James J Conway takes a tour of the writer’s main haunts during her time in the German capital…
Else Lasker-Schüler is celebrated as an artist, as a prose writer, and above all as one of the great German poets of the twentieth century. In 2019, I translated Lasker-Schüler’s episodic collection The Nights of Tino of Baghdad, which she wrote in Berlin and published in 1907, and which set me on the path to a more comprehensive collection of her pre-World War One prose (published by Rixdorf Editions in 2022). It also made me curious to know more about her time in the city. Where did she live? Who did she know? Did any of the stone witnesses to her existence survive the firestorms of modern German history?
Else (Elisabeth) Schüler was born to an assimilated Jewish family in Elberfeld (Wuppertal, in the Rhineland) in 1869 and died in Jerusalem in 1945, yet Berlin was home for the majority of her adult life, the stage for her creative personae and the crucible of most of her greatest works. She arrived in 1894 with her first husband, Berthold Lasker, but within a decade she had divorced him and married Herwarth Walden, by which time she was a fixture of bohemian Berlin.
Before World War One, Lasker-Schüler had established her uncompromising artistic vision, combining Jewish and Arab motifs to form an idiosyncratic Semitic realm of her mind. This construct was never confined to the page or the canvas; Lasker-Schüler appeared in public dressed as “Tino, Princess of Arabia” or “Jussuf, Prince of Thebes” and assigned roles in her imagined world to friends and associates.
Revisiting these figures and their physical settings evokes a whole German avant-garde milieu of the early twentieth century. It introduces us to writers, publishers, artists, gallerists, anarchists, utopians and café habitués searching for meaning beyond the reactionary confines of the Wilhelmine mainstream and even the more liberal Weimar Republic. Many of the buildings associated with Lasker-Schüler were destroyed during World War Two but these erasures themselves form a poignant memorial to a writer forced to absent the city at the peak of her renown.
Below, in approximately chronological order, are the key stations of Else Lasker-Schüler’s life in Berlin.
BRÜCKENALLEE
THEN: In 1894, Else Lasker-Schüler moved from Elberfeld with her husband Berthold Lasker and settled in Brückenallee in the central Berlin district of Hansaviertel. Lasker, a physician and chess master, hired a studio for his wife in the same street where she took art lessons. Nestled in a loop of the River Spree, the Hansaviertel was a prestigious neighbourhood at the time although it retained a creative edge, numbering both government ministers and artists among its residents, with two synagogues to serve its large Jewish community. Lasker-Schüler departed after the breakdown of her marriage in 1899.
NOW: This area was almost entirely destroyed during World War Two and the streetscape radically altered when it became a post-war showcase of high-rise modernism designed by the likes of Walter Gropius, Oscar Niemeyer and Alvar Aalto—West Berlin’s response to progressive urban development on the other side of the Wall. The building that stands where Lasker-Schüler once lived on Brückenallee, now Bartningallee, inhabits a somewhat less exalted class of post-war architecture.
NEUE GEMEINSCHAFT
THEN: Leaving material security behind, in 1900 Lasker-Schüler embarked on a new life in the new century and joined the New Community (Neue Gemeinschaft), her first major contact with bohemian literary Berlin. This idealistic group with anarchist tendencies operated a library and meeting place out of an apartment in bourgeois Wilmersdorf before heading to Schlachtensee, (then) beyond the city limits. Members included Magnus Hirschfeld, Lasker-Schüler’s mentor Peter Hille, future husband Georg Levin (Herwarth Walden) and beloved companion Johannes Holzmann (Senna Hoy), as well as Hugo Höppener (Fidus), Erich Mühsam, Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber.
NOW: That the Neue Gemeinschaft met here merely confirms the long, symbiotic relationship between bohemia and bourgeoisie. It is still difficult to imagine a more purely middle class part of Berlin, with few of the eco-progressive trappings of Prenzlauer Berg or inter-generational wealth of the western perimeter. Pro tip: nearby Tian Fu is one of the best Chinese restaurants in Berlin.
CABARET PETER HILLE
