• Else Lasker-Schüler by Henrik Eger
  

LASKER-SCHÜLER, Else. Born February 11, 1869, in Elberfeld [now a part of the integrated city of Wuppertal] Germany; died January 22, 1945, in Jerusalem. Daughter of a banker, granddaughter of a chief rabbi of the Rhineland, Lasker- Schüler, in revolt against her bourgeois origins, joined the bohemian literati prominent in Berlin during the 1890s. Consorting with Theodor Daubler, Franz Marc, Georg Trakl, and Peter Hille (the German Verlaine), she became “the Scheherezade of the Café des Westerns.”

Her second marriage, to Herwarth Walden, linked her with expressionists, and she began to publish poetry and prose in Die Fackel (The Torch), Der Brenner (The Burner), and Der Sturm (The Storm). Die Wupper (1909, People of the Wupper) was an isolated exercise in proletarian drama, but her later play Arthur Aronymus und seine Väter (1932, Arthur Aronymus and His Fathers), based on her own family history, expressed more durable associations with Hebraic themes.

When the play was banned in 1933, Lasker Schüler emigrated to Zurich. A first visit to Palestine inspired a travel book, Das Hebräerland (1937, Land of the Hebrews). The outbreak of hostilities in 1939 found her once more in Palestine, where she spent the remainder of her life.
[The above text merges the opening that I wrote and the entry by Cedric Hentschel.]

Before her exile from 1933 to 1945, Lasker-Schüler wrote hundreds of poems and prose pieces, many of which appeared in leading journals. Thirty volumes of her poetry, prose, and plays were published by 1933. For some of these works Lasker-Schüler chose imaginary male names for herself as symbol of the artist as a royal being; she sometimes signed these names in her correspondence with lovers, friends, financial supporters, and critics. Throughout her life she put feeling above intellect and invariably triggered strong reaction in her readers and listeners through her innovative language and her dramatic and eccentric manner of performance. 

Else Lasker-Schüler, portrait by Gudrun Boíar

Else Lasker-Schüler as a bride, 1894

Karl Kraus preferred some of her poems to those of Heinrich Heine. Georg Trakl, Franz Werfel, * and Gottfried Benn dedicated works to her. Franz Marc and Oscar Kokoschka* pained her. Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism called her one of the “36 just beings, holy people walking on earth naïvely, angels!” but Franz Kafka was discomforted by her bohemian lifestyle. A newspaper critic called her “the most radical representative of modern radical poetry.” In spite of these mixed reactions, Lasker-Schüler was awarded Germany’s prestigious Kleist Prize in 1932.

Soon after Adolf Hitler came to power, her works were banned and burned. When the sixty-four-year-old poet was physically attacked in the spring of 1933, she fled to Zurich, Switzerland, the same day. Unable to visit the graves of her parents in her beloved hometown of Wuppertal, or the grave in Berlin of her only child, Paul, Lasker-Schüler never again returned to her homeland.

Swiss police found Lasker-Schüler sleeping on a bench in a park without any money and papers, arrested her, and published their report in the daily newspaper. Such was the embarrassment of her exile, which was to continue until her death.

The three visits Lasker-Schüler made to Jerusalem may be seen as an exile’s desperate attempts to make her vision of the Land of the Hebrews come true, and to make her writing a contribution in “the building of Palestine; I have not been idle in God’s work” (cited in J. Hessing, “Else Lasker-Schüler and Her People,” Ariel 41 [1976], p. 67). Yet she also concluded: “I have imagined my being in Jerusalem differently . . . and I will die here of sadness. . . . There is no warmth here.” As a work of love and reconciliation between Jews and Arabs, she wrote her last prose collection, Das Hebräerland (1937, The Land of the Hebrews), in her Swiss exile.

Whether in Switzerland or Palestine, Lasker-Schüler was aware that “foreign hedges surround [the exile’s] heart” (Lasker-Schüler’s diary, cited in Sigrid Bauschinger, Else Lasker-Schüler: Ihr Werk Und Ihre Zeit, Heidelberg, 1980). After decades of Fernwehdichtung (poetry of painful longing for that which is far away), her exile writing became a form of Heimwehdichtung (poetry of homesickness). After her second visit to Palestine in 1937, the Jewish Kulturbund in Switzerland no longer offered her financial support. Deprived of her German citizenship in 1938, she felt newly betrayed, and left Zurich to visit Jerusalem for a third time in 1939. Unhappy with life in Palestine, Lasker-Schüler applied for a return visa to Switzerland, but her application was denied.

Else Lasker-Schüler as Prince Yussuf playing flute

Twice exiled and unable to leave Jerusalem, Lasker-Schüler—now over seventy years old, impoverished but still dressing herself as Prince Yussuf—became an object of derision among Jewish settlers and intellectuals. In return, she referred to her once beloved “Erez-Israel” (Land of Israel) as “Erez-Miesrael” (Land of Erez Misery-el). Filled with her visions, Lasker-Schüler continued writing, drawing, giving readings, and forming a literary salon called “Kraal,” which Martin Buber,* the philosopher, opened on January 10, 1942, at the French Cultural Center. Although she attracted some of the leading writers and promising poets to her literary programs, Lasker-Schüler soon faced a ban of her readings and lectures because they were held in German. In a letter to the head of the German synagogue in Jerusalem, she begged him to let her use his Gotteshaus (house of God) one more time: “Wherever I was, German is not allowed to be spoken. I want to arrange the last Kraal evening for a poet who is already broken, to recite from his translations [into German] of a great Hebrew” (Letter to Rabbi Kurt Wilhelm, Else Lasker-Schüler Archive, Jerusalem, cited in Bauschinger, p. 270).

ABOVE: Else Lasker-Schüler, Self-portrait with friends, drawing

RIGHT: Else Lasker-Schüler, Nicodemus, self-portrait with Star of David on her neck, drawing

In her final years Lasker-Schüler worked on her drama IchundIch (IandI), which was to remain a controversial fragment. However, she finished her volume of poems, Mein Blaues Klavier (1943, My Blue Piano). This collection of privately printed poems appeared, under difficult circumstances, in a limited edition of 330 copies; her literary farewell became her last attempt to overcome the loneliness of exile. Significantly, she dedicated the work to “my unforgettable friends in the cities of Germany and to those, like me, exiled and dispersed throughout the world, in good faith.” In one of her final acts, she asked that her hometown of Wuppertal and its surrounding area be spared from Allied bombing.

Few of her poems and prose works have been translated into English. However, her work has been shown increasing attention by American scholars.

Translation: See section on Lasker-Schüler in A. Durchslag and J. Litman-Semeestere, eds., Hebrew Ballads and Other Poems (1980).

Consult: Sigrid Bauschinger, Else Lasker-Schüler: Ihr Werk und Ihre Zeit (Heidelberg, 1980); Jakob Hessing, “Else Lasker-Schüler and Her People,” Ariel 41 (1976); Heinz Politzer, “The Blue Piano of Else Lasker-Schüler,” Commentary 9 (1950); Michael Schmid, ed., Lasker-Schüler: Ein Geburtstagsbuch (Wuppertal, 1969); Wolfgang Springmann, ed., Else Lasker-Schüler und Wuppertal (Wuppertal: Stadtbibliothek, 1965).

HENRIK EGER

Else Lasker-Schüler (Wikipedia, 9 July 2015)
Else-Lasker-Schüler-Gesellschaft (German)

Originally published in Literary Exile in the Twentieth Century: An Analysis and Biographical Dictionary , edited by Martin Tucker. 
New York, Greenwood Press, 1991, pp. 448-50.

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