Alma Maksimiljana Karlin was born in Celje to Slovenian parents and at the age of eleven she discovered her talent for foreign languages. In the autumn of 1908, she moved to London, where she got a job in a translation office, and while working, she familiarised herself with Asian cultures and studied foreign languages. As an Austrian citizen, she did not feel comfortable in London at the outbreak of the First World War, and therefore retreated to Norway and Sweden. Her return to Celje in the spring of 1918 sparkled opening of a language school and preparations for a journey around the world, which she decided to go on during her stay in Scandinavia.
Alma went on a journey around the world in November 1919 and returned in the last days of 1927. She originally planned to go to Japan, but due to unfavourable sailing schedules, she decided to go to Japan via South America or via Hawaii. Her voyage included the following route: Genoa – Peru – Panama – San Francisco – Hawaii – Japan – Korea – China – The Philippines – Australia – New Zealand – Fiji – New Caledonia – New Hebrides – Solomon Islands – New Guinea – Indonesia – Singapore – Thailand – Burma – India – Eritrea – Venice. She travelled alone, and along the way she supported herself by teaching, translating and writing articles and reports for more than twenty newspapers in Austria, Germany and Yugoslavia. During her travels, she diligently recorded her impressions of places and people, collected large or small objects that became part of her ethnological collection, and wrote stories, novellas, tales, and novels.
Immediately after her return, she set about editing her notes and from 1929 to 1930 published a two-volume travelogue about her journey around the world in German and with a German publisher: “Einsame Weltreise” and “Im Banne der Südsee” (The Odyssey of a Lonely Woman, London : Victor Gollancz, 1933). The travelogues became bestsellers and were reprinted several times.
Alma met Thea Schreiber Gammelin on one of her lectures in Stockholm in the early 1930s. Thea moved to Celje in 1934 to live permanently with Alma and they remained inseparable until Alma’s death. Alma was an outspoken anti-Nazi. Because of this, her books became unwanted in Germany after 1939, and during the occupation, the Nazis immediately imprisoned her and put her on a list to be taken to one of the concentration camps – she was saved from certain death by her reputation as a writer and the good connections of her friend Thea. Alma joined the partisans in the fall of 1944.