I Placed My Fate in Hard Hands

In my favorite photo of her, she stands on a muddy forest road on the outskirts of Berlin. A large group has gathered to celebrate spring: bearded bourgeois, wild men, women holding the hems of their pale dresses up from the muck. Her robe is dark and lace-lined, mud-splattered to the hip. Posed on the far edge of the semicircle, she alone refuses to face the camera.

All of her life, Else Lasker-Schüler fought to define and depict herself, and to set the terms by which she would be understood. She took and gave out new names, married and divorced two men, and drew herself as a dancer, a prince astride an elephant, and an Arab queen in trousers, her cheek adorned with crescent and star. By the time she was 27 she was already subtracting years from her age. When asked where she was born, she answered “Thebes.” Over the course of nearly 76 years, she produced poetry, prose, plays, feuilletons, illustrations, cartoons, letters, cracks, and public invective, the record of a difficult and frequently disappointed life, tending toward a caged sort of freedom.

She was born in February 1869, into a Jewish family in the Prussian Rhineland town of Elberfeld. On her father’s side, she was related to the famous Prague Rabbi Judah Loew, creator of the Golem legend; on her mother’s side, the founder of the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung. Looking back from the 1920s, she recalled a home both mythic and bourgeois, her descriptions sounding like Bruno Schulz in a subdued register. “When the sunset is mirrored in its windows, like the rubies of heaven, it seems to me that Angel Gabriel stands sentinel over it alone,” she writes in Concert (1932).

Her father was a banker, prankster, and homebody, a man who “was simply worried about his dahlias and pansies in the flowerbed of our garden.” Her mother, meanwhile, was “my friend, my idol, my strength, my absolution, my emperor,” whose death in 1890 seems to have shifted something in the 21-year-old Lasker-Schüler. “When my mother died,” she later wrote, “the moon broke apart.” In a 1911 poem titled “My Mother,” she calls her “the great angel / who walked beside me,” a being who lies “buried / under this sky of smoke” which has ceased to “bloom blue” since her death. “Now,” she concludes, “I will be always alone.” Her mother appears in 10 poems; her father in none.

In 1894 she entered into an unhappy marriage with the doctor and chess enthusiast Berthold Lasker. The couple left for Berlin, where Lasker-Schüler took art lessons, rented an atelier around the corner from their Tiergarten home, and transformed from bourgeois to bohemian. She refused to fulfill domestic expectations, which she compared to a tomb. In a photo from the mid-1890s, she appears in profile, her blouse wrinkled, her collar disheveled, her hair wild and glossy.Even from the side, her gaze is wide, bright, and intimidating, as if staring down her own diminishment.

She addresses her husband in the 1899 poem “Wilted Myrtle”: “You trampled my young spirit dead / And then drew back inside your own cold shell.” But Lasker-Schüler was about to affect a resurrection. That poem and several others were published in the August issue of Die Gesellschaft, just before she gave birth to her son Paul. Around this time, Lasker-Schüler met the writer, radical, and occasional vagabond Peter Hille, who helped bring her into Berlin’s bourgeoning avant-garde.

Before his early death in 1904, Hille was associated with the artist groups Die Kommenden and Die Neue Gemeinschaft, as well as with the city’s fledgling cabaret scene. These groups published their own journals and put on performances, read their poems in the woods or on the lakeshores of Berlin (which they trekked through the mud to reach), and performed in costume at clubs and restaurants. The groups could be hedonistic and erotic, and they flouted rigid sexual norms. Yet they were largely bourgeois endeavors, run by middle-class men whose flirtation with radical ideas such as communal living gave way to professional jealousy and domestic conservatism. Lasker-Schüler was frequently one of the few female participants, and her yearnings—for love, God, and a deeper mode of experience—transgressed the moral limits of other members. “My motherland is soulless,” she writes in “Chaos” (1902). “No rose blooms / In the tepid air.” As in the aforementioned group photograph, Lasker-Schüler refused to allow others to direct her gaze.

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These groups helped transition Lasker-Schüler from housewife to poet. She published her debut collection, Styx, in 1902, followed three years later by The Seventh Day. Both books are full of love poems, the fruit of Lasker-Schüler’s time in Berlin’s coffeehouses. Functionally separated from her first husband for several years, she divorced Lasker in 1903 and married the composer and writer Georg Lewin, who went on to found Der Sturm. In a poem dedicated to him, she describes their love affair as violent and shattering, “a weeping in the world, / As if dear God Himself had died.” Yet this is not quite the apocalypse promised by the title (“Weltende”), but, rather, the end of an old, desiccated world, in which “Life’s locked up in every heart / As in a coffin.” The poem ends with Lasker-Schüler’s command that they “hold each other tight and kiss . . . / A terrible yearning pounds at the gate, / And we must surely die.”

These early poems waltz back-and-forth between desire and its anticipated disappointment. In one poem her love causes her to go “wild and screaming like gazelles”; in another, she longs to tell her lover “how I sink / to find your kiss / gone empty.” In a typical Lasker-Schüler narrative, the flush of love when “your kisses darken on my mouth” gives way to distance, and what was once experienced can now only be recalled. Even the natural world—the moon and the sky—turns away. At times, the poems tip into despair: “I adapted to you, / because I longed for what is human. // I have become poor / from your begging charity.” But there is always another infatuation. Rather than the proper poems of a woman in love, Lasker-Schüler’s read like the confessions of a desire so capacious it approaches holiness. “I am not accustomed to living on a small scale,” she would later write.

Such transfigurations marked her personal and artistic lives. Hille called her “Tino of Baghdad,” a name that can use feminine, masculine, and neuter pronouns, and which offered an additional Orientalized identity through which Lasker-Schüler enacted fantasies of liberation on the page, and thus in her own life. A “name is no accident,” she writes. Lasker-Schüler frequently assumed new identities, often in response to tumult and privation. When her divorce from Lewin in 1912 plunged her into poverty, she began to sign her requests for charity the “Prince of Thebes,” defying her reduced status. “Neither as a woman nor as a Jew would she ever accept an assigned role,” writes her biographer, Betty Falkenberg.

Lasker-Schüler extended the favor to others. Before their marriage, she rechristened Lewin as Herwarth Walden (possibly a reference to Thoreau). Name-giving allowed her to create a mythic Berlin, and to assert her prominence in a flourishing artistic milieu. Many of the great artists of pre- and interwar Germany met Lasker-Schüler at the Café des Westens and featured in Walden’s epochal journal Der Sturm, including the painter Franz Marc, anarchist Johannes Holzmann, novelist Alfred Döblin, cabaretist Erich Mühsam, theorist Walter Benjamin, philosopher Martin Buber, and poets Georg Trakl and Gottfried Benn. Like the alternative groups of Lasker-Schüler’s early career, the Berlin avant-garde blended political and aesthetic radicalism, and provided a home for Jews and women excluded from Germany’s official artistic societies.

Her novel My Heart (1912) describes this society in an alternately ironic and tragic mode. Lasker-Schüler spent the better part of her days in cafés, writing letters and poems, and holding court with contemporaries and younger poets. My Heart celebrates and mocks this milieu. It is the center of the world, a bazaar, yet even there “not everything is the real thing: imitation poets, false verbal embellishments, simulated thinking, [and] cigarettes smoked” as an affectation.

Published in Der Sturm in 20 installments, My Heart is full of love affairs whose paramours are all referred to by their codenames: Johannes Holzmann is Senna Hoy, the German poet and lawyer Kurt Hiller is The Bishop, the Austrian writer Karl Kraus is the Dalai Lama, and Gottfried Benn is Giselher the Barbarian. Infatuations give way to disappointment. “I am a transparent, bottomless ocean,” Lasker-Schüler declares near the novel’s conclusion. “I feel that there is no solid ground beneath me any longer.” Written at the end of her second marriage, My Heart reads as both a confession and a cry of despair.

Like much of her early prose, the book exhibits the Orientalizing tropes that excited German readers around the turn of the 20th century. Mosques, pyramids, temples, caliphs, Fakirs, and dervishes all make appearances. Lasker-Schüler went about Berlin in imported wide-legged trousers, and posed for pictures in “Arab” dress. She even once made a round of the clubs speaking a gobbledygook “Arabic” she improvised on the spot. While some of her writings focus on an ancient, eastern Judaism, the concept is fluid; The Nights of Tino of Baghdad (1907) is a series of prose poems narrated by a Muslim princess who falls for a Greek boy.

As with many of Lasker-Schüler’s contemporaries, the East provided a zone of fantasy, a place where she could transcend social roles, playact as both a woman and a man, and be the “Wild Jew” who not only rejected assimilated, bourgeois German Judaism, but also the Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews whom she scorned, as did most German Jews. Yet this cultural appropriation was also a reflexive response to the many antisemites who regarded Jews as an alien, “Oriental” presence in German society. Lasker-Schüler recalls that, as a child, she would open her eyes so wide that it shocked her Pietist neighbors, making her “look so inspired and strange, so exotic.” Echoing her father’s prankish spirit, she writes, “One must be a clown to be understood by the public.” The translator James J. Conway sees in this notion “a highly modern idea of hybrid identity,” a rejection of being reduced to a single thing.

This hybridity lends much of Lasker-Schüler’s work an in-betweenness spanning eras and movements without being wholly one or another. She is too flowery for the expressionists and too formal for the modernists. She’s interested in love and the past and the moon rather than the city or modern society. Although her poems are highly structured, they lean on neologisms that take advantage of German’s agglutinative qualities—allowing sound to embody the image. Take one of her most famous poems, “Ein Alter Tibetteppich” (1910). That long string of t’s and p’s collapses when translated as “An Old Tibetan Rug,” per Brooks Haxton, as does any attempt to rhyme “love” and “Tibetan rug,” as Lasker-Schüler does with “liebet” and “Teppichtibet.” Her original skips off the tongue, with its repetitions that follow the eponymous tapestry’s warp and weft. This is to say nothing of the single word comprising the second line of the third stanza: “Maschentausendabertausendweit.” I like Janine Canan’s translation of “thousands upon thousands of meshes wide” more than Haxton’s “with its weft of a thousand colors,” yet neither phrase fully encompasses the scope of the original, nor conveys the compactness of that compound, in which thousands give on to thousands without a gap. Lasker-Schüler and her expressionist contemporaries celebrated the potential of German as a creative language, much more so than the antisemites who decried this inventiveness as Jewish “linguistic syphilis.”

If this seems a kind of idyll, it’s only because it could not last. After her divorce from Lewin, she sent her sickly son Paul to a school in the Odenwald, whose 600 marks-per-quarter tuition swallowed almost all of her minimal earnings. Friends, including Karl Kraus, raised funds for her, which rarely lasted. She grew irritated and erratic, harassing Walden and his new wife. When she didn’t win the 1913 Kleist Prize, she wrote furious letters to her friends on the committee: “I have no money—am alone.”

Lasker-Schüler lost many who were dear to her during those years. Marc died on the Western Front during World War I. Trakl died of a cocaine overdose while recuperating in a military hospital in Krakow. Holzmann died in a Russian psychiatric prison. Like the woodcuts of Käthe Kollwitz, Lasker-Schüler’s postwar work takes on a directness born of mourning. “I am fathomless to our friends / and am become a stranger,” she writes in “Senna Hoy.” Trakl’s shadow haunts her room at dusk, the bare residue of a man whose “eyes forever held the distance.”

Even in love poems such as “Farewell,” anticipation only precipitates disappointment: “When I heard someone knocking, / it was my own heart.” Her young exultation has burned out, leaving her exhausted. She compares herself with “the lees in the goblet,” praying that when the final man empties her out, God will not let her slip through his grasp. But her faith is not strong: “O God, O God,” she wails, “I am so far from you!”

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Lasker-Schüler was finally awarded the Kleist Prize in November 1932. She had spent the prior decade touring Europe, giving paid readings, and writing the feuilletons that make up Concert. She lived meagerly in furnished rooms. Her right arm was frequently in a splint, as she developed what was likely carpal tunnel. She composed very little poetry between 1917 and the 1930s, and seemed to have become increasingly isolated: when her son Paul died of tuberculosis in 1927, few besides Gottfried Benn attended the funeral.

The Nationalist press denounced her Kleist win. Her “hebraic poetry . . . has nothing to say to us Germans,” spat the Völkische Beobachter. Only two months after she celebrated the Prize with a reading at the Schubert-Saal concert hall, Hitler was named chancellor. In April 1933, Lasker-Schüler was attacked by a Nazi stormtrooper outside of her hotel. She fled Germany and did not return. In May, students burned her books outside of the Berlin State Opera. Then that fall, Benn and 87 other artists signed a pledge of allegiance to the Nazi government—a personal betrayal—and many of her radical associates were murdered at the Oranienburg concentration camp.

“My Blue Piano,” Lasker-Schüler’s most famous poem, describes a large, beautiful instrument which the poet cannot play. “Ever since the world went savage,” it has been banished to the cellar, its keyboard smashed, a “dead blue thing” which only sings for the rats who scuttle across it. Expressing the futility of poetry in an age of extremes, the poem is also a plea to the Angel who might open wide the door to heaven to one “who has eaten such bitter bread,” even though this is a forbidden act. However futile it might have seemed, Lasker-Schüler continued to write, producing a final slate of alternately stark and ecstatic poems.

Collected in My Blue Piano (1943), these late poems follow the course of her exile. “[I] wake at dawn by a strange wall,” she writes. “I placed my fate in hard hands.” She fled first to Zurich, and made two trips to Palestine, aided by benefactors like Sylvain Guggenheim and Carola Kaufmann. As a refugee, she was forbidden to work in Switzerland but could not afford to stay without giving readings. She constantly struggled with the Swiss government over visa extensions, and relied on the Jewish community of Zurich to pay her rent. The process wore her down: when Gershom Scholem came across her in Jerusalem, she seemed “right on the brink of madness.” Eleven days later he downgraded her to “a ruin more haunted than inhabited by madness.” She picked fights, even with her benefactors and artistic supporters, who included Klaus Mann. “No one who has ever had anything to do with me has not suffered for it,” she later wrote.

In March 1939 she left Switzerland on a third trip to Palestine, intending to sort out her paperwork and return. She never did. Supported by a monthly stipend from the publisher Salman Schocken, she eventually settled in Jerusalem. She enjoyed the company of fellow Jewish exiles like Scholem and Martin Buber, but after her years of fantasizing, the East was a qualified disappointment. She resented the development of buildings, such as the King David Hotel, disdained the large number of Yiddish speakers, and thought the ancient city had become entirely too modern. During her 1937 trip, the main Zionist and cultural organizations refused to allow her to read in their rooms. “Erez Israel,” she puns, had become “Erez Misrael.” “Even David,” she writes, “would have packed up and left.” (Presumably she appreciated the safety.)

She settled into life in Jerusalem, even if her old life would not leave her. “But now cannot remember where I was, before this world,” she writes, “And my nostalgia will not end!” Lasker-Schüler dedicates My Blue Piano to “my never-to-be-forgotten friends in the cities of Germany—and to those who like myself were driven out, and are now scattered throughout the world.” She fell deeply in love with the (married) scholar Ernst Simon, marking a late turn toward ecstatic love poetry. In “To the Beloved,” she compares his body to a golden meadow, and describes a path made of turquoise that leads to her lap. She sends her beloved fresh kisses and “greetings wrapped in blue clouds” from deep within a dream. Yet this love cannot be consummated: “Forever I sought you—my feet still bleed . . . And still I fear that the dream / will close its gate.” Elsewhere she commands, “Do not extinguish my heart.” Though he appreciated Lasker-Schüler’s poetry, Simon did not reciprocate her feelings.

Still, Lasker-Schüler never turned away from the fate of her country, or the Jews in Europe. In an unfinished poem titled “A Single Human Being,” she declares that “A single human being is often a whole people.” She continues: “God does not want to be watered / with blood. / He who kills his neighbor, / kills God budding in his heart.” And in the strangest of her posthumous works, the play I and I, she stages the downfall of the Third Reich as the result of a conversation between Faust and Mephistopheles—the triumph of an older German tradition against upstart Nazi fascism. It is a thoroughly metatextual work, which Lasker-Schüler herself introduces and closes out, and occasionally interrupts to give the actors notes. A Jewish scarecrow, King Solomon, and the theater director Max Reinhardt all make appearances. Deep in the midnight of the Shoah, Lasker-Schüler was still attempting to reconcile Christian and Jewish Germans—having the Nazis reject Goethe as too Christian, and Jesus Christ as a “Jewish priest” of no use, now that “our Führer, Germania’s god,” has ascended to the throne.

There are no photographs from these final years. Lasker-Schüler turned completely away. In Miron Sima’s 1944 sketches, the poet appears haggard and thin, bent forward under the weight of her hat, her clothes hanging off of her. She muttered to herself on the street, and neighborhood boys threw stones at her. Her heart began to fail, and on January 22, 1945, she died in the Hadassah Hospital. “No one shall rob me / of my freedom,” she writes in one of her final poems. “If I die somewhere along the way, / you will come, dear Mother, // and lift me on your wing / to heaven.”