in Europe, the USA, the Belgian Congo, the Soviet Union and Persia , illustrating, above all, with her photographs the historical events of the 1930s and 1940s.

Unable to overcome his addictions and the psychological problems that followed, Schwarzenbach died in the Swiss Alps after a bicycle accident in which he severely injured his head.

The two women left behind journalistic and photographic chronicles and books in which they recounted their travels and the evolution of their lives, from Forbidden Oasis, in which Maillart recounted his experience in Central Asia, or Death in Persia , with Schwarzenbach's impressions of the country now called Iran.

The Cruel Life , written by Maillart, recounts the journey the two shared between Geneva and the capital of Afghanistan, aboard a Ford.