Else Lasker-Schüler

She came into the world on February 11, 1869 in Elberfeld, a town in the Wupper valley integrated since 1929 into the Wuppertal agglomeration, under the name Elisabeth Schüler [BnF, Notice d'autorité] [Deutsche Biographie]. The family belonged to the German Jewish bourgeoisie long established in the Rhineland; her father worked in banking and business, and the household offered the youngest daughter a cherished childhood, imbued with a Judaism experienced both as family heritage and as a reservoir of images.

This Rhineland origin is not incidental. The region, industrious and Protestant, then knew an emancipated Jewish community, largely acculturated, whose children attended the same schools and salons as Christian bourgeoisie. Else grew up in this milieu of successful assimilation, where Jewish belonging combined without apparent friction with pride in being German. The early death of her mother, a figure to whom she would devote lasting veneration, and that of a beloved brother, marked childhood with a grief that surfaces constantly in her future work. This dedication to the mother would find its most formal expression decades later, when the poetess would place at the head of her Gesammelte Gedichte these words: "I dedicate this collection to my dear mother and to her grandson Paul." The native city would remain in her poems a mythified place, matrix of a nostalgia that exile would only intensify [Kluesener, Else Lasker-Schueler in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, 1980].

In 1899 her first poems appeared; that same year, a new life began. Married in 1899 to physician Berthold Lasker — whose name she retained joined to hers —, she divorced as early as 1903 [Persée, Portrait d'une poétesse]. It is in Berlin, where she settled, that her legend took shape. The German capital, at the turn of the century, was teeming with cabarets, reviews and avant-garde circles; the young woman became a central figure of artistic bohemia there.

Her second marriage, to writer and impresario Herwarth Walden, founder of the journal and gallery Der Sturm, placed her at the heart of modernity. An brilliant circle gravitated around her: she counted among her close associates Karl Kraus, Georg Trakl and Gottfried Benn, with whom she was linked for a time [Forward, 2011 ; Literatur Rheinland]. A constellation of painters and poets recognized her as one of the rare women truly active in the expressionist movement [Forward, 2011]. Painter Franz Marc dedicated to her his celebrated Tower of Blue Horses, while Martin Buber, despite their quarrels over art and religion, held her to be a "true poet" [Forward, 2011]. From these years came the collections that established a new language, sensual and hieratic, where the biblical hymn crossed verbal invention: Styx (1902), Der siebente Tag (1905), Meine Wunder (1911) and the Hebräische Balladen (1913) mark the stages of this conquest [K. J. Skrodzki, Die Bücher von Else Lasker-Schüler].

The most singular trait of her personality lies in this mythology of self that she builds relentlessly. Else Lasker-Schüler costumes herself, renames herself, presents herself as "Jussuf, prince of Thebes," signs her drawings with this name, stages herself as an Oriental sovereign. The prose collection Der Prinz von Theben (1914) and the Nächte Tino von Bagdads (1907) unfold this Orient of fantasy, half-biblical half-legendary, which has no geographic reality but responds to a deep need for belonging [Deutsche Biographie; EMMA, 2020].

This fabrication of legend is not mere eccentricity. It reflects the position of a Jewish woman in Wilhelmine Germany, seeking in a reinvented Orient the homeland that European modernity denied her. Her engagement with Heinrich Heine — German Jewish poet in exile, whose heir she felt herself to be — nourishes this double consciousness [Shedletzky, in The Jewish Reception of Heinrich Heine, 1992]. To this foundation is added a plastic dimension: as much a draughtswoman as a poet, she illustrates her own books, mingling line with word. The cover image of the Gesammelte Gedichte of 1920 is thus from her hand, as she herself specifies in the prefatory note to the edition — characteristic gesture of a total artist who refuses to separate writing from visual representation. Her sheets would later be struck by the Nazis: drawings were seized in 1937 as "degenerate art" from Berlin collections [Literatur Rheinland].

The publication of Gesammelte Gedichte constitutes the first gesture of self-anthology that the poetess accomplishes, and the material history of this book is in itself a document on German literary life in the interwar period. The original edition appears in 1917 in Leipzig at the Verlag der Weißen Bücher, in a volume of two hundred twenty-six pages; it has since been digitized by the HathiTrust Digital Library and serves as the basis for the complete transcription available on Wikisource in German [Die gesammelten Gedichte, 1917, HathiTrust / Wikisource; Wikimedia Commons, file Else_Lasker_Schueler_Die_gesammelten_Gedichte_1917.pdf].

The collection bears as epigraph a verse by Richard Dehmel — "Täubchen, das in seinem eignen Blute schwimmt" (the little dove swimming in its own blood) — a borrowing that immediately places the book under the sign of sorrowful lyricism and fidelity to a German poetic tradition that the Jewish poetess claims as her own. The dedication of the entire volume — "to my dear mother and to her grandson Paul" — brings together in a single formula the two founding griefs of the work: the mother who died too soon, and Paul, son of the poetess born in 1899, himself destined for premature death [New item added, 23/08/2026; K. J. Skrodzki, Die Bücher von Else Lasker-Schüler].

The poem bearing the incipit of Dehmel's verse occupies pages 94 to 96 of the volume. The presence of this epigraph is not merely ornamental: Dehmel, a tutelary figure of German symbolism at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, represents precisely that world of German poetry in which Lasker-Schüler trained herself and which she intends both to prolong and to transcend. To cite Dehmel at the threshold is to assert a lineage while putting it under tension, for the language that the poetess deploys in the collection is already quite other — stranger, more biblical, more opaque.

A new edition appears in 1920, this time in Munich at Kurt Wolff Verlag, printed by the Spamersche Buchdruckerei of Leipzig. The mention "Sechstes bis zehntes Tausend" — sixth to tenth thousand — attests to a cumulative print run of at least ten thousand copies, a remarkable figure for a poetry collection, which speaks to the actual audience of the poetess in Weimar Germany [New item added, 23/08/2026; K. J. Skrodzki, Die Bücher von Else Lasker-Schüler]. This 1920 edition differs from the original in its cover, illustrated by the author herself — extending the gesture of artist-poet that runs through the entire work — and by an additional dedication, distinct from that of the volume: the cover image is offered "to Franz Marc," the painter friend who died at Verdun in 1916. This double homage — to the mother and son in the dedication of the text, to Marc in that of the drawing — transforms the book into a monument to intimate deaths, erected as Germany had scarcely emerged from the war that had reaped its generation.

Between 1917 and 1920, an intermediate edition had appeared in 1919, constituting a second wave before the third in 1920 [Planetlyrik, Else Lasker-Schüler: Sämtliche Gedichte, 2016]. These successive reprints signal that Die gesammelten Gedichte is not a fixed object but a living book, reworked and offered at each printing to new readers, at the very moment when the poetess enters into her full creative maturity.

The Great War breaks the enchanted circle. Franz Marc and Georg Trakl, her friends, die among the victims of the conflict; the poetess transposes this grief into her work, notably in a book published in 1919 [Zukunft braucht Erinnerung]. The dedication on the cover of the 1920 reissue of Gesammelte Gedichte to Franz Marc is part of this movement of grieving loyalty: poetry as a tomb, the book as a place of symbolic burial for those whom war has taken away.

The following years, marked by material precariousness, see her nonetheless recognized as a leading figure in German letters. A new grief, decisive, strikes her: her son Paul dies on 14 December 1927, an ordeal from which she never fully recovers and which gradually causes her to withdraw from public life [Zukunft braucht Erinnerung]. Paul was born in 1899, the very year of her first marriage — his birth and the birth of poetry merge in the family chronology, and it was he whom the dedication of Gesammelte Gedichte had greeted as the cherished "grandson" of the departed mother.

Yet it is to this dark period that consecration comes: in 1932, she receives the Kleist Prize, one of the highest German literary distinctions, crowning the whole of her work [Forward, 2011; Deutsche Biographie; Zukunft braucht Erinnerung]. But the honor comes at an inopportune moment: the celebration is already shadowed by mounting hostility. The following year, the Nazis' rise to power transforms the celebrated poetess into a hunted woman.

From 1933 onwards, threatened as a Jewish woman and avant-garde artist, she fled Germany. She first found asylum in Switzerland, where the authorities granted her only precarious residence, forbidding her to work there [IdRef, via Persée]. There began the wandering of the emigrant, this condition that would become the heart of her last work and posthumous reception [Hedgepeth, Ueberall blicke ich nach einem heimatlichen Boden aus, 1994].

After travels in Palestine, she settled there permanently at the end of the decade, in Jerusalem, where she was caught by the outbreak of war. The holy city, so long dreamed of in her verses, proved harsh and difficult for the old destitute and isolated woman; actual exile scarcely coincided with the Orient of her poems [Bodenheimer, Die auferlegte Heimat, 1995]. Yet it was there that she composed one of her masterpieces, the collection Mein blaues Klavier (My Blue Piano, 1943), a twilight song of loss and faithfulness. Else Lasker-Schüler died in Jerusalem on 22 January 1945, a few months before the collapse of the regime that had driven her out [Wikipedia; BnF; EMMA, 2020]. She rests on the Mount of Olives.

Born Elisabeth Schüler, the poetess made her name an object of creation. The surname Schüler ("the schoolboy," "the disciple") ceded first place to Lasker, inherited from her first husband, which she retained throughout her life and under which posterity knows her. Under this authorial name, she superimposed fictional identities — Tino de Bagdad, Prince Jussuf — to the point that the boundary between person and character became blurred.

Her death on Palestinian soil opened a long history of reception. Post-war Germany, seeking to reconnect with the culture it had renounced, undertook to "repatriate" her symbolically: as early as 1951, Ernst Ginsberg's edition of Dichtungen und Dokumente and Werner Kraft's essay initiated her rehabilitation [Ginsberg, 1951; Kraft, 1951]. The following decades witnessed the unfolding of a mythification, analyzed by critics as the ambivalent return of a Jewish émigré to German memory [Hessing, Die Heimkehr einer juedischen Emigrantin, 1993]. Sigrid Bauschinger's biography (2004) has since established the documentary foundation of her life [Bauschinger, Else Lasker-Schüler. Biographie, 2004].

In this critical landscape, the material bibliography reconstructed by Karl Jürgen Skrodzki, which describes book by book the editions published during her lifetime, sheds precious light on the concrete conditions of publication: print runs, successive publishers — Verlag der Weißen Bücher, Kurt Wolff, Paul Cassirer — and the paratextual choices that make each volume a deliberate act [K. J. Skrodzki, Die Bücher von Else Lasker-Schüler]. Translated late into French — Mon piano bleu brings together several collections in the first edition of her complete poems — she remains today a reference point of European poetry [Persée, Portrait d'une poétesse].

Since 1993, a dramatic prize bearing her name has been awarded by the Pfalztheater of Kaiserslautern on behalf of the Rhineland-Palatinate Foundation for Culture — an institutional tribute that consecrates, beyond poetry, her dimension as a dramatist, which the play Die Wupper (1909) had inaugurated.

Else Lasker-Schüler, born Elisabeth Schüler (1869–1945) — German Jewish poetess and playwright, born in Elberfeld and died in Jerusalem, she was one of the rare women of the Expressionist movement. Author of Der Prinz von Theben, of the play Die Wupper and of the collection Mein blaues Klavier, illustrator of her own books — she illustrated by hand the cover of the 1920 edition of Gesammelte Gedichte — she received the Kleist Prize in 1932 before being driven out of Germany by the Nazis. Her work, marked by biblical and Oriental imagination, makes her a major voice of lyrical modernity [Encyclopaedia Judaica ; Deutsche Biographie].

Herwarth Walden (1878–1941) — Writer, composer and avant-garde animator, founder in Berlin of the journal and gallery Der Sturm. Second husband of the poetess, he was one of the great promoters of German Expressionism. Their union, celebrated and then broken, placed Lasker-Schüler at the center of early twentieth-century Berlin's artistic life. Emigrated to the Soviet Union, he disappeared there, victim of the purges [Literatur Rheinland ; Forward, 2011].

Franz Marc (1880–1916) — Expressionist painter, co-founder of the Blaue Reiter. Friend of the poetess, he dedicated to her his celebrated work La Tour des chevaux bleus. His death on the front, during the First World War, was one of the griefs that Lasker-Schüler transposed into her poetry: the 1920 reissue of Gesammelte Gedichte offers him the cover drawing — "I give it to Franz Marc" — as a symbolic tomb printed in ten thousand copies [Nouvelle pièce versée, 23/08/2026 ; Forward, 2011].

Georg Trakl (1887–1914) — Austrian poet, one of the great voices of lyrical Expressionism. Close to Lasker-Schüler within the circle of Der Sturm, he died prematurely during the Great War. The poetess dedicated verses of mourning to him, making his figure one of the reference points of her friendly constellation and one of the symbols of a broken generation [Forward, 2011 ; Zukunft braucht Erinnerung].

Gottfried Benn (1886–1956) — Doctor and Expressionist poet, for a time sentimentally linked to Else Lasker-Schüler. Their relationship nourished the love poetry of the Berliner, to whom he is associated in Gesammelte Gedichte by a cycle addressed to him. Controversial figure for his positions in the early 1930s, he nonetheless remains one of the great German lyricists of the century [Literatur Rheinland ; Tandfonline, Oxford German Studies, 2013].

Richard Dehmel (1863–1920) — German Symbolist and Expressionist poet, tutelary figure of Lasker-Schüler's generation. It is a verse from his work — "Täubchen, das in seinem eignen Blute schwimmt" — that serves as epigraph to the 1917 Gesammelte Gedichte, signaling the filiation that the poetess claimed with the German lyrical tradition while surpassing it through a stranger and more biblical language [Nouvelle pièce versée, 23/08/2026].

Martin Buber (1878–1965) — Philosopher and theorist of Judaism, thinker of dialogue and actor of the Jewish cultural renaissance. Despite their disagreements on art and religion, he recognized in Lasker-Schüler a "true poetess". Settled himself in Jerusalem, he embodies the link between German Jewish culture and the home in Palestine where the poetess ended her life [Forward, 2011].

The life of Else Lasker-Schüler traces a tragic parabola of European Jewish modernity. A cherished child of Rhineland bourgeoisie, queen of Berlin's bohemia, she invented an Orient of words to give herself a homeland; then History forced her into real exile, all the way to Jerusalem, where dream and necessity met in bitterness. Her work, sustained by a language unlike any other, combines the biblical hymn, legendary fantasy, and the pain of mourning.

The material history of the Gesammelte Gedichte — from a first Viennese edition of 1917 to a third printed in ten thousand copies in 1920, covered with a drawing given to a friend dead at the front — tells in its own way the extraordinary creative energy of a woman who, amid the ruins of her intimate life, continued to make books as one erects monuments. These objects, today digitized and accessible, restore the concrete gestures of a poetess who never separated writing from image, dedication from friendship, nor the book from memory.

Her posthumous memory, alternately forgotten, rehabilitated, and mythified, reflects Germany's difficulties in reconciling itself with the culture it had destroyed. There remains, beyond the disputes of reception, one certainty that the archive and reading confirm together: Else Lasker-Schüler stands among the greatest lyric voices in the German language, and her blue piano still resonates, from the Mount of Olives, like the song of an unfindable homeland [Encyclopaedia Judaica; Hessing, 1993].