Else Lasker-Schüler

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An introduction to Your Diamond Dreams Cut Open My Arteries

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In the following excerpt, he provides an overview of Lasker-Schüler's career and the criticism on her works.
SOURCE: An introduction to Your Diamond Dreams Cut Open My Arteries by Else Lasker-Schuler, translated by Robert P. Newton, The University of North Carolina Press, 1982, pp. 3-50.

[Newton is an American educator, translator, and noted scholar of German poetry. In the following excerpt, he provides an overview of Lasker-Schüler's career and the criticism on her works.]

Though the basic themes of Lasker-Schüler's art persist through all of her books, lines of thematic and formal development do exist.… Her first-born (Stvx, 1902) contains, if we may believe the poetess, some poems that had been written in her adolescent years, from the age of fifteen to seventeen. In this volume she had not yet developed her most characteristic metrical style—the two- and three-line, free-verse strophes—but her rhymed forms are often handled freely in terms of meter and stanzaic structure. The use of extravagant, grotesque, intensifying metaphor is already her own. The main themes—love, dejection, religious feeling, her child—are all convoked, but verses astir with a candid erotic passion are more prominent than in her settled years, and, on the whole, the taste of the times shows through. But despite its reflection of literary fashion, the volume contains some fine lyrics.

Echoes of neoromanticism, decadence, and art nouveau can be heard in the titles: "Jealousy," "Instinct," "My Blush," "Nervus Erotis," "Vagabonds," "Old Spring," "Orgy," "Fever," "Eros," "Sensual Ecstasy"; or, in the fashion of romantic demonism: "Damnation," "Chaos," "Weltschmerz," "The Fallen Angel," "Suicide," "Guilt," "Unhappy Hate," "After-Pain," "Revenge," "The Fear Deep in My Blood."

The desire for love is there, and for union, both sexual and spiritual. Complete union is the goal, a spiritual state that rejects real circumstances and exists at a perpetually high pitch. It cannot, like simple friendship, be induced or cultivated; it either takes place between two people or it does not. Lasker-Schüler deprecates mere "love," which is bourgeois, compared with her own overpowering "falling in love" (verliebt sein), a faculty in which she knows that few can match her, for, in the same breath she goes on to say, "Or somebody must have loved me. Did you love me, Herwarth? Who loved me?"

She herself did not hesitate to give the answer: she herself. For the love that remained true after the disappointment of unresponsive and unfaithful lovers was narcissistic; "I am my only immortal love," she said at one time, with obvious pleasure in her aphorism, however painful the fact. A friend, Grete Fischer, opines, "She was in love with love. I hardly believe that she was in love with the men about whom she speaks with such enthusiasm" [Else Lasker-Schüler: Ein Buch zum 100. Geburtstag, 1969]. The poetess confided to Karl Kraus, "I know so many people I write a love poem for six people together"; and "The only important thing is how I give expression to the models. I have nothing further to do with them"; and "I only need people to furnish my stars." She wrote to Walden, "I never perceived people other than as a frame in which I put myself."

But it would be a mistake to press this psychological catechizing to an extreme. Unquestionably she had known real love—for Peter Hille, Gottfried Benn, Johannes Holzmann, her son, her mother. And despite the professional cynicism of the artist in her bons mots to Karl Kraus, her friends and Lasker-Schfdler herself record repeated infatuations on her part until advanced age; the beautiful "A Love Song" appeared in her last book. Shades of Goethe! (And was Goethe always "really" in love?)

She may have been well aware that these fleeting enchantments were a game, but it was her vital game, the talent, along with her gift for language, that gave meaning to her life as a homeless transient. Love was for her a source of vitality and a resurrection of the spirit, the counteractive to hate and violence, as we read in the poem "Autumn," where her memories of National Socialist torchlight parades may also be invoked: "Eternal life to him who can say much of love. / A being of love will rise most certainly! / Hate boxes in! High though the torch may flare above."

It is less clear what we are to think of Lasker-Schüler's personal erotic propensities. There are some torridly beautiful verses in Styx, for example in "Sensual Ecstasy" or in these lines from "Fortissimo": "And our desire came breaking loose / And hunted us in blood-storm swells: / We sank into the Smyrna moss / Gone wild and screaming like gazelles." The arsenal of images in the early poems is bristling with fires, conflagrations, glowings, pourings, sinkings, plungings. Curiously enough, we have no way of verifying to what extent these poetic visions record actual desires or erotic adventures. Other than her possible but puzzling affair with the father of her child, the nebulous Alcibiades de Rouan, it is difficult to pin down a specifically sexual encounter, although it is sometimes assumed her relationship with Benn was such. To be sure, Kurt Hiller accused her of seducing young poets to win their loyalty "in a base way"; but this unchivalrous charge aroused her intense and apparently honest indignation. Here, offended honor was involved, but, in addition, a kind of aesthetic prudishness can be detected in what she allegedly said to Sigismund von Radecki: "The physical act by which a human being is created is something so impossible that it is only justified when two people, because of their love, simply can't do otherwise" [Dichtungen und Dokumente, 1951]. Nevertheless, in her own prose writings, more reliable than Radecki's report, what we find is a balanced view of spiritual and physical love, not at all Victorian or Wilhelminian: "I am thence at least capable of understanding man's body, which God created after his primordial image. And I wonder why one should despise this image, the flesh, the covering of the soul, especially since we enjoy the foliage of the forest, luxuriantly dense, and of each individual tree; why not the beauty of the bodily temple, which preserves in itself a treasure, the most holy, the soul" [Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 2,1962]. The imagery here is itself probably sexual. The body, i.e., sexuality, was for her in her later essayistic writings a pathway to and for the soul. Lasker-Schüler sees even the prostitute's profession as just a pretext; even she is only looking for a residue of paradise: "Love is always a psychic possession, sexuality its chalice. To reject sexuality thus would mean not to respect the body that hosts the soul. This often occurs erroneously. But I think sexuality is to be condemned which isn't seeking love's paradise. I praise the Don Juan, who, through all the hearts, is only seeking the paradisical one. Naturally there is a love, prepared in the love-light of God's East, which needs no chalice" [Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1].

[Hans W.] Cohn maintains that this latter, unchaliced love is given pride of place by Lasker-Schüler [Else Lasker-Schüler: The Broken World, 1974]. This does not necessarily emerge from the passage or the context, although it is true that platonic relationships such as hers to Johannes Holzmann ("Senna Hoy") were important occasions of her life, almost parareligious experiences. Yet the above passage was written from the viewpoint of a woman in later years and need not express the attitude of the author of the Styx. Actually, only the poems themselves tell us about the force of eros in Lasker-Schuler's youth, and if we believe them—even discounting a bit of literary pose—it was a drive of which she was much aware, whether or not (very likely not) it was promiscuously indulged. Cohn himself points out the candor and mature psychological self-observation of poems like "Instinct," where "the expression of sexual need does not betray any feeling of guilt."

Both specific and oblique sexual imagery abounds in the poetry. In contrast to the body-soul harmony promulgated in her later prose writings, the sexual drive may be depicted as an uncontrollable force or attack to which she submits will-lessly ("Instinct"), or as a torture ("Instinct") or narcotic ("Sensual Ecstasy"), while in another mood it is felt as a joyful, inseparable union of rushing cataracts ("Viva!") or the wild rapture of gazelles ("Fortissimo"). In "Knowledge," she celebrates the "primal cry, the song of Eve," whose "longing was the snake"; and in "Flight of Love" (from The Seventh Day, her second book of lyrics) a lover "leaped with me on the winds, / Godwards, until our breath gave way." The whole spectrum of the sex drive's sometimes alien, sometimes exultant, but always overmastering force is clearly projected from: "Let's whet our lusts in hellish heats" ("Vagabonds") to "Now like two children let us play" ("Spring").

Yet there are also indications of resentment at the power of this instinctive drive. In "Karma" the speaker mutters morosely, "In a night of stars all blazing free/I killed the man who was next to me"; and in "His Blood," the tormented blood (read "natural instinct") of the lover would "really prefer to pluck my joy's / Last rose in Maytime / And throw it in the gutter slime." In the poem "My Drama" the poetess seems to resent being "lured" and thinks her beloved is, if the truth were told, "afraid" of her; she is miserable, longs for her loneliness and has learned "hate for my body, my heart's blood and him." In the uncharacteristically Gothic "Ballad from the Mountains of the Sauerland," it is the woman figure who exercises a demonic domination destructive to the man, and in "Elegy," a love "which had died young" drives her "exhausted into Satan's arms."

It has frequently been noted that there was a distinct masculine component in Lasker-Schüler's nature. She wore short hair and sometimes pants, before these became customary feminine attributes. Her mythical masks (in the prose) were often male—the Prince of Thebes, Jussuf of Egypt—although in her poems she normally speaks in her own woman's voice. Perhaps close identification with father, brother, son, and platonic lovers reinforced this tendency, though certainly her mother was a primary guiding figure in her life. However, the poems themselves only infrequently hint at any homoerotic tendencies, e.g., in "Old Spring." More often the relation of two ostensible males ("Pharaoh and Joseph" or "David and Jonathan") is really more like that of male and female, with the poetess speaking from the female point of view. Most of the imagery presupposes a feminine self-conception of freely chosen devotedness, along with the unquestioned acceptance of an emotionally strong sexual role, both experienced within the limits of an absolute personal independence. In this respect, despite some turn-of-the-century arabesques of sentiment and literary allusion, she seems to me quite modern in her realization of an autonomous femininity, with all the open potentials for gratification and disaster that any extreme autonomy of character imports.

The Seventh Day (1905), the next volume of lyrics, was dedicated to her mother as Styx had been to both "dear parents." It was published by a different house, as indeed almost each of her books was; she was convinced of the exploitative intent of her successive publishers and compared their enterprises to the "bordellos of soulmerchants." This book, about half the size of the previous one, contains several poems considerably longer than preceding efforts ("Knowledge," "My Quiet Song")—a departure that was soon abandoned. Here also appeared some early unrhymed triadic stanzas ("Dove That Swims in Its Own Blood," "My Love Song") and the unrhymed two-line stanzas ("My Quiet Song") that proved to be Lasker-Schüler's most unique and fruitful formal innovations, later perfected into the hymnic earmark of her work. (Two brief rhymed two-liners, "Weltschmerz" and "Karma," had been published in Styx.)

Thematically, the Seventh Day is familiar, although several humorous poems open new territory ("School Days," "Grotesque"), but the best examples of her irony and grotesque humor are naturally in the prose. "The End of the World," adopting a favorite motif of the expressionists, implies the death of God, while other poems are preoccupied with human mortality, her fear of which was undoubtedly sharpened by perceiving the transitoriness of her own feelings. The poet is obviously well on the way to her personal imaginative and metric style, though literary echoes still can be heard—for example, of Stefan George in "Fighters" ("Streiter"...). The best attempts are in the new rhymeless forms.

In My Miwcles (1911) we witness the ripening mastery of poems written in two- or three-line strophes or in a mixture of various verse-group lengths. Among these stand the first of the biblical poems, such as the fine "Pharaoh and Joseph," as well as her perhaps most famous lyric, "An Old Tibetan Rug."

This signatory style of Lasker-Schuler has often been compared to the metric of paralleled members (parallelismus membrorum) employed by Hebrew poetry, as in the Psalms, but parallelism in the sense of repeated syntactical structures or of the pairing of synonymous or substantively related (or contrasted) images is not present. Lasker-Schüler claimed to have read frequently in the Bible, but her familiarity with it has been questioned. Nevertheless, in her verses as in biblical poetry we experience a comparable series of brief paratactic statements, heavy with imagery but without metrical regularity.

It may be significant, regarding the question of influence, that the poetess once claimed in her half-serious, half-ironic way that her poems were written in Hebrew. Because of this affinity her characteristic form has been called by [Fritz] Martini "mythically old and at the same time very modern … Modernity was ready for the forms of the archaic," [Der deutsche Expressionismus: Formen und Gestalten, 1965] an idea recalling Thomas Mann's theory of modern art in Doctor Faustus as an intellectualized reversion to primitive forms. But in Lasker-Schuler's poetry there is no trace of the "bloodless intellectuality" allied with "bloody barbarism" that is found in Adrian Leverkiihn's music. Her poems give voice to the "soul" that Leverkuhn lacked.

These short strophes in free verse are by no means without rhythmic principles, but they are mainly principles of proportion. There are, for example, usually limits to the number of emphatic stresses grouped in a strophe; in "Pharaoh and Joseph," in the German original, this number varies from five to nine. Strophes may show the same number of emphases in each verse or may contain both longer and shorter lines, variations in this point enlivening the rhythm. Most frequently, syntax and strophe proceed in congruence—each verse group comprises a single sentence; sometimes, however, the syntax is allowed to enjamb. Verse-end pauses may coincide with any phrasal juncture but will not intervene within a prepositional or noun phrase. More than in regular metrical poetry there is a strong interaction between breath grouping and the endings of verse and stanza. A rhythmic factor hardly to be overestimated in its importance is the overlapping enchainment of inner assonance, which does so much to provide continuity to the rhythmic flow. In this, Lasker-Schiller is a master. A grasp of the dynamic relationship of repeated sounds is a vital compositional skill in the euphony of free verse, and we have been told that even as a child Lasker-Schüler was sensitive to the disharmony of off-rhymes (though they litter her poems and were thus probably consciously accepted as a means of expressive freedom).

The phenomenological correlative of these devices, in concord, has been described as "dreamspun music," / "magical monotony," / or a "proclamatory tone" such as that in Old Testament poetry. At its best, it mildly hypnotizes and creates the same hyperaesthesia as meter, but more than regular meter it alerts the listener to the palpable objective silence that the poet's words must dominate. The images are strung in luminous isolation, each suspended in a moment of unique tension, each subject to time's immediate decay. Psychologically, the representations proceed more as in memory or in dream than as in conscious reflection or in direct reality. Lasker-Schiller has in this way realized the necessary aesthetic distance from her emotions, which tend to be unrestrained or sentimentalized. Ceremonious attention, even solemnity, reins the affections; a reposeful measuredness is insinuated by the strophic rhythm.

This dream-speech can, of course, also lapse into mere routine, a mechanical mannerism, but that is true in the same degree of regular metrical poetry; we are simply more attuned to, and thus unaware of, the strictures of the latter. One specific source of potential monotony in this particular form, however, is the lack of interaction between a rhythmic norm and the norm's incomplete realization in concrete language. Since there is no fixed standard, we lose the sense of variety. This is a debility in all free verse, but particularly in Lasker-Schüler's short verses and sentences (as opposed to long rhapsodic lines of free verse), which arouse an expectation of proportional rhythmic form but lack a firm norm that could underline moments of expressive change. At times they may fail to escape repetitiveness and may become a "flowing into boundlessness," which never reaches the intended end of movement in fulfilled repose. Actually, from the viewpoint of both logic and thematic development, Lasker-Schüler has occasional trouble in gathering her poems to an effective conclusion, a weakness consequent in part on her effusive, imagistic style.

A traditional topos employed by tone-deaf critics is the supposedly crushing announcement that free verse sounds no different than prose, a charge supported by typographical resetting of the poem in question in a prose format. Dieter Bansch, [in Else Lasker-Schiler: Zur Kritik eines, etablierten Bildes, 1971], does just this with Lasker-Schuler, and mirabile dictu—at the magic swish of a scholar's pointer-wand—the poem indeed then sounds like prose. But, naturally, one has destroyed the whole structure of rhythm in the process and should not be proud of the results. The reverse transformation is just as astonishing (if not more so); real prose reset in short lines that introduce rhythmic proportions and recurrent pauses, thus focusing attention on the sounds themselves, will lead a reader to assume the heightened ethos of poetic performance.

We have every reason to believe that the finely tuned rhythm we hear in these poems was the music heard by Lasker-Schüler herself. In her recitations she was credited [in Else Lasker-Schüler: Ein Buch zum 100. Geburtstag] with a "masterful" delivery, carried by a "dark, melodic, expressive voice," however odd her other sound effects (bells, flutes) and her exorbitant garb may have appeared. Her conscious theory concerning the relationship between breathing and poetry led her to report that she felt "bodily injury from a vowel or consonant that causes undefined disturbances in measure or hearing" (meter or sound harmony is what she probably meant.) Not infrequently her regular metrical forms show deviations from their given schemes. One cannot be sure that she consciously scanned her verses (I rather imagine she would have thought that pedantry), but it is precisely in the nature of free verse that one dare spurn such Philistine niceties as scansion, and the poet's inner rhythm can hold sway.

In My Miracles we first take note of recurring motifs that acquire symbolic value. These verbal counters seem to be extremely important for the poetess, even if in their later persistence they at times begin to ring hollow.

Foremost among these hieroglyphs is certainly the "star." Even visually, Lasker-Schuler was fascinated by the star as conventionally drawn; her sketches frequently imprint it on the cheek or brow of human faces, on buildings, even show it, as Philistines might expect, in the sky. Such drawings come to mind then when we read: "I am a star / In the blue cloud of your face" (from "But Your Brows Are a Storm"), where the image also bears a symbolic meaning. Her letters, too, are full of pictorial doodlings and ideographs, including frequent stars.

But the meaning of "star" as a metaphor is somewhat elusive. The poem "Say It Softly" begins "You took for yourself all the stars / Above my heart," and in "Reconciliation" we are informed, "There will be a giant star fall in my womb," and in "Evening" …, "A weeping angel carves the inscription / On the pillar of my body in stars." The natural and conventional symbolism of stars includes the semantic features: brilliance, distance, fateful significance, order, everlastingness. Such meanings may often be applied in Lasker-Schüler's poems; the "star" there may suggest a high, incandescent moment of feeling, or something or someone of unchanging brilliance, a lodestar inaccessible to the lower creatures of the earth. Cohn sees the image simply as a symbol of transcendence, which perhaps lacks in precision because it ignores the suggestions of radiance and significance. For [Walter] Muschg the star is the "absolutely miraculous, the grace of love"; to bear it on one's face is a sign of the elect [Von Trakl zu Brecht: Dichter des Expressionismus, 1961]. In Georges Schlocker's view the star becomes a token of the "miraculous worlds" to which the poetess aspires out of her constitutional ennui [Expressionismus].

In a little noted essay titled "Astrology," in the volume Visions (Gesichte), Lasker-Schuler contrasts the original chaos in the self, which is palpable and the source of suffering, with the "star system" in the same self, which is untouchable and regulatory: "I speak of your most invisible, of your highest part, which you cannot grasp, like the stars above you." The descent of God's son to earth, for example, is a "transformation from star into chaos." (Lasker-Schuler speaks figuratively here to express God's entry into the earthly being of Jesus.)

An "undisturbed astral course" is what determines the greatness of human figures, like St. Peter Hille, whereas human ills stem from the collision of "stars strayed from their paths." One dies of "burst stars or the chilling of your sun or from darkness." In this "astrological" context, we can understand the stars as the vital determinant forces of each human fate, whose harmonious constellation and unabating energy light up the chaos of the unconscious life and whose clear radiance attracts other souls charismatically. A star as a person is a kind of spiritual guardian: "O she was a staress—/ Strewed shimmering light around her" ("Alice Triibner"); or "All of my dreams hang from your gold; / I have chosen you among all stars" ("Secretly at Night"). Lasker-Schiler was not versed in conventional symbolism, but it is interesting to note in conjunction with the "Astrology" essay that J. E. Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbols, based on a multicultural survey, finds that the star "stands for the forces of the spirit struggling against the forces of darkness," a meaning that, [J. E. Cirlot claims in A Dictionary of Symbols, 1962], appears worldwide in emblematic art.

The poetess's astral views help to explain such otherwise abstruse verses as: "See my colors / Black and star" ("To Giselheer the Heathen"), where black represents material chaos and the curious adjective "star" suggests the transcendent light, both of which poles she recognizes in herself and others. In "Reconciliation," with its initial line "There will be a giant star fall in my womb," she expects a miraculous regenerative force to accompany her reconciliation with the person addressed; life will be renewed; "Whenever we embrace we do not die." The ambiguity of the word SchoI3 in the original of this poem, meaning either "lap" or "womb," imports a subliminally erotic image that also suggests the renewal of life through procreation. The common interpretation of this poem sees it as referring primarily to the Day of Atonement. This view is supported in the text by the prayer in a harp-shaped alphabet, i.e., Hebrew, by the overflow of God, and by the word "Versohnung," which in German also occurs in the translation of Yom Kippur. This theory, however, overlooks the obviously given situation that a lover is addressing her beloved and the fact that the word "versohnen" in the original appears as a reflexive ("Wir wollen uns versohnen die Nacht"), almost certainly indicating a personal reconciliation rather than a ritual of atonement.

A closely related symbol is the color blue, which Cohn terms the "color of the spirit" or of "spiritual peace." Blue, Schlocker contends, is the "covering of the divine," a cue that opens vast "spiritual spaces" for Lasker-Schüler. Blue is in fact often associated with an immaterial realm of purity by natural symbolism; Cirlot lists thinking, truth, equilibrium, religious feeling, heaven, devotion, and innocence as correlatives of blue in various cultures. In "Say It Softly" the blueness of the eyes of her lover has been stolen from an archangel, and in "I Am Sad" the lover appears "Blue from [caused by] Paradise," suggesting heavenliness, calm, integrity, and innocence. The same qualities make sense of her claim in "Prayer": "I brought love to the world, and light—/ So every heart can blossom forth in blue."

Gold, say Muschg and Cohn, has an erotic connotation for the poetess; they have in mind, perhaps, lines such as "And like the moon of gold—your body" in "From Afar". … For Guder it implies nobility or is mere decoration [The Broken World]. In Cirlot's broader cultural view it is the color of superiority and glory, correspondent to the sun. It is indeed true in Lasker-Schüler's work that gold most commonly appears in the physical description of people, often to glorify the color of skin or hair, or generally to exalt the feature described. Erotic overtones are perhaps intended in "A Love Song": "A night of gold; / Stars made of night… / Nobody sees us"; but these are less likely in a metaphor such as "Golden icons / Are your eyes," in the poem "When I Met Tristan".…

Other motifs, such as the angel, wing, flower, sea, night, mother, and heart, would reward an effort at more exact definition, but they often adhere to the natural, conventional, or figurative implications of the words. Nevertheless, reference to Lasker-Schüler's prose is sometimes helpful. When she writes in Concert, in the essay "Friendship and Love," that unrequited love is a case of the wings of love's angel being broken, we immediately recall the first stanza of "Prayer":

I'm searching for a city in these lands
Before whose gate a mighty angel stands;
For, broken at the shoulder blade,
I bear his wings' gigantic spans,
And on my brow his star as seal is laid.

The dejected and forlorn poetess searches for the angel of love, love that is not returned but whose broken wing (the power of love's flight) she possesses and whose star (symbol of a guiding light) is imprinted on her brow—as in the sketches she never tired of drawing.

Hebrew Bllads (1913) enjoys a greater degree of thematic unity than any of its predecessors. Its topics are all religious, mainly profiles of biblical figures or episodes, hardly ballads at all, but reinterpretations or original legends with a powerful immediacy of their own. This biblical involvement presages, but does not as yet fulfill, the later turn to a more personal religious lyricism. In this volume—not constricted by fidelity to the letter of the Testament—she conjures up her own visions of Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, and others, setting them in a poetic world that, as Bansch correctly notes, is as characteristic of the turn-of-the-century scene as it is of early Hebraic history. The portrait of "Jacob," for example, bears little resemblance to its subject, but its titanism and narcissistic smile of defeat (or victory) would seem quite in order for a hero of the decadence.

These historical motifs produce an effect of objectivity, because the poems, even when spoken in the first person, are constrained in part by the factual model and hence mask to some extent the poet's subjectivity. This quality makes the Hebrew Ballads, for Hans Cohn, "the most evenly excellent of all her collections," and Fritz Martini affirms that with this book she became the greatest poet of Jewish faith writing in German in the twentieth century.

From the aesthetic point of view, these poems are indeed more consistently harmonious structures than those of the earlier creative periods. Compared with Rilke's biblical poetry, Bansch states, they may seem "more Old Testament-like, more inelegant, more na* ve." "Like in an edifying book for children," Bainsch remarks, "little stories are unfolded." But there are moments of terse drama in Lasker-Schuler's language, the repertoire of images is refreshed, and a chiseled, archaic quality is achieved in poems like "Abraham and Isaac" or "Moses and Joshua," which is more robust than Rilke's suave rhythms and subtle perceptions.

Lasker-Schuler's relationship to Judaism was personally and culturally deep but not theologically exclusive. She called herself a "most fervent Herbrew" and was, as Cohn says, "profoundly conscious of being a Jew"—even as a child she had been exposed to anti-Semitism—but her religious piety toward life encompassed everyone of comparable good faith, be it a Catholic Hille or a Protestant-born Benn. The Bible strongly influenced her themes and style; certain Judaic conceptions, such as paradise and the fall, she grasped in terms of her loss of childhood's security, and Eve became a symbol of her womanhood as did Jerusalem of the final homeland. She knew a bit about Jewish mysticism; what she was familiar with in the Jewish literary tradition is unclear. Yet all of these circumstances, as significant as they are, do not add up to a doctrinal faith but rather more to a tradition of religious culture. She identified with the Jewish people (see "My People") but actually more, according to Sigismund von Radecki, with the "wild, Maccabean Jews." In her own words, "It's fine to be a Jew … if one has remained true to it, grown part of it, not misled by any external triviality, but washed by the Jordan. Who can tear me away from the old skeleton of Jehovah, the unshakable rock."

Yet she did not countenance the fractioning of religion by a sectarian spirit. Lack of theological rigor is evident in her ambiguous attitude toward the figure of Jesus. She was not beyond calling him the Messiah or God's son, and she could even say, perhaps in a mood to flabbergast the middle classes, that "the Jew who rejects the Heavenly One [Jesus] proves that he is a bourgeois." She wrote a poem to Mary and often refers to the Nazarene, but it was as human figures that she was devoted to them, as part of her heritage of Jewish religious paragons like the characters of the Old Testament, "the people of the primordial stories who laid the roots of mankind." Her love for Jesus and his mission, for his apostles, and for early Christianity extends only through the time of the early Christians' persecution. In later years she wrote, "Today I am sympathetic only to individual persons, whatever their religion may be." Ernst Ginsberg [in Else Lasker-Schüler: Zur Kritik eines etablierten Bildes] claims that in the early thirties Lasker-Schüler was on the point of converting to Catholicism, but, even should that be the case (and it is not hinted at elsewhere), one should not assume it would have basically changed her eclectic religious views or her loyalty to her mythical Joseph, to "My People" or to Jerusalem. For her there was only "one faith, one God, one creation, one heaven." In exile in the real Jerusalem of strife and tension, she hoped in vain to find a "reconciliation" realized and in the end, Cohn notes, found her refuge to be spiritually dead, a sentiment underlying the poem "Jerusalem." But not even that could mar her spirit's mythical city.

No genre of the lyric is so uniquely Lasker-Schuler's as the pointillistic portraits of her beloved ones and friends, those of the former largely hymnic, those of the latter sometimes chatty and informal. Both come to the fore in the Collected Poems (1917), which adds to the reprinted earlier works those new series of poems dedicated severally to Senna Hoy, Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, Gottfried Benn, Hans Adalbert von Maltzahn, and to "My Beautiful Mother." In the first four series are gathered some of her finest love poems in two- and three-line stanzas, works that are usually eulogistic but containing a few, particularly among those to Benn, that express the dejection of disappointed love and reproach the beloved, usually mildly. The last two series unite sketches of her numerous friends with poems to her sister and child, some of them drawn from earlier books. In "My Beautiful Mother" rhyme schemes reappear, and love poetry is absent. The portraits of friends in the Maltzahn group share the situational objectivity of the Hebrew Ballads and, like them, expand the previous range of motifs and feelings, thus breaking the spell of a style that tended increasingly toward automatism. These works vividly recreate for us the atmosphere of the poetess's activities and companionship in Berlin during the most youthfully vigorous and outgoing years of her life, and they add a certain ballast of social reality to the solitary, burning elevations in which the poetess confronts her beloved. Whether or not these vignettes of admiring friendship truthfully reproduce their subjects, they are at least poetic artifacts in their own right, sharply limned mosaics in bright pinpointed colors.

The late poems of Else Lasker-Schüler, harvest of the sorrows of penurious years and endless loneliness, of her son's death and the terror of her flight and exile, spread a mood of resignation sometimes succumbing to hopelessness; yet they also speak the language of an increasingly humble personal piety in some of her best religious lyrics such as "God Hear…" in Concert (1932), "Prayer" in My Blue Piano (1943), the movingly dignified elegy to her dead son ("To My Child"), and her apotheosis of love in "Autumn." The poetess returns to a contemplation of her own experience within now accepted limits of reality and in a less mannered style. The love poems, no longer in the majority, are less imperative, more modest, more touching in their honest respect for the otherness of the beloved.

Lasker-Schuler's relationship to God began in childish fantasy and ended in childlike faith. The God of her earlier poems may at one moment be a playful young father, wagging a finger with forced jollity at an even younger rascal of a poet ("In the Beginning"), while only shortly later it appears that God has precipitately aged and died ("End of the World") or at least absconded. "God, where are you?" she asks in "To God". … Bainsch quips that she treats God as one more poetic figure among others, almost as a painted decoration. But there is also a real and lasting skepticism in her soul. We have previously quoted her letter to Karl Kraus in 1914, when she was already forty-five years of age: "Waves are always beating on my heart; I always have to go over God's grave; I almost believe he's dead and the Bible is his tombstone. For human feelings it can only seem like willfulness—if he lives and has turned away." True to decadent rhetoric, Satan plays in the early poems a more reliably present role than God ("Damnation," "Elegy").

Her feelings are marked by a vacillation between skepticism and a picture-book image of God the Father, between fear of his disappearance and the devotion of the mystical bride. She admits, "It is so easy to assert that there is no God" but confesses too, "I was always busy digging, not for gold but for God. I didn't dig for the eternal out of bold arrogance but from religious adventure-lust." The tone of her late poems is caught in an essay entitled "My Devotion," from Concert: "I rely on God, because how often I have put my pain and joy into his hands." At this point she has apparently overcome the doubt that is prompted by the perennial problem of theodicy: how it is that God's omnipotence can tolerate evil, in particular the suffering of her soul, which longs to be devout? The world of the suffering body is here seen as an illusion, a mere "crystallization of the soul's homeward longing for protection in God the Father's hands," and it is thus of lesser reality. Perhaps she should have said, "God the Mother," because God's protectiveness toward the world is seen as the relation of mother and child. In any event, in her last poems a child's trustful submission to the parent's will is the experiential ground of her faith. God has become an imperative and not just a poetic image with which to convey charming beliefs or resentful desolations.

The propensity toward faith was a lifelong implication of her divided character: her constitutional commingling of sharp anxiety and dulled feeling, her sense of being a lonely outcast in society and yet suffocated by its grip, this latter an impression that in several respects—culminating in her persecution and forced exile—was only too close to the truth. God's was then the only reassuring love that would never reject or disappoint.

Her letters, real and fictional, repeatedly report that she is alone, even though she knows nice people, even in the Cafe of the West. She cannot find a bridge to anyone's soul. "Nobody can get to me, I can't get to anybody." She loves no one, and no one loves her. Life is purposeless; one takes refuge in one's self: "We're only on the way; life is just a way, has no arrival, because it isn't coming from anywhere. Where should one go anyway? Take refuge in yourself! That's why people are so poor, their hearts are asylums; they feel themselves secure in their sociable homesteads." She is driven to "flee mewards," in her "Flight from the World."

"I could never be compared with other people," she opined in a letter to Herwarth Walden, and she thought of herself as an Indian, a Robinson Crusoe, a Theban prince, Joseph the Egyptian, anybody but a mere Frau Else Lasker-Schuler, put down like a million others with their inexorable birth dates in a file in an archive in a swarming city somewhere on the Brandenburger flats. Her fantasy worlds were theatrically cozy homesteads envisioned by a homeless wanderer, who also, repeatedly and to great effect, burned bridges she had not yet built across the human stream.

But the stage behind these fantastic props stood empty again as soon as the poetess's audience had left. She was bored, benumbed, but apprehensive and afraid of death:

I cannot find myself again
In this dead abandonment!
It's as if: I lie world-far from me
Among gray night of old anxiety. ("Chaos")

Urangst, "old anxiety," is for Cohn a key word, expressing the mood of her "rootlessness and isolation." It is the pathos of self-abandonment and helplessness, draining away the essential elin of life. In "Spring Sorrow" this "repose of death" is to be revivified by an infusion of her lover's warming "spring-like blood," for probably, as in "Revenge" …, "Death spent the night in my soul / And ate my springtimes." This ebbing of vitality is the victory of death's forces ("The Fear Deep in My Blood"), which, on more manic occasion ("Youth"), is roundly defied: "Why me in the City of the Dead, / Me, whose rejoicing's just begun." Symptomatically, a condition of listless dread and paralysis of feeling gives way to a spell of rebelliousness: "And my soul lies there like a pale, wide plain / And hears life grinding in the mill, / Dissolving in a heavy chill, / And gathering hot for battle once again" (in "Fighters"..). With the passing of youth, however, the resistance of sheer animal vitality had to give way to courage or to faith.

In the prose works Lasker-Schüler's depressive ennui is plainly described. She is "restless with fearful boredom." She is tired of life and wants to die ad venturesomely: "I'm fed up with everything, even the leaves on the trees. Always green and always green. If only I'd meet some magical people, I mean some who had grand wishes, but they are all serious, only I am in earnest. I'm so lonely—whoever looks at me for a long time will fall into a dark—heaven." "I'm through; I hate to wake up in the morning because I hate the world; I don't want to sleep because I dream of the world." She clearly recognizes that this spiritual vastation is the obverse of her spiritual freedom: "I no longer have anything to hold on to.…I never made a system for myself like smart women do, never fortified a world-view like still smarter men, I haven't built myself an ark. I am unattached." Because she was unattached personally (especially after the death of Paul) and to an extent also socially (especially in exile), and because she served no ideology other than her art and found it to be unrecognized even in her Promised Land, she in the end turned back to her happier beginning and saw the power of love in herself not as hers to be requited—as such it had overpowered both others and herself—but as a divine presence: "Holy love which you blindly trampled / Is God's image." ("I Lie Somewhere by the Side of the Road" …). Love is the completed bridge between herself and God, to whom she could now proffer her soul with the modesty of a woman returning a lost possession to its rightful owner: "Oh God, though it of fault be full—/ Take it quietly in your hand.… / That, in you, it may gleam—and end" ("Prayer").

The potency of love is the immanence of God. This conviction becomes not only a religious principle but an aesthetic one as well, in the form: creativity is divine inspiration, hence a revelation, a belief that leads Bansch to speak of Lasker-Schüler's "undaunted romantic definition of art and the founding of religion" as one and the same. She says, "I even assert that the artist who has overcome ambition is concerned only with the Nirvana of inspiration, drifting off into sleep, the streaming away of the heart, making room for God." A true work of art proceeds from a state of enthusiasm (Schwdrmerei; the English word literally means to have God in oneself); and it is this state of the soul that is to be sought, not the poet's probably faulty record of the experience: "It is not the poem that is important, but the poetic state in which one creates it." Put thus, it sounds quite like the expressionist poetics, which extols the poet's intensity, ethical or aesthetic, rather than the technical perfection of his actual poems. The poetic state transcends the inadequacies of life as it sadly is; it is a resurrection: "I die from life and catch my breath again in images." So, despite her poverty, her writing made her rich: "I've been composing poetry now for two days and two nights; I'm actually a person who has many palaces. I can enter my poetdom, as wide as a thousand mornings and nights—and I cannot lose it, and the very fact that one must pay his taxes with his blood—that is possession."

We might be led to think that for Lasker-Schüler the poet's office is austerely sacerdotal, as it was for Stefan George. But we know already that it was also a kind of delightful game: "Whether one plays with green, lilac, and blue stones or whether one writes poetry, it's all the same, one has the same feeling of happiness, because one can't see the world any more vividly through ecstasy than through bits of [colored] glass." She metaphorized her writing habits like this: "I write for myself primarily, let everything I've written get hard like an earth, like a star that becomes earth. Then I take the earth in my hand and play ball with it." Translated into everyday reality, this suggests that the poetess, after an initial flow of associations, put her creations aside and later perhaps rearranged the parts—phrases, sentences, or strophes. In many poems the array of images is conceivably commutable; the pieces could be "played" in a different sequence; but, of course, each arrangement results in differently felt emphases in the experience. Very likely the composition is not by chance. We know that Lasker-Schüler worked over and revised her poems continuously, often long after their original publication. Compare, for example, the two versions of "My Quiet Song."

Lasker-Schüler rejected the intrusion of external "purpose" into art: "I almost slapped [Stefan] George on the street"—although on an earlier occasion she had approached and wordlessly given him a flower—"I was so disappointed. Affected people! Art shouldn't educate but crown with garlands." She was also distrustful of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's gracefully perfect form, especially of his Jedermann's didactic intent. Her own poetic labors were mainly in praise of others or were lamentations on the sorrows of the self.

Art was reception of God; it was a game with colored stones; but certainly it was not to be an exercise in intellectual or spiritual vanity, a public preening of one's feathers. Schalom Ben-Chorin reports [in Else Lasker-Schiler: Ein Buch zum 100. Geburtstag] that she did not like self-conscious talk about artistic matters, preferring to discuss—it sounds quite curious—politics. She once exclaimed, "You wouldn't believe how literary topics revolt me, that pluck to pieces and plunder the game, the charms of the soul. I am so alone, so barren inwardly that I scorn every sensation, every immodesty." A cafe friend whom she dubbed Cajus-Majus, Caesar of Rome, provoked her to the outburst: "If he only weren't always talking about literature! As long as it's my verses it's okay, but when he begins to blather about Aristophanes, let Dante's Inferno fetch him."

Some of her critics wish that she had been less reluctant to think about questions of taste. In the end we must also face those critical doubts that even sympathy never spared her. The most frequent charges are: kitsch, monotony, defective workmanship—all of them true to a degree.

Marianne Lienau, one of Else Lasker-Schiüler's most unforgiving detractors, but not the only one, decries her "cutesy kitsch" (neckischer Kitsch), deplores her lack of self-criticism, and deprecates her "calamitous teen-ager tone" (fataler Backfischton). Apparently on political grounds, Lienau denies a gifted artist the right to say, "I don't know myself "; to do so is an asocial self-indulgence. Lasker-Schüler makes a cult of her Self without examining how this Self reflects her social being. She should have learned to distinguish between kitsch and real sweetness, gaiety and silliness, originality of language and buffoonery.

Perhaps Lasker-Schüler was herself regretting a certain sentimental indecisiveness of mind when she noted, "The teeth have fallen out of my thoughts, I think too sweetly," yet this very image shows how her uncontrolled associations can forge incisive language. The boundary between sentimentality and rapture is a fine one, as Schlocker admits, and not only the poet but also the reader may misjudge it subjectively. One might contend that it is best to avoid these swampy borderlands of feeling. For good or ill, however, poets tend to wander quite heedlessly through all the territory they inhabit. Lasker-Schuler's realm verged on the marshes of sentiment, that much is clear, and she inevitably sometimes crossed the line. Most readers will recognize this wavering boundary within her work, even within particular poems, without confining her finally to either side.

Her images, rhythms, and sentiments are sometimes repetitive. Bänsch detects a "wearying stereotypy," and for Schlocker she fails to escape the "danger of playing with the worn-out coins of words." Particularly in the two- and three-line stanzas, Lasker-Schuler's rhythmic style can ring repetitive because of the predominant conjoining of brief rhythmic and syntactic periods, their brevity being the (negative) operative factor. When, in addition, the images are picked from her staple stock of favorite "stones" or "buttons"—words like star, blue, gold—an individual poem may not come alive, especially if read in company with others that use the same repertoire. Of course, countless other poets have cultivated personal mannerisms or rethreshed empty grain—one thinks of Trakl immediately or even Heine—but what poet has not? The greatest poets will be the most continuous fountains of innovation; the merely good ones will be graced with a score of poems in which their genius springs to life, while the rest of their works may be respectfully shelved like significant scraps from the atelier, clues to the designs perfected in the best.

Her critics have begrudged the embattled poetess even these few perfected poems, though this is surely less easy to understand. Pbrtner judges himself as a critic, rather than her as a poet, when he concludes: "I don't know any perfect poem by her.… When I seek in my memory I find words, series of words, verses of poems, but no poems." And Schlocker: "It is not given to the poem to reach ripeness" under Lasker-Schüler's hand. Or Heselhaus: "The literary significance of Lasker-Schuler lies in the individual pearls of the metaphors." It has become a repetitive cliche in its own right to describe Lasker-Schuler's poems as fragmentary and without logical development. Yet, although some poems may be circular "garlands of praise," the best progressively evoke their subject and build to a rhetorical climax. It is difficult to see how this simple fact can be overlooked.

Beginning with "Spring," one can go on to name "Old Spring," "Then," "Weltschmerz," "Viva!," "Fortissimo," and "Youth," in Styx alone, as not necessarily great poems, but yet as developed, rounded, in their own way unflawed works. And who could carelessly deny the truly completed beauty of "Reconciliation," "Pharaoh and Joseph," "A Song of Love," "To the Barbarian," "A Song," "George Trakl," "My Quiet Song" (second version), "Prayer," "Abraham and Isaac," "Moses and Joshua," "David and Jonathan," "Esther," "Genesis," "To My Child," "My Blue Piano," "Chased Away," or "A Love Song"?

The thematic range of these songs is narrow, if the forces of love and dejection can be thought of as limited, but the sentiments ring true, and the music is haunting and original. Solipsistic Lasker-Schüler may have been—eccentric, careless, paranoid, in some respects selfish. Yet the powerful glow of her eros holds transfixed for us in its beam the figures of long-forgotten people—people more practical than she, more selfless, less distracted, less anxious, less afraid of death, who did not jingle their cheap jewelry in others' faces, and who did not die with little left so far from home.

Where are they now, though?

In these few poems.

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An introduction to Hebrew Ballads and Other Poems

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