Sybille VON SCHOENEBECK BEDFORD

Sybille Von Schoenebeck-Bedford
(1911-2006)

A polyglot cosmopolitan, traveller, writer and journalist, Sybille von Schoenebeck, daughter of a German Baron and his second wife, a descendant of a wealthy German-Jewish family, lived in Sanary from 1926 to 1940. There she met Aldous Huxley, her idol writer, and his wife Maria. They struck up a lifelong friendship. Very close to Thomas Mann’s children, Klaus and Erika, and other emigrants, she was the link between Sanary’s English- and German-speaking circle. After her application for French naturalisation was rejected, she entered into a sham marriage with Walter Bedford in 1935 and became a British citizen. She became famous in the 1950s for books based on her life in Sanary.

Sybille grew up in a small village in Germany with her father in a precarious situation. When he died, she joined her mother and her new husband, a young architecture student, in Italy. From there, her mother, from a wealthy family of German-Jewish merchants, sent her to England for a school trip. Das Fräulein von leads the life of a luxury nomad across Europe. She spoke German, English, Italian and French, and attended school only sporadically. Sometimes she is home-schooled with private tutors, but she is largely self-taught when it comes to her schooling.

In 1926, Sybille was reunited with her mother, who had moved to Sanary with her husband. Although Sybille was not particularly enchanted by the fishing village at first, she later admitted that she really felt ‘at home’ in Sanary, where she stayed for fourteen years. Sybille Bedford was only fifteen when she arrived in Sanary. She soon met the Huxleys, who became her adoptive parents, because despite her German roots, she felt closer to the English-speaking clan than to the German-speaking ones. Sybille was happy to help new arrivals settle in by helping them find somewhere to live. She is also very close to Klaus and Erika Mann, whom she met on a trip to New York, but has no affinity with their father Thomas, whose behaviour she finds inappropriate for Sanary. Because of an article she published in Klaus Mann’s new anti-Nazi magazine Die Sammlung in 1933, the Nazis blocked her bank accounts and her inheritance in Germany.

Sybille was virtually destitute at the time, surviving thanks to the help of friends and family, and in particular the support of her friend in Sanary, Eva Herrmann. Her German passport had expired and she was unable to renew it, so in 1934 she applied for French nationality, but her application was rejected for no apparent reason. The following year, through the Huxleys, she entered into a sham marriage with a British officer, Walter Bedford, and thus obtained a British passport. When she began writing after the war, she published her books in English.

In May 1940, when the Nazis invaded France, Sybille left Sanary, a place she would always remember with longing. She managed to escape via Italy and Spain to America, where she first stayed with the Huxleys in California before settling in New York. In 1947, Sybille returned to Europe and began writing. Her first book was published in 1953. She also attended famous trials as a court reporter, writing about them for magazines like Life. She traveled between Italy, France, England, and Portugal before finally settling in England in the late 1980s, where she died on February 17, 2006.