Gender and Performance
The Dissolution of Artistic and Gendered Boundaries
Else Lasker-Schüler’s artistic vision demanded the dissolution of artistic and gender boundaries. In defiance of bourgeois norms, she wished to see her prose and poetry performed in cabarets or at literary gatherings, while her correspondence became the setting for imagined others. These multiple selves transgressed gender norms and societal divisions, allowing life and art, stage and text, to intermingle.
Postcard to Friedrich Sally and Sina Grosshut
The postcard to Friedrich S. and Sina Grosshut reflects the social and literary network of the poet in British Mandate Palestine: the owners of the bookshop »Heatid« organised poetry readings in Jerusalem, and the Grosshuts did so in Haifa, where they ran a small antiquarian bookshop.
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Postcard to Friedrich Sally und Sina Grosshut
(verso)
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»To Ernest of Yesteryear«
In the poem Else Lasker-Schüler addresses the educational and cultural philosopher Ernst Akiba Simon (1899–1988) who emigrated from Berlin to Jerusalem in 1928 and became the inspiration for the Lasker-Schüler's love poems after 1935, although their relationship remained platonic.
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»Dance in the Kibbutz«
The drawing reflects one of many scenes that Else Lasker-Schuler encountered in Palestine, and is at the same time evidence of her poetic engagement with the bodily and metaphorical associations of modernist dance.
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»The Nights of Tino from Baghdad«
The collection of prose fragments and poems is a reflection of Else Lasker-Schüler's search for a revolutionary female poetic voice within a patriarchal society.
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»The Nights of Tino from Baghdad«
(p. 7)
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»The Nights of Tino from Baghdad«
(p. 8)
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»The Nights of Tino from Baghdad«
(p. 53)
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Letter to Paul Goldschneider
The letter to the young Paul Goldschneider is part of a wider epistolary exchange between them, and evidence of the ways Else Lasker-Schüler intertwined text and object, biography and fantasy.
Letter to Ernst Akiva Simon
This letter reflects the historical situation of March 1943. Else Lasker-Schüler responds to reports about the Shoah in Nazi Germany.
Letter to Ernst Akiva Simon
(p. 2)
»Asser Mëmëd Schalomein Jussuf«
The drawing was completed around 1920 in the context of the poet's epistolary novel »Der Malik«, in which Else Lasker-Schüler writes herself and her surroundings into the story of Prince Jussuf.
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»The Malik«
The avant-garde novel »Der Malik« (1919) captures Lasker-Schüler's friendship with Franz Marc, to whom she dedicated the work. The »Imperial History with Images and Drawings« integrates the poet's environment into a story of prince Jussuf.
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Postcard to Franz and Maria Marc
»Jussuf the wild Jew.« This postcard is part of the poet's artistic exchange with the painter Franz Marc. Lasker-Schüler's postscript refers to woodcuts by Gabriele Münter published in »Der Sturm«.
Postcard to Franz and Maria Marc
(verso)
