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Lasker-Schüler Else
(1876—1947)

Else Lasker-Schüler was a German poet. She was born in Elberfeld (now a district of Wuppertal. Her mother, Jeannette Schüler (born Kissing) became a central figure in her poetry. Her father Aaron Schüler, a Jewish banker, later became the inspiration for the protagonist in her drama Die Wupper.

In 1894, She married the physician Dr Jonathan Berthold Lasker (the older brother of Emanuel Lasker, for many years World Chess Champion) and moved with him to Berlin in the same year. There she worked on training as an artist. On August 24, 1899 her son Paul was born and her first poems were published. Her first full volume of poetry was called Styx and was published three years later in 1902. On April 11, 1903, she and Berthold Lasker were divorced and on November 30, she remarried to Georg Lewin to whom she gave the name Herwarth Walden.

In 1906, Lasker-Schüler's first prose work, Das Peter-Hille-Buch, was published after Hille's death. Hille had been one of her closest friends. In 1907 the prose collection Die Nächte der Tino von Bagdad was published. In 1909 she published the play Die Wupper, which however was not performed straight away. With the Meine Wunder volume of poetry in 1911, Lasker-Schüler became the leading female representative of German expressionism.

After separating from Herwarth Walden in 1910, her second marriage also ended in divorce in 1912. Without her own source of income, Else Lasker-Schüler had to live on the financial support given to her by her friends, in particular Karl Kraus. She also met Gottfried Benn in 1912. An intense friendship developed between them which found its literary outlet in a large number of love poems dedicated to Benn. The death of her son in 1927, however, sent her into a deep depression.

Although the poet had been awarded the Kleist Prize in 1932, she emigrated to Zürich after physical attacks and faced with the threat of National Socialism. There, however, she was still banned from working. From here she made two journeys to Palestine in 1934 and 1937. In 1938 she was deprived of her German citizenship and a year later in 1939 she travelled to Palestine for the third time. However, the outbreak of World War II prevented her from returning to Switzerland. In 1944 she became severely ill. After a heart attack on January 16, Else Lasker-Schüler died on January 22, 1945. She was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

German Federal Republic, 1975, Elise Lasker-Schuler