“Man in Motion” by Patrick Straumann: wanderings of an evanescent great-uncle

To write the biography of a figure whose characteristic was to disappear and emerge from one end of the world to the other in the chaos of the 20th century^e century, this is the bet taken by the Swiss journalist and writer based in Paris, Patrick Straumann. With Man in motionhe paints the portrait of a great-uncle, Paul (1905-1995; born Reichstein, he gave himself the surname Ritchie), as evanescent in his own existence as he was fascinating in the eyes of his great-nephew.

Author of a description of the Portuguese capital during the Second World War, an ambiguous haven for refugees (Lisbon open cityChandeigne, 2018), Straumann combines a literary talent with finesse – correcting, with the help of discreet humor, his empathy for a city or, here, for a character – with the work of a historian who never seeks to fill in the gaps or mysteries with imagination. The exercise is all the more difficult because, he says, his protagonist had no ambition to leave the slightest trace.

Apart from some archival research, the biographer had little other guide than the correspondence maintained by Paul with his older brother and unwavering supporter, the Basel native « Tadzik »Tadeusz Reichstein (1897-1996), Nobel Prize in Physiology 1950 for his work on cortisone and vitamin C, as sedentary as his younger brother was in perpetual movement. Both from a Polish Jewish family settled in Switzerland, they attended the famous Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, a breeding ground for scientists but also for unusual destinies.

An extraordinary route

Even if we regret that this exchange of letters is not more often cited, it does seem to trace an unusual itinerary. We thus find Paul in Moscow as well as in Alaska, in Japan as well as in San Francisco and especially in camps and opposing armies in a troubled time. Living in the USSR at the beginning of the 1930s, he became familiar with “real socialism” shortly before the outbreak of Stalinist terror. Shunning the Soviet “bright future” while abandoning a wife and a son there, Paul would finish the war in the US Navy before working, among other things, as an engineer in the merchant navy. This turbulent career, from which he nevertheless emerged unscathed, is reminiscent of the story of the life of a high-flying spy. But reading Straumann, this is not the key to this biography.

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