The life of Else Lasker-Schüler traces the history of Germany from its unification with Bismarck to the collapse of the Third Reich. She writer, poet and graphic artist, German Jew in times of Nazism, she lost friends during the Great War, in Russian prisons and in the concentration camps of World War II. She witnessed Europe between the wars, her books were burned by the Nazis and her German nationality was revoked, following which she had to go into exile first in Switzerland and later in Palestine, where she also witnessed the confrontation between Arabs and Jews.
It would seem that, from her birth in 1869, it was her destiny to be surrounded by a permanent halo of tragedy: the death of her mother, her brother and her father occurred in a short space of time. She married Dr. Berthold Lasker, but the relationship failed and she, far from settling for a marriage that might have given her the social and economic stability that a woman was supposed to seek at that time, decided to divorce her. Years later, she joined the writer Georg Lewin, from whom she also parted ways; From then on and until the end of her life, her economic situation would depend, to a great extent, on the support and charity of her friends. To all these family and economic hardships was added the event that probably marked her life the most and that caused a deep emotional crisis in the artist: the death of her son, Paul, due to tuberculosis.
Lonely and exiled as a woman, writer and Jew; isolated, even secluded, sometimes; misunderstood, generally; no filters, always, because there was nothing Else didn’t dare say without anesthesia to anyone she had in front of her. Extravagant woman devoted to the Berlin bohemia of expressionist circles. She is a key figure for German-language lyrics and the personalization of a constant struggle between dichotomous forces: angel and devil, the masculine and the feminine, the bourgeois and the bohemian. In short, she was a person who, quoting a phrase from Goethe that she herself used: “she shouted very loudly with joy and [estuvo] afflicted to death.”
Else used all her loneliness and all her pain and channeled them to write a prolific work, which might well be considered a sea of debris that she knew how to navigate with sorrow and hope in equal parts, because as she told her friend Karl Kraus in a letter “In the morning my world breaks, in the followingnoon I hit it once more”. She used love, both emotional and physical, and eroticism as the sources of all art, even in her later years when her already deteriorating body and her ever-young soul suffered from a certain mutual anachronism.
Biography of Else Lasker-Schüler
Jacob Hessing
It is not fair for a writer of her stature to need a letter of introduction, but if that were the case, we might cite Gottfried Benn, who said of Lasker-Schüler that she was “the best poet Germany has ever had”, or Peter Hille, whom the writer owes her nickname to “the black swan of Israel” and who described her as “a Sappho whose world has been turned to pieces”.
“Only eternity is not exile,” Else said, and in 1945 – months before the fall of Hitler – and paraphrasing the poem that the rabbi read at his funeral, he walked to his eternal home from the Mount of Olives, where he is buried, leaving German literature a little sadder and a great source of art that, on days like March 8, is certainly worth remembering.
Hebrew ballads and other poems
Else Lasker-Schüler
