[In the following essay, Guder surveys the major themes of Lasker-Schüler's poetry.]

Examining the whole body of [Lasker-Schüler's] poetry from the publication of her first volume of verse, Styx, in Berlin, 1902, to Mein Blaues KinFier, written in exile and published in 1943 in Jerusalem, two years before the poet's death, one realizes that throughout her whole life her poetry was the expression of one unchanging experience. This experience was the outcome of an aim which was deeply rooted in Else Lasker-Schuler's thought and feeling, and of which a clear definition is given by the poet herself in her essay 'Meine Andacht':

Ich habe mich stets befleissight, nicht nach Gold aber nach Gott zu graben; manchmal stiess ich auf Himmel [Gedichte 1902-1943, 1959].

When Else Lasker-Schuler is classified as one of the German Expressionists, with whom she has, no doubt, stylistic characteristics in common (her second husband was Herwarth Walden, the editor of Der Sturm), it is too readily overlooked that for Else Lasker-Schüler God is not 'die grosse, nur mit unerhörter Ekstase zu erreichende Spitze des Gefdhls' (Edschmid) [quoted by Arno Schirokauer, 'Expressionismus der Lyrik,' in Germanistische Studien, 1957] but the God of her fathers. Werner Kraft, a close friend of the poet, bears this out when he writes 'die montheistische judische Glaubenskraft gab ihren Dichtungen eine Grundlage, die sie in ihren besten Schöpfungen vor jeder mythischen Selbstzerspriihung bewahrte' [Wort and Gedanke, 1959]. Floundering in cosmic mysticism, exaggerated eruption of feeling, purely rhetorical pathos—these weaknesses which became more and more obvious in the expressionistic lyric, are practically non-existent in the poetry of Else Lasker-Schuler. With the exception of the Hebruisehe Balladen, Else Lasker-Schüler, too, wrote her poems in the first person singular, but she is not subjective in the worst sense of the word, i.e. 'ich-besessen'. Her early poem 'Mein Volk' (1902) embodies her consciousness that the I of a great poet is a functional I, as distinguished from the purely biographical I:

Und immer, immer noch der Widerhall
In mir,
Wenn schauerlich gen Ost
Das morsche Felsegebein
Mein Volk zu Gott schreit.

Even at a time when the motif of her poems was increasingly homelessness, uprootedness and dread of life, she, the ageing, ailing woman, remained concerned with the efficiency of her poetic voice as mediator, so that her last poems, too, with the same subjective tone transcend all that is purely individual and are timeless symbols of the fate of man and of the artist in an age of increasing inhumanity. The poet's sense of responsibility, as she explains in her religious reflections in the essay 'Das Gebet', links him with the prophet. In particular the poem 'Mein Blaues Klavier' with its subjective tone, which gives its title to her last volume, is not only the personal lament of Else Lasker-Schüler but also the expression of the tragic situation of the poet-prophet in a world which no longer heeds his warning:

Ich habe zu Hause ein blaues Klavier
Und kenne doch keine Note.

Es steht im Dunkel der Kellertür,
Seitdem die Welt verrohte.

The second line especially implies that in the present situation the poet's inspiration has failed.

The most dominant stylistic characteristic of Else Lasker-Schüler's poetry is her tendency towards pictographic expression. She, who herself could draw with no little skill, experienced life 'tableaumassig', as she describes it in a letter to Herwarth Walden, adding 'ich sterbe am Leben und atme im Bilde wieder auf'. These words confirm the affinity of her poetry with painting and indicate that she knew how to contain even the most subjective anguish in imagery. This is especially noticeable in poems which she addressed to Gottfried Benn, the expression of the purely personal experience of her great love which Benn did not return. The pictorial presentation of this most painful emotion prevents it from becoming obtrusively sentimental. The poem 'Lauter Diamant', beginning

Ich hab in deinem Antlitz
Meinen Sternenhimmel ausgeträumt,

is a suitable illustration of how the purely subjective is objectified into a common human situation as expressed in the last stanza

Dunkel ist es—
Es flackert nur noch
Das Licht meiner Seele.

But Else Lasker-Schuler is by no means always so successful in this, often not when she gives herself up completely to an experience of ecstatic bliss, especially when this experience is more imagined than real. In one of her 'Monch' poems she says:

Und mein Herz wird ein Weihbecken,
Besterne dich mit meinem Blut;

This is an image drawn from the Roman Church, and although the figure of Christ attracted Else Lasker-Schüler, it was not as Christ the Son of God, but as the One who was persecuted but did not retaliate. Some of her poems, if only in occasional verses, come near to the folk-song, and this brings with it a soulful tone. 'Der Sturz kopfiuber in den Kitsch, in gemachte Susslichkeit, ist oft unvermeidbar', states Georges Schlocker, [in Expressionismus, 1956], and quotes as example 'An den Gralprinzen':

Wenn wir uns ansehn,
Blühn unsere Augen

Und wir staunen
Vor unseren Wundern—nicht?
Und alles wird so süss.

It is the wonder of the awakening of love which transfigures earthly existence—'Ich glaube wir sind Engel' the poem ends. Whilst the lines expressing the effect of love, which to Else Lasker-Schüler is something of a miracle, have some artistic merit, the line 'Und alles wird so siiss' shows how small the distance is between genuine bliss and sentimentality. Within the whole body of her poetry, however, such lines are rather the exception than the rule; they need therefore not tip the scale too heavily in the final assessment. As well as those quoted from 'Der Monch', the line 'Bliihn unsere Augen' is noteworthy in so far as it shows a feature of expressionistic style—to invest objects and their purpose with qualities and meanings which are not usually attributed to them. The same principle applies to the way in which Else Lasker-Schiller uses colour in her poetry. Colours are ascribed to objects to which they normally do not belong—'blaues Klavier,' 'blaue Tote,' 'schwarze Sterne,' 'schwarze Taube'—or to abstracts which are beyond visual perception—'blaue Allmacht,' 'blaue Seele'. At the same time Else Lasker-Schüler often uses colours with their more traditional meaning. Her tribute to Karl Sonnenschein, 'Dem grossen Armenapostel und Dichter' contains a description which is typical of this usage in her poetry as well:

Er war ja heilig. Seine Seele, eine fromme drei-farbige
Fahne; ihr weisses Linnen, ein Symbol seines makellosen
Wandels; der rote Streif hielt sein Leben wach und lebendig
Für den aufopfernden Dienst an der Menschheit; doch das zarte
Blau führte ihn ungehemmt in die höhere Welt.

Blue for her, as it was for her friend Franz Marc, is the colour with greatest significance. In what is probably her best-known poem, 'Gebet', which belongs to the mid-period of her work, the second stanza may be interpreted as one of Else Lasker-Schüler's many avowals of her poetic mission:

Und wandle immer tiefer in die Nacht…
Ich habe Liebe in die Welt gebracht—

Dass blau zu blühen jedes Herz vermag,—
Und hab ein Leben müde mich gewacht,
In Gott gehüllit den dunklen Atemschlag.

Blue signifies untiring striving towards God, and for Else Lasker-Schuler becomes the symbol of her poetry and of the manifestation of divine power. Even in moments of deepest anguish, as after the death of her only son, who died of tuberculosis in his teens, she remained aware of that power. In her essay 'Meine Andacht' she writes:

… und man vermag nur zu knien, sein Kind im Sterben zu erreichen. Der Himmel ist es eben, die blaue Verklräung, die den Sterbenden von dem Zuruckgebliebenen trennt.

Thus her believing trust in God prevented her from yielding to the temptation of making her own Ego the measure of all things. In the poem 'An mein Kind,' which she wrote after this blow of fate, stating that her eyes will no longer turn towards the world because even the green of the leaves—for Else Lasker-Schüler the life-giving colour—hurts them, she continues:

—Aber der Ewige wohnt in mir.
Die Liebe zu dir ist das Bildnis,
Das man sich von Gott machen darf.

Obedience is for her the bridge to God. It is with this same obedience that she accepts God's curse on the world. The world before and the world after the Fall are ever present in her poetry. Grey represents the turning away of man from God or man's doubt of God, which Else Lasker-Schuler, too, is not spared. Her early poem 'Weltende' is typical of man's existential dread in a time of which [Friedrich] Nietzsche proclaimed 'Gott ist tot'.

Es ist ein Weinen in der Welt,
Als ob der liebe Gott gestorben wär,
Und der bleierne Schatten, der niederfällt,
Lastet grabesschwer.

And even in her late poem 'Hingabe' Else Lasker-Schüler confesses:

Mit einem Kleid aus Zweifel war ich angetan,
Das greises Leid geweight für mich am Zeitrad spann.
Und jedes Bild, das ich von dieser Welt gewann,
Verlor ich doppelt, und auch das, was ich ersann.

What she imaged to herself was the re-creation of a world without conflict.

Since the Hebraic Ballads appeared in 1913, Else Lasker-Schüler's poems have been viewed too one-sidedly as the manifestation of Oriental myths, a view which was aided by the fact that she referred to herself as Prinz Jussuf von Theben (Egypt). Consequently the influence on her poetry of Else Lasker-Schüler's encounter with life has not been sufficiently recognized. The one myth which characterizes her work as a whole is that of the lost Paradise. In the poems in which she regains Paradise, even if only momentarily, she creates a reciprocating love-relation. The love aspect is hardly ever missing from any poem even though it be a love remembered. In the power of love she believes firmly, or rather clings to it desperately, because for her love is literally identical with Heaven. In her essay 'Freundschaft und Liebe' she defines love as a state 'in den man durch himmlische Geschebnisse versetzt wird. Ein Zustand vor oder nach dem Tode.' Poems which illustrate this state place man once more in the proximity of God, in the midst of a shining world full of vigour and energy, in which the law of gravity does not exist and man is therefore free from the fetters of earthly existence. A typical example of this is the early poem 'Friihling,' one of those poems with an abundance of detail which appears to transpose a painted picture into words. The experience is summed up in the last stanza:

Der liebe Gott träumt seinen Kindertraum
Vom Paradies—von seinen zwei Gespielen,
Und grosse Blumen sehn uns an von Dornenstielen …
Die düstre Erde hing noch grün am Baum.

The erotic tone which is sometimes noticeable in poems of similar content will be more easily understood if it is remembered that in poems which conjure up an idyllic existence, as in her conception of love in general, Else Lasker-Schüler goes beyond the purely human plane. The poem 'Ein Liebeslied' from Mein Blues Kiavier comes to mind. It begins

Komm zu mir in der Nacht—wir schlafen engverschlungen.
Müde bin ich sehr, vom Wachen einsam.

and ends

Wir wollen wie zwei seltene Tiere liebesruhen
Im hohen Rohre hinter dieser Welt.

Between lies a picture which is best illustrated by the lines

Es öffnen Blumen sich vor allen Quellen
Und fȧrben sich mit deiner Augen Immortellen…

The link between Else Lasker-Schüler and Franz Marc was strengthened through a common conception of animal life. Having stated in a letter to him that she dares anybody to say anything against birds, she continues 'es sind die hochsten Menschen, sie leben zwischen Luft und Gott, wir leben zwischen Erde und Grab'. Even if this remark was called forth by the narrowness and poverty of her Berlin lodgings at the time, it reveals something of that deeper sense which sees the animal in unbroken harmony with the original Creation. Franz Marc's aim was, as he himself defined it, 'Ein unirdisches Sein zu zeigen, das hinter allem wohnt, den Spiegel des Lebens zu zerbrechen, dass wir in das Sein schauen [quoted by Walter Hess in Dokumente zum Verstdndis der modernen Malerei, 1958]. He is attracted by the mystery of the idea of how nature presents itself to the eye of the animal. 'Wie armselig seelenlos ist unsere Konvention, Tiere in eine Landschaft zu setzen, die unseren Augen zugehort, statt uns in die Seele des Tiers zu versenken, um dessen Bildkreis zu erraten.' The inner bond between man and animal is there, even though the attempt must remain incomplete as long as the artist is earthbound. The bond consists in the fact that they both originate from the same act of creation. From this angle many of Else Lasker-Schüler's love poems embody a myth, and move, not on the level of this world but in the sphere of the original harmony of Creation (hence 'hinter dieser Welt'). This experience finds symbolic expression in her poetry in the colour gold, as, for instance, in an earlier poem, also entitled 'Ein Liebeslied,' where gold carries a sacred meaning:

Aus goldnem Odem
Erschufen uns Himmel.
O, wie wir uns lieben …

In the light of this it is understandable that in her poetry there is no conflict between sensuality and the spirit. For her man's guilt manifests itself in 'man's inhumanity to man' as a result of his disobedience to God. The necessity that man should realize that he must find his way back to God is a recurring motif in many of her longer poems. Her meditation at the end of the year, in one of the last poems that she wrote in Germany, 'Letzter Abend im Jahr,' culminates in her concern for the metaphysical fate of man:

O Gott, wie kann der Mensch verstehen,
Warum der Mensch haltlos vom Menschen bricht,
Sich wieder sammeln muss im höheren Geschehen.

In addition to this anxiety comes the fear that God must have turned His face away from man.

The possibility of feeling herself secure in a transfigured world even at a time when her poems written in exile increasingly reflect her despair of this world and preparation for death, is one of the most striking features of her poetry. This can be partly explained by the fact that love for her continued to signify Heaven and the power that ultimately would transform the world. Whether as a young girl or as an aged, banished woman, she writes of love with the same magic. One of her last poems, 'Ich saume liebentlang' (a word of her own coinage) recalling the memory of past love, ends

Es lächelten die Immortellen hold in deinem Angesicht,
Als du im Liebespsahme unserer Melodie
Die Völker tauchtest und erhobest sie.

It is equally remarkable that Else Lasker-Schüler never yielded to the temptation of escapism (one of her early poems bears the title 'Weltflucht'). This is due to the high conception she had of the poet's role to lead man, estranged from God, back to his Creator. In his essay 'Goethe und Heine' [in Der Dichter und die Zeit, 1947] Fritz Strich states 'Nur der Schmerz macht den Juden Schopferisch. Heine musste ihn sich einbilden, wenn er ihn nicht empfand.' Else Lasker-Schuler did not invent a kind of romantic 'Weltschmerz' for herself; she really felt her deep anguish, felt it as man in a loveless world, and felt it as a poet who had no 'Volk'. She created for herself the solace of a mythical world, but one in which God and love are always the centre. Her love poems are therefore basically religious poems. Her legacy to our times is summed up in a verse from her late poem 'Herbst':

Das ewige Leben dem, der viel von Liebe weiss zu sagen.
Ein Mensch der Liebe kann nur auferstehen!
Hass schachtelt ein, wie hoch die Fackel auch mag schlagen.

Kurt Schumann has given one of the most sensitive appreciations of Else Lasker-Schüler, but here, too, there is a tendency to see in her a typical representative of Expressionism. Nowadays it can act as an obstacle to the appreciation of a poet's work if the impression is created that it is typical of a largely time-conditioned movement which reached its climax in the last few years before the First World War. The question is whether her poems are those of a genuine poet who has created timeless works of art. In her travel journal Dos Hebrierland, written after her first stay in Palestine, Else Lasker-Schüler says of herself:

Ich bin nicht Hebräerin der Hebräer willen, aber Gottes willen! Doch dieses Bekenntnis schliesst die Liebe und Treue unerschütterlicher Ergebenheit zu Seinem Volke ein.

The religious aspect therefore remains the most genuine element in her verse. Her description of the outer world is significant for the expression of her inner religious experience. Her late poem 'An Apollon,' for instance, is typical of her technique. In the first stanza she perceives in the impressionistic manner a fleeting stir of life:

Es ist am Abend im April.
Der Käfer kriecht ins dichte Moos.
Er hat so Angst—die Welt so gross!

This expression of fear leads in the second stanza to the image of the whirlwinds wrangling with God, an image from which arises her expression of her submission to God:

Ich halte meine Hande still ergeben
Auf meinem frommbezwungnen Schoss.

The three stanzas that follow are her reflection on the poet's experience in this world, a reflection which is in some ways a parallel to the experience of the natural object in the first stanza. The imagery in this reflection, the stream of consciousness in the poem, as it were, though emancipated from a logical connexion with the description in the first and the image in the second stanza, contributes nevertheless to the psychological continuity of the poem by the poet's adherence to the same consciousness throughout. An insecure human being experiences a reality which is under constant threat. Else Lasker-Schüler's insecurity was overcome by her faith. Her submission to God prevented her from developing an expressionistic problematic nature which projects its own problems constantly into outer reality. In one of her major poems written in exile, 'Jerusalem,' she begins by comparing the Holy City to a graveyard, and then in the second stanza continues

Es starren Gründe hart den Wanderer an—
Und er versinkt in ihre starren Nächte.
Ich habe Angst, die ich nicht überwältigen kann.

Thus Jerusalem has become symptomatic of change and decay. But as the epigraph anticipates 'Gott baute aus Seinem Riuckgrat: Palastina; aus einem einzigen Knochen: Jerusalem,' Jerusalem is at the same time symbolically the spiritual backbone of the world, and thus becomes a symbol of regeneration. The spiritual rebirth is envisaged as completed in the prophecy with which the poem ends:

Es grüssen uns
Des 'Einzigen Gottes' lebendige Fahnen,
Grünende Hände, die des Lebens Odem säen.

Furthermore, this poem is a good example of Else Lasker-Schüler's ability to express her doubts and fears, and also her religious trust, without exaggerating either her disillusionment or her exultation. This gives her poetry not only convincing substance but also the power of language reminiscent of the prophets. Her diction is especially direct when she uses Old Testament stories as parables. The events serve as symbols of inner experience. The biblical story, as in the ballad of 'Abraham und Isaak' with its addition of the sea and an altar decorated with sponges and shells, may be altered by the poet's imagination:

Und Gott ermahnte: Abraham!!
Er brach vom Kamm des Meeres Muscheln ab und Schwamm
Hoch auf den Blöcken den Altar zu schmücken,

but the biblical spirit, Abraham's obedience, is kept as a timeless symbol:

Und trug den einzigen Sohn gebunden auf den Rücken
Zu werden seinem grossen Herrn gerecht—
Der aber liebte seinen Knecht.

Already forty years ago these Hebraic Ballads were adequately described by Meir Wiener [in Juden in derDeutschen Literature, 1922] as 'Kleine althebraische Hoheliedlein'. When Else Lasker-Schuler uses biblical tropes it is by no means necessary to know the corresponding biblical passages. For instance, a poem which neither in time nor content belongs to the Hebraic Ballads, 'Ein Lied,' begins with the lament,

Hinter meinen Augen stehen Wasser,
Die muss ich alle weinen,

which is as likely to be a spontaneous expression of her own feeling as a conscious recall of the prophet's lament in Jeremiah ix. i.

With this a criterion is given by which Else Lasker-Schiller's poetry may be judged: true art must have an independent life, and the reader should not need explanations of the poet's subjective angle. Else Lasker-Schüler combines self-expression with communication, and thus her poetry is valid at the particular as well as at the universal level. Hers is a lyric verse which does not employ rhyme or word-music as ends in themselves. Whether she writes in free verse, as she generally does in poems addressed to particular persons, or in rhyme, in poems containing moments of revelation—a revelation of the state of the world, of her position in the world, or of transcendence—her poems are always carried by a rhythm adequate to their meaning.