Lasker-SchüLer, Else

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LASKER-SCHÜLER, ELSE

LASKER-SCHÜLER, ELSE (1869–1945), German Jewish writer.

Born 11 February 1869 in Elberfeld, the Rhineland, Else Lasker-Schüler grew up in a well-to-do assimilated Jewish family, the youngest of six children. Her father was a banker and builder. She attended a progressive girls' school until she was about thirteen when, due to illness, she was educated at home. In 1894 she married the physician Berthold Lasker and moved to Berlin. There she took lessons in art and entered the literary circles of the burgeoning avant-garde that was very much under the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Artists' communities sprung up around Berlin, advocating a radical renewal of life and art, and Lasker-Schüler was their frequent guest. The growing estrangement from her husband, her insistence that he was not the father of her son Paul, born in 1899, give proof of her determination to free herself from bourgeois constraints. In the same year she published her first poems.

After her divorce in 1903, Lasker-Schüler married the musician Georg Levin, whom she renamed Herwarth Walden (1878–1941). Always in precarious financial situations, the couple nevertheless fought without compromise for an aesthetic renewal with publications, readings, and concerts in Walden's Verein für Kunst (Association for Art) by far the most prestigious of the many artistic organizations of the time in Berlin. In 1910 Walden, in close collaboration with Karl Kraus (1874–1936) in Vienna, founded the periodical Der Sturm (The storm). It became the mouthpiece for expressionist art and literature in which Lasker-Schüler published widely. The marriage ended in 1912.

Lasker-Schüler continued to live in Berlin, adding to her meager honoraria by selling her exquisite drawings. Her son, a gifted artist himself, died of tuberculosis in 1927. During the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) she was recognized as the greatest living German woman poet. In April 1933 she fled to Switzerland, which she was forced to leave in 1939. She died in Jerusalem in January 1945.

Lasker-Schüler became most famous for her poetry: passionate early poems that employ art nouveau imagery written around 1900; the strong Hebräische Balladen (1913; Hebrew ballads), glorifying Biblical figures; poems in praise of young painters like Franz Marc (1880–1916), and poets like Gottfried Benn (1886–1956) and Georg Trakl (1887–1914), whose genius she was among the first to recognize. Like many artists and poets of her time, Lasker-Schüler was inspired by Asian art, including dance. She had created a realm within her artwork that she called Theben (Thebes), and ruled as "Prince Jussuf." Her alterego also appeared in fantastic Oriental stories and in her drawings surrounded by her artist friends. Her Briefe nach Norwegen (1912–1913; Letters to Norway) depict the Berlin bohemia that congregated in the famous Café des Westens. Lasker-Schüler was also a great essayist. Her love for nature and her deep religiosity are evident in many of her prose texts. In the first of her three plays, Die Wupper (1909), named for the river of her hometown, she creates a magically realistic picture of an industrial city.

Prayer

I'm seeking allwhere an estate,
which has an angel at its gate.
His great and broken wing I feel,
Upon my shoulder blade its weight,
And on my brow his star as signet seal.
(Translated by Susan L. Cocalis)

World War I took the lives of many poets and painters she had praised in her writings. She opposed the war from the beginning, knowing that it would destroy the hopes for a truly modern Europe not divided by nationalistic strife but united by the common goals of its artists. She poured out her utter despair in the fictitious letters to her Blue Rider, the painter Franz Marc, which she published as "Briefe und Bilder" (1913–1917; Letters and pictures) in various journals and later the volume Der Malik. Eine Kaisergeschichte (1919; The Malik: The story of an emperor).

In her works and deeds Lasker-Schüler emerges as a proud Jew and a woman who fought for justice. In 1914 she traveled to Russia, trying to free one of her friends who was a political prisoner. Her many activities for others cannot be counted. Most of all she stood up for artists and writers sharing with them what little she had. Lasker-Schüler's critics were found in the conservative camp of the Wilhelminian empire. However, they were of no consequence. Considering the writers who wrote about and dedicated their poems to her (Gottfried Benn, Georg Trakl), the painters who painted her (Karl Schmidt-Rottluff [1884–1976], Jankel Adler [1895–1949]), and the composers who set her poems to music (Paul Hindemith [1895–1963], Ernst Krenek [1900–1991]), it is evident that the truly great were always on her side.

See alsoAvant-Garde.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Lasker-Schüler, Else. Hebrew Ballads and Other Poems. Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Audri Durchslag and Jeanette Litman-Demeestère. Philadelphia, 1980.

——. "Your Diamond Dreams Cut Open My Arteries." Poems by Else Lasker-Schüler. Translated and with an introduction by Robert P. Newton. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982.

——. Concert. Translated by Jean M. Snook. Lincoln, Nebr., 1994.

——. Werke und Briefe. Frankfurt am Main, 1996–.