Else Lasker-Schüler

Jan 1, 2008

(Elberfeld, 1869 -- 1945, Jerusalem), was the daughter of a well-to-do Christian-Jewish family called Schüler, to which she added the name of her first husband. She frequented the avant-garde literary circle of Berlin in the 1900s, which included P. Hille, Th. Däubler, G. Trakl, G. Benn, F. Werfel, R. Schickele, and the painter F. Marc. From 1903 -- 1912 she was married to Herwarth Walden. She emigrated to Switzerland in 1933, and in 1939 visited Palestine for a third time and remained there, suffering during these last years from loneliness, ill-health, and poverty. Her only son (from her first marriage) died in 1927. Her life had for years been eccentric and unpredictable, and she tended to live in a world of her own imagining, appearing in various oriental guises, as Tino von Bagdad (Hille's pet-name for her), as Prinz von Theben, Prinz Jussuf or Josef (even in her correspondence). She displayed her individuality in her exotic dress and in her illustrations, and, in this Bohemian phase of her life, appeared in cabarets. This concealment extended to her autobiographical works, from which no reliable account of her life emerges. She contributed to a number of periodicals, strongly supported Walden in Der Sturm , and was herself later helped and promoted by Karl Kraus. Her poetry, which is symbolical and sometimes playful, is basically religious and concerned with the decline of the modern world. After 1912 she began to return to the faith of her forebears, which is reflected in first-person verse as well as in her treatment of figures and themes from the Old Testament. At this time her variable mood was already prone to sink into deep desolation. Her early volumes of verse, Styx (1902) and Der siebente Tag (1905), were followed by Meine Wunder (1911), Hebräische Balladen (1913), Die gesammelten Gedichte (1917), Die Kuppel (1920), and Theben (1923). She dedicated her last collection, Mein blaues Klavier (1943), to all who shared emigration, the recurrent theme of the years in Jerusalem, where her art reached a new perfection. In the title poem of this volume sound and colour, rhythm and metaphor combine to convey a pervasive sense of loss; it is her last, and it ends with a prayer for release.

Her first play, Die Wupper, written in ‘one night’ in 1909 in her native dialect (‘Wupperdhalerplatt’), was published in its final form in 1919, the year of its performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin. Described by A. Kerr as ‘phantasto-naturalistisch’, it is one of the most interesting modernist plays and has been revived since its Cologne production by Hans Bauer in 1958 (Heinz Herals directed the 1919 production and Jürgen Fehling the Berlin Staatstheater production of 1927). Konzert, a volume of prose and verse, and her second play, Arthur Aronymus und seine Väter, relating to her father's childhood, appeared in 1932, the year in which she was awarded the Kleist Prize. A third play, Ichundich (1970 in Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft) was written c. 1943. Her epistolary novels Mein Herz (1912) and Der Malik (1919) and her Essays (1913) spring from her own life and circle; the stories Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona (1921), Arthus Aronymus. Die Geschichte meines Vaters (1932), on which her play is based, and Hebräerland (1937), resulting from her first journey to the land of her forebears, share her intimate concern for religious tolerance and reconciliation.

Dichtungen und Dokumente, ed. E. Ginsberg , appeared in 1951; Gesammelte Werke (3 vols.) in 1959 -- 62 (vols. 1 and 2 ed. by F. Kemp , vol. 3, Verse und Prosa aus dem Nachlaß, by W. Kraft); Sämtliche Gedichte, ed. F. Kemp , in 1966; correspondence, Lieber gestreifter Tiger and Wo ist unser buntes Theben, both ed. M. Kupper , in 1969, Briefe an Karl Kraus, ed. A. Gehlhoff-Claes , in 1959, and Was soll ich hier? Exilbriefe an Solman Schocken in 1981; another edition of Werke. Lyrik, Prosa, Dramatisches by S. Bauschinger in 1991.

A bilingual volume of select poetry, translated by R. P. Newton, was published in 1982.