Else Lasker-Schüler

Jewish German poet, short-story writer, playwright, and novelist who grew up in Wuppertal. In 1894, she married the physician Jonathan Lasker and moved to Berlin, where she frequented the circles of upcoming expressionism. Her son Paul was born in 1899, and she divorced Lasker in 1903. The same year she married the writer Herwarth Walden, with whom she founded the expressionist magazine Der Sturm. She divorced Walden in 1912 and continued to live as a kind of groupie in the Berlin expressionist bohème. She had close friendships with the publicist Karl Kraus, the poet Gottfried Benn and the painter Franz Marc. Most likely she also knew the painter and later astrologer Thomas Ring, who lived in Berlin and married there the manager of the Sturm bookshop.

Despite winning the Kleist Prize in 1932, as a Jew she was physically harassed and threatened by the Nazis. She emigrated to Zürich but there, too, she could not work. She traveled to Palestine in 1934 and finally settled in Jerusalem in 1937. She had always led an eccentric and unpredictable life, and she spent her last years in poverty.

She published many anthologies of poetry. A large part of her work is composed of love poetry, but there are also deeply religious poems and prayers. Transitions between the two are often quite fluid. Her later work is particularly rich in biblical and oriental motifs.

In 1944 Lasker-Schüler's health deteriorated. She suffered a heart attack on January 16, and died in Jerusalem on 22 January 1945.