Lasker-Schüler, Else (1869–1945)

German lyric poet of the 20th century, winner of one of Germany's highest literary honors, the Kleist Preis, who was forced by her Jewish heritage into exile during the Nazi era. Name variations: Elsa Lasker-Schuler or Schueler. Born Else Schüler on February 11, 1869, in Elberfeld, Germany; died on January 22, 1945, in Jerusalem; daughter of Aron Schüler (a banker) and Jeanette (Kissing) Schüler; married Berthold Lasker, in 1899 (divorced 1903); married Georg Levin also known as Herwarth Walden, in 1903 (divorced 1912); children: (first marriage) Paul Lasker (b. 1900).

Published her first poems in Die Gesellschaft and Das Magazin für Literatur (1899); became famous as a poet and bohemian in Berlin cafes; received the Kleist Preis (1932); fled Germany (1933); reached exile in Israel (1939).

On a cold day in January 1945, a small gathering in a Jerusalem cemetery stood listening to a poem read aloud in German, one of the few occasions during that period when the German language was spoken anywhere in public in Palestine. War had forbidden it, as German was the language of the enemies of Palestine, and World War II was not yet at an end. But in the peace that came with the end of a tormented life, the sound of German was the final irony to mark the passing of the elderly woman who was being buried there—Else Lasker-Schüler, author of the words being spoken.

I know that I must die soon.
Yet all the trees are radiant
After summer's long-awaited kiss—

My dreams grow gray—
Never have I written a sadder ending
In my books of rhymes.

You pluck a flower for me—
I loved it in the bud.
Yet I know that I must die soon.

My breath hovers over the river of God—
Softly I set my foot
On the path to my long home.

Recognized by many as the finest lyrical voice of 20th-century Germany, she had instilled a poetry into her native language that few possessed and had then been prevented from living in her native land. Driven to exile in Jerusalem, she was deprived there of hearing or speaking the language she cared about most. Provided with a pension adequate for her needs, she continually gave most of it away and spent her final years in an unheated furnished room, sleeping in an easy chair because she did not own a bed and did not want one. Prone since youth to a bohemian lifestyle, she spent her days sitting in cafes and her nights at the movies, still occasionally writing poetry, still appreciated by the other writers and artists in exile like herself, but growing increasingly eccentric in her behavior and her dress. Exiled in both language and land, she felt nowhere at home.

Else Schüler was born on February 11, 1869, in the German town of Elberfeld, the youngest of six children, three girls and three boys. Her father Aron Schüler was a banker, and her mother Jeanette Kissing Schüler devoted much time to literature. Else was the granddaughter of a rabbi, although her family was not especially religious. Of all her siblings, she was closest to her brother Paul, who was seven years her elder. He wrote poetry in Greek and Latin, and she adored him.

In school, Else was mercilessly teased by her Catholic and Lutheran classmates, reflecting the anti-Semitism that was escalating in Germany in those days. The children would taunt her with the words "Hepp, Hepp," which was thought to be a medieval abbreviation signifying "Jerusalem be damned." When her mother recognized the child's suffering, she decided to educate Else at home, a much happier experience. Jeanette Schüler fostered a free, joyful spirit in Else, affirming her imaginative skills, urging her to explore a world of sound and color, and encouraging her interest in poetry.

When Else Schüler was 14, her beloved brother Paul died. When she was 21, her mother died and was mourned by Else ever after. "When my mother died, the moon broke in two," she wrote. Else was 30 when she married Berthold Lasker, a Berlin physician eight years her senior, in 1899. That same year, she published her first poems in Die Gesellschaft and Das Magazin für Literatur. In the early days of her marriage, she rented a studio near the Tiergarten and began living a life separate from her husband. In 1900, she gave birth to a son, named Paul after her dead brother. When the boy was a year old, she separated from Lasker, and the couple divorced in 1903. Else Lasker-Schüler had by then taken to playing the role of the "Prince of Thebes," wearing extravagant baggy pants, flowing gowns, colorful rags, and cheap glass beads. She became notorious for frequenting cafes where she often shared opium and cocaine with her friends. The cultural elite of Berlin admired her poetry and welcomed her eccentric antics.

During the hours Else spent writing or sketching her fellow artists in the Café des Westens or the Romanisches Café, she met her second husband, Georg Levin, whom she married in 1903. An art historian, accomplished composer, and founder of the art society Verein für Kunst, Georg also established the highly successful cultural-literary journal Der Sturm, in which he published a number of his wife's poems. Else soon gave Georg a different name—Herwarth Walden—which turned out to be more lasting than their marriage. In the spring of 1910, Walden left her for another woman. The divorce became final in 1912.

In her early 40s at the time of her separation from her second husband, Lasker-Schüler became a nomad, wandering from hotel to rooming

house. Although she often wrote of her homesickness for Elberfeld and Westphalia, she remained in Berlin, a city with which she had a love-hate relationship. Names, dates, and places were never as important to Else as the poetry of words, and she often reordered the facts of her life to fit her vision of herself, much as she would rearrange words to construct a poem. Biographers have had to dig to separate fact from fiction. It was only recently, for example, that documents revealed her actual date of birth to be 1869, rather than 1876 as she claimed. She also alleged that her father was an architect who built houses for the poor and allowed them to live in them at no cost, when he was in fact a banker. In Else's descriptions, her father's father, a simple rabbi, became a chief rabbi who conversed with Catholic bishops about matters divine, and her mother's ancestors came from Spain, not England. Lasker-Schüler also denied that Berthold Lasker was the father of her son Paul, claiming that he had been fathered by a Greek aristocrat by the name of Alcibiades de Rouan.

I am homesick for our garden and tower. What does the world want from me?

—Else Lasker-Schüler

Around the turn of the century, Lasker-Schüler became involved with the mystical poet Peter Hille, who introduced her to Die neue Gemeinschaft (The New Community). Founded by the brothers Heinrich and Julius Hart, the group included some 70 poets and philosophers who rejected materialism, similar to groups which sprang up in the 1960s in the United States. Members included the poet Peter Baum, theologian Martin Buber, and Gustav Landauer. Lasker-Schüler idolized Hille: "His brown eyes are two heavens, and that's why anybody who saw him became a believer." His death in 1904 was another great loss, but her relationship with him had led her away from the bourgeois world forever.

Lasker-Schüler wrote prolifically. In the first decade of the century, she published two books of poetry (Styx [1902] and Der Siebente Tag [1905]); two books of prose (Das Peter Hille Buch [1906] and Die Nächte der Tino von Baghdad); and a play (Die Wupper [1909]). The great German writer Thomas Mann once said, "The poet is not somebody who invents things, but somebody who creates something out of things as they are." According to Hille, the four elements in the work of Lasker-Schüler were the Judaic, the Arabic, the childlike, and the primordial, and she "took refuge in dreams of angels who resembled heavenly gardeners, in dreams of her mother and child, or in madness." At the same time, Lasker-Schüler celebrated the joy of life and sacred devotion to love. Her work was characteristic of the Art Nouveau movement. Its imagery used roses, lilies, hyacinths, and twisting flames, all meandering, climbing, winding, and springing up. Lasker-Schüler's unique universe of fantasy was created despite personal loss and exile, and the language of her poetry transcended frail human barriers to become sublime.

In 1913, Lasker-Schüler journeyed to Russia in the hope of securing the release of her friend, the writer and activist Johannes Holtzman. The former publisher of the anarchist journal Kampf, he had been sentenced to 15 years in prison for revolutionary intrigue in tsarist Russia, and had been committed to a mental institution in Moscow in 1912. Lasker-Schüler was appalled by the condition in which she found him but was forced to return to Berlin without winning his release. Holtzman later died of pneumonia in Moscow.

Lasker-Schüler loved many men. In 1912, she fell in love with the poet Gottfried Benn, who held her in great regard throughout his life. She also met Georg Trakl and later wrote two poems about their brief friendship. She had a longer association with the Viennese critic and satirist Karl Kraus, who recognized the greatness of her poetry and published some of it in his periodical, Die Fackel. When Lasker-Schüler had financial difficulties in 1913, Kraus published an appeal for contributions on her behalf. Throughout this period of poverty, prolific publishing, and intense relationships, she remained devoted to her son. Paulchen, as she called him, was bright and creative, and no matter how erratic her lifestyle, he remained at the center of her life. Part of her deprivations resulted from the expenses of sending him to a good boarding school.

During the 1920s, Lasker-Schüler traveled extensively in Germany, Austria, and occasionally to Prague, giving poetry readings and visiting friends. In 1925, when Paul was diagnosed with tuberculosis, she poured all her resources into securing the best medical attention for him, selling sketches and drawings as well as her poetry to provide for his care in the best sanatorium in Switzerland. That year, friends organized another collection for her sake, while she continued to write lyrical verse and to appear in Berlin cafes dressed in outlandish clothes. Paul's death in 1927 became her greatest loss.

Always in the parting year
You will die to me, my child ….

In 1932, Else Lasker-Schüler was aged 63 when she received the Kleist Preis, one of Germany's highest literary honors. Her pleasure in this recognition might have been greater had it not been accompanied by the sting of anti-Semitism then on the rise. As one critic wrote, reflecting a view held by all too many at the time, "The pure Hebrew poetry of Else Lasker-Schüler has nothing to do with us Germans." Later the poet spoke of being knocked down by bullies in uniform, a common experience for Jews in Berlin during that period. On April 19, 1933, the political ascent of the National Socialists led her to flee Berlin, without luggage and telling no one of her destination. She went to Zürich, where she spent six nights sleeping on a park bench until her identity was discovered. On May 23, Albert Einstein noted, "Frau Else Lasker-Schüler also belongs to those noble individuals whom blind hatred has driven into exile." The poet who had been a nomad by choice, henceforth became an exile of circumstance.

In 1934, she accepted an invitation from a Greek couple to visit Palestine. Summing up her initial reaction to the Holy Land in a letter to Ernst Ginsberg, she wrote, "Glorious land of the Bible, caravans continually passing my balcony. Quite different than one expects. But difficult." In July, she returned to Switzerland, where her economic situation remained perilous as the readings that provided her income were often canceled. In 1936, her play Arthur Aronymous, a plea for reconciliation and peaceful coexistence of Christians and Jews, was not well received by the Zürich press, and she became more disillusioned. She wrote to Ginsberg: "I would like to flee across the ocean…. I am homesick for our garden and tower. What does the world want from me?"

In 1937, she made a second visit to Palestine, where she found a literary following among other exiles from Nazi Germany. Some, like Martin Buber, were already known to her, but for the most part she was forced to make new friends. Giving readings of her poetry, which always revived her, she would dress in a favorite Hussar-style black velvet jacket, and emote with enthusiasm. In August of that year, she returned to Switzerland where she was supported largely by the wealthy industrialist Silvain Guggenheim. But the threat of war was flooding Switzerland with exiles in need of financial help, and her situation grew increasingly difficult. In April 1939, she left for Palestine once more for a short visit. Instead, the looming war intervened, and Else Lasker-Schüler never again saw Europe.

In Palestine, the poet found many who welcomed her. In a land where most people were quite poor, she received a comfortable pension, but she was an old woman in her 70s who had suffered many losses, and she failed to adjust to her new home. For the writer so finely attuned to language, her greatest loss was the language of her birth and of her poetry that she could not publicly speak. This loss was the subject of her final work, Mein blaues Klavier (My Blue Piano):

I have a blue piano at home
But I don't know a single note.

It is standing in the dark of the cellar door
Since the world turned savage.

The dedication of this last volume of poems reads, "To my unforgettable friends in the cities of Germany—and to those who like me are exiled and now scattered over the world. In loyalty!"

Since her death, Else Lasker-Schüler has regained her place as one of the preeminent poets of Germany. But in her lifetime, she became trapped in the irony of her heritage: recognized by many as the greatest lyrical poet of her time, she was forced by Nazi racial ideology from her homeland, unable to lay claim to the only culture she had known since birth. In her era, however, no contribution to the German language and literature by a "pure Aryan" managed to equal hers.

sources:

Cohn, Hans W. Else Lasker-Schüler: The Broken World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.

Eger, Henrik. "Else Lasker-Schüler," in Literary Exiles in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Martin Tucker. NY: Greenwood Press, 1991, p. 407–410.

"Lasker-Schüler, Else," in Lexikon deutschsprachiger Schriftsteller. 2 vols. Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut, 1972–74, vol. 2, pp. 14–15.

Pfanner, Helmut F. Kulturelle Wechselbeziehungen im Exil—Exile Across Cultures. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1986.

Politzer, Heinz. "The Blue Piano of Else Lasker-Schueler," in Commentary. Vol. 9. April 1950, pp. 335–344.

Resch, Margit. "Else Lasker-Schüler," in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 66, part I. Edited by James Hardin. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1988, pp. 285–305.

Robertson, Ritchie. "Nationalism and modernity: German-Jewish writers and the Zionist movement," in Visions and Blueprints: Avant-Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth Century Europe. Edited by Edward Timms and Peter Collier. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988, pp. 208–220.

Schwertfeger, Ruth. Else Lasker-Schüler: Inside This Deathly Solitude. NY: Berg, 1991.

Serke, Jürgen. Die verbrannten Dichter. Weinheim and Basel: Beltz & Gelberg Verlag, 1978.

Zimroth, Evan. "The Black Swan of Israel," in Tikkun. Vol. 5, no. 1. January–February, 1990, pp. 35–39.

John Haag , Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia