Plumm Pasha

August is Women in Translation month (take a look at #WITMonth on Twitter), and we are marking it with Else Lasker-Schüler’s contribution to a visionary pre-World War One cinematic/literary project, here in English for the first time.

Wilhelmine Germany was the birthplace of cinema, in the sense of a place where audiences pay to watch moving images. The year was 1895, the venue was Berlin’s Wintergarten – a variety theatre. This setting seemed to define the status of the new form; soon, short and artistically undemanding films were a common attraction in sideshows. Almost ten years later, there were hundreds of small neighbourhood cinemas throughout the country calling themselves ‘Kientopp’ or ‘Lichtspiel’ (literally light play), often playing imported films. The new art form still hadn’t entirely shaken its novelty status, but a small minority of creators and critics were beginning to see the phenomenal potential in film. In 1913, Else Lasker-Schüler was one of a number of avant-garde writers who took part in a visionary project which embraced cinema at a critical moment in its artistic and technical development. They believed that given sufficient scope, films might properly aspire to the status accorded to novels or paintings. The result was Das Kinobuch (The Cinema Book).

The project was conceived by Kurt Pinthus, a Leipzig theatre critic who at the time felt increasingly drawn to film. He knew there could be so much more to the medium than brief knock-about skits or even the more serious productions of the day which nonetheless treated cinema as theatre with a camera in front of it. For the Kinobuch he turned to writer friends such as Walter Hasenclever, Franz Blei and Paul Zech, all of whom were associated with Expressionism. While Germany’s dominant avant-garde strain had been gathering force for about a decade, it was only in 1911 that it was baptised by its greatest critical champion, Herwarth Walden, who at the time was still married to Else Lasker-Schüler.

Pinthus got each of the writers to submit an original film concept in the form of a script or treatment (although with no dialogue, early screenplays were treatments, more or less; the script for Georges Méliès’s revolutionary Trip to the Moon, for example, was essentially 30 bullet points). While the contributors may all have issued from the same milieu, their responses to Pinthus’s challenge could not have been more varied. Max Brod conceived a journey into the rich imagination of a bookish twelve-year-old, the camera following him through the day and showing us what he could only see in his mind. Albert Ehrenstein contributed one of the most elaborate scenarios, a variation on Homer and the Odyssey. Elsa Asenijeff delivered an extensive narrative that offered little of her usual formal daring, but in its centring of emotion and female experience, it reads almost like the précis of a great, lost Douglas Sirk melodrama; one dramatic turning point is even triggered by a car accident (try pulling that together on stage). Franz Blei simply submitted a letter explaining why he didn’t want to take part; “plays without words are pantomimes,” he complained, and “filmed pantomimes are weak surrogates.” Instead he advocated for a cinema that documents human lives, thus accidentally inventing reality TV.

All of these writers were associates of Else Lasker-Schüler. Even Ludwig Kainer, the artist who provided the cover, was a friend; in her epistolary novel My Heart she describes a plan for him to illustrate her ‘caliph’ stories (presumably a reference to the Orientalist tales that made up The Nights of Tino of Baghdad). Kainer contributed to the satirical journal Simplicissimus but around the start of the First World War, perhaps inspired by this book, he began working on film set design. He also designed posters for Valeska Gert, arguably the most radical performer of Weimar Berlin.

The timing of Das Kinobuch was propitious. Although officially dated 1914, its actual arrival in 1913 came at a turning point for German cinema, as though in simply issuing the book the vision of an artistically ambitious cinema was made manifest. This was the year of Carl Froelich’s Richard Wagner, the first biopic and perhaps the first feature film as we know it today, with its unprecedented run time of 80 minutes. It was also the year of The Student of Prague by Hanns Heinz Ewers, considered both the first auteur film and the first horror film. Its daring use of double exposure and other new techniques, feats that were impossible to replicate on stage, were precisely the kind of innovation to which the writers of Das Kinobuch aspired. Considering that Expressionism would be the dominant mode during Germany’s explosion in cinematic brilliance after the First World War, Das Kinobuch can be seen as something of a game plan, a statement of artistic intent, a vision of filmic excellence projected far into the future.

Else Lasker-Schüler’s contribution to Das Kinobuch was ‘Plumm Pasha’, which is also the title of one of the short tales in The Nights of Tino of Baghdad, although the treatment is not an adaptation. Rather, it incorporates the title character and other figures from the book – including Hassan, Diwagâtme and Tino herself – into a stand-alone scenario. ‘Plumm’, incidentally, means ‘plum’, but not in standard German (where it is ‘Pflaume’) but rather the Plattdeutsch dialect of the writer’s childhood.

The first edition of Tino had appeared six years previously, in 1907 (with the second six years in the future), and Lasker-Schüler was still very much dwelling in the world she had created. But here we witness a fascinating stylistic transformation; the narrative is just as absurd, the characters no less singular, but here their exploits are rendered in a clipped, utilitarian style, a bracing distillate of the heady, evocative prose of Tino.

In ‘Plumm Pasha’, Lasker-Schüler collapses dynastic and Ottoman Egypt into one plane. The clearest influence, apart from her own tales, is Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – the confusion between dream and reality, the happy young lovers, the transformed head (here a bull rather than a donkey). The treatment follows comedic convention by concluding with a wedding, with farcical mix-ups, boisterous slapstick and even an extreme makeover along the way. But like The Nights of Tino of Baghdad, the narrative switches abruptly between tenderness, humour and violence; it’s hard to imagine any other comedy screenwriter opening with a burning at the stake. In every medium in which she operated – poetry, prose, graphics, drama, film – Else Lasker-Schüler was unmistakably herself.

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Else Lasker-Schüler

Plumm Pasha

translated by James J. Conway

Characters:
Plumm Pasha, Grand Vizier of Upper Egypt
Shechem, his deaf servant
Ptah, the old bull god
His bull priests
Princess Diwagâtme
Hassan, their son
Princess Tino, his sweetheart
Tino’s black slaves
Dr Eisenbart from the West
The ugly princess Bâhbâh
Doctors, wise men, envoys, flute and bagpipe players, jugglers, belly dancers, warriors, bull warriors, black servants, slaves.

* * *

On the orders of Plumm Pasha, the Grand Vizier of Upper Egypt, the last bull priests of a sect of the god Ptah are burned at the stake. A crowd mocks the victims, casting stones at them, but the martyrs faithfully hold their little bull-headed idols aloft from the flames until they are burned to ashes.

Plumm Pasha emerges from his imperial palace, accompanied by his entourage, envoys in fezes and long, solemn robes. The Grand Vizier descends from his litter. It grows dark, lightning flashes, and suddenly the god Ptah is standing before Plumm Pasha; he curses the Grand Vizier and replaces his head with an outsized bull’s head (the turban remains unchanged and looks comically small compared to his bull’s head). Frightful bull-faced creatures dance around the hexed Plumm Pasha until the dawn breaks; Ptah has disappeared. The envoys have fled, the black servants drop the imperial edicts, and great confusion ensues. Only the deaf servant maintains his composure, bearing the startled Grand Vizier on a cushion of moss on which he sits cross-legged. Wise men come with instruments, microscopes, and large skull-measuring devices, but their counsel is without success; they begin to quarrel, tear at their beards and gesticulate violently with all their limbs. Slowly recovering, Plumm Pasha yells at his deaf servant, who takes a giant ear trumpet from a case that he carries with him and puts it on. Now he understands that his master is plagued by hunger. And he runs off to bring his master a cart full of hay to eat. Meanwhile the wise men advise him to summon Diwagâtme, the wise calipha of the city.

In the rose garden, the wise men encounter Hassan and Tino, sitting on a branch and hugging amidst the roses. Diwagâtme, Hassan’s mother, approaches them. The two lovers ask for her blessing, but she refuses it; she is miserly and tips her large bag up to indicate that she has no money left to build them a palace.

The wise men hear this and tell the trio about the fate of Plumm Pasha, and they are astonished. Diwagâtme explains that only the kiss of a pure woman can lift the Grand Vizier’s curse. She slyly turns to Princess Tino and tries to spur her to action; she would no longer be a poor princess because the Grand Vizier would shower her with gold and precious stones, and nothing would stand in the way of her marrying her son. Diwagâtme accompanies the wise men out of the garden. Tino’s playmates approach and dance a veil dance around the pair.

The Grand Vizier lies on the roof, roaring; suddenly a balloon appears with ‘Occident’ written on it. Dr Eisenbart climbs out of the balloon onto the roof, followed by living bottles with the inscription ‘Cow Lymph’. The servants want to prevent the inquisitive doctor from examining the angry Pasha. But they do not manage to prevent Dr Eisenbart from extracting lymph from the bull, until the Grand Vizier bites off his head; it is impaled on a long pole as a warning. Meanwhile the wise men approach and relay Diwagâtme’s wise words. The Vizier utters a roar of joy, stumbles a few times over the carpet on his roof and the wise men with him. Black boys cry out in the streets and market squares for a pure woman who might redeem the Grand Vizier for gold and precious stones. They write this on great banners that they carry around.

The Grand Vizier, surrounded by his entourage, rushes to the market square. Ten bulls with ten princesses approach; when they see the Grand Vizier roar they flee. Only one of them is prepared to kiss the hexed overlord of the city. Her veil is removed; but she is so hideously ugly that the Grand Vizier resolutely refuses her kiss. She is tall and skinny. Barbers come with large hedge clippers and trim her hair. Buckets full of make-up are brought in and the princess is made up, her lips and cheeks coloured with large paintbrushes. But Plumm Pasha waves dismissively, despite the advice of everyone around him. The ugly Princess Bâhbâh purses her mouth, presses herself upon him again and again, until the deaf servant takes pity on her, kisses her and rides off with her.

Finally Tino approaches on a white cow, beautifully dressed, accompanied by Hassan and her faithful playmates. Enraptured by the great beauty of the princess, the bull-headed one moves about on the throne with frightful, comical gestures. Tino is shown all the gold and precious stones in the sacks, and she brings herself to kiss the bull’s head on the mouth out of love for Hassan. Great darkness again, lightning, grimaces by firelight. When the dawn breaks again, Plumm Pasha has his former bearded head again and, as well as rewarding the princess with treasures, he elevates her to sit beside him on his throne – and hands her his large ruby ​​heart. But Tino cries bitterly for she loves Hassan, who gestures for her to remain silent. But one of the people rushes to the Pasha and reveals to him that his redemptress loves Hassan, the son of the calipha Diwagâtme. The Grand Vizier now sends for the raiments of battle and a spear and sends the surprised youth to war.

But the moon rises gigantic in the sky, and the princess pretends to be tired, to fall asleep ... and beside her the Grand Vizier sleeps, along with all the people. And when the princess hears that all are fast asleep, she opens her eyes; the god Ptah has brought a jester. He exchanges clothes with the princess so that she can make her lucky escape. The Grand Vizier awakens, sees the jester next to him; the jester keeps nodding to him, and Plumm Pasha believes it to have all been a dream. So he hosts a great feast at which Tino and Hassan are married. Roses, water displays. Finally the god Ptah comes and blesses the two: Hassan and Tino.

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‘Plumm Pasha’ by Else Lasker-Schüler was first published in German as ‘Plumm-Pascha’ in Das Kinobuch (ed. Kurt Pinthus), by Kurt Wolff Verlag in Leipzig, 1913 (copyright 1914).

This translation © 2020 James J. Conway

Who was Édouard Drumont?

When it came to designing our next book, Antisemitism by Hermann Bahr (originally published in 1894), finding an appropriate image proved challenging. How best to depict this utterly ground-breaking set of interviews concerning anti-Jewish sentiment of the 1890s that encompassed much of western Europe in its scope? One alternative might have been to explore the grotesque antisemitic caricatures that appeared in a number of publications of the time, particularly in Germany and France. Parisian newspaper La Libre Parole, for instance, popularised the kind of imagery seen in the worst antisemitic propaganda to this day – big-nosed Jews grasping, pulling strings, bleeding nations dry.

But rather than perpetuating these images, wouldn’t it be better to put the focus on those who were actually peddling these tropes? French writer Édouard Drumont, for instance. Born in 1844, he was perhaps the most prominent antisemite of his time in Europe. In fact it was he who founded La Libre Parole, in 1892. This followed the ‘Antisemitic League’ which he established in 1889, and his most lasting contribution to the cause, the extensive and popular book La France Juive (Jewish France), which appeared in 1886. One of his numerous targets in that book was the French-Jewish journalist and newspaper proprietor Arthur Meyer – one of Bahr’s interviewees – who challenged him to a duel.

Drumont was instrumental in arousing public outrage during the Panama Scandal that followed the first, failed attempt to build a canal through Panama in which France lost huge amounts of money, sometimes in deals of questionable legality. Drumont believed that Jewish conspirators were behind the whole affair, recklessly accusing public figures of underhand dealings for which he received a three-month prison sentence in 1892. The story was still dragging on as Bahr conducted his interviews, and while Drumont himself wasn’t among the 38 respondents, he was frequently cited by those who were, including French journalist Francis Magnard:

Antisemitism is an invention of Mr Édouard Drumont – by which I mean, of course there has always been anti-Jewish sentiment, prejudice and hatred, but it was only ever a purely personal matter. You liked the Jews, or you did not, as you saw fit – it had nothing to do with politics. It was Drumont who first created, discovered political antisemitism, and it was only with La France Juive that it came to life. Drumont turned his individual antipathy into a general principle …

But elsewhere Magnard describes Drumont as ‘passionate, immoderate, yet gallant and honourable’, consistent with others who found admirable qualities in him even while deploring his monomaniacal hatred of Jews. They included another interviewee, French journalist Séverine, who described him as ‘brave, passionate, strong and chivalrous’.

So: back to the cover. We wanted the artwork to match our previous books, for which the imagery was largely drawn from postcards of the era (incidentally today marks 150 years since the first postcard was sent, in Bahr’s native Austria). And then we stumbled upon an extraordinary, deceptively playful postcard that depicts Drumont, which we presume to have been produced around 1890. The illustrator is Philippe Norwins, of whom little information survives, except that he worked for a number of journals around the beginning of the 20th century and seemed to specialise in caricatures of prominent French figures of the day.

The caption for his image of the French writer reads ‘Drumont anéantit ses mites’, a play on ‘Drumont, un antisémite’ which literally translates as ‘Drumont annihilates his moths’. We see the writer with an outsized pen in one hand, dripping black ink, and in the other an implement with which he sprays what we can presume is a deadly chemical agent, targeted at conspicuously big-nosed insects, one of whom has fallen dead at his feet. The victims are depicted as dehumanised, as vermin, and decades before the gas chambers this single illustration takes us from word to deed, from the polemics of hatred to the obscenity of genocide. And it is this image of shocking if accidental prescience that now adorns our translation of Antisemitism, designed by Svenja Prigge (like the cover for our recent edition of The Nights of Tino of Baghdad by Else Lasker-Schüler).

The Dreyfus Affair erupted in 1894, just as Bahr’s 1893 interviews were being published in book form. It was a scandal tailor-made for Drumont, and in fact it was his Libre Parole that broke the original story which would come to engulf French society in a bitterly rancorous dispute for years. Drumont was the most vocal and fanatical of the numerous French public figures decrying Jewish ‘treachery’ following the (false) accusations against Captain Dreyfus. Drumont was later elected to the Chamber of Deputies as a representative of Algiers, and tried (unsuccessfully) to repeal the law that had conferred French citizenship on Jewish Algerians. Failing to be re-elected in 1902 Drumont returned to his writing, and narrowly missed out on a seat on the august Académie française.

Édouard Drumont died in 1917; among the mourners at his funeral was Arthur Meyer.

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Antisemitism by Hermann Bahr, originally published in German in 1894, is appearing in English for the first time on 21 October 2019 (translated by James J. Conway), Rixdorf Editions

Overcoming antisemitism

One of the most famous of Hermann Bahr’s considerable contributions to early modernism is the 1891 essay ‘Die Überwindung des Naturalismus’ (Overcoming Naturalism), in which the Austrian writer and critic proposed ways in which European literature could advance beyond what was then its dominant movement. But Bahr never lost sight of wider society beyond the cultural sphere, maintaining a keen interest in politics, although his views underwent substantial transformation, especially in his early adult years.

As the Afterword to our forthcoming translation of his 1894 book Antisemitism reveals, the young Bahr was given to rowdy student provocations, including antisemitic insults. Within a decade he was a spokesman for the ‘Young Vienna’ group of writers and its numerous Jewish members, and would soon marry a Jewish actress. This unusual trajectory gave him a highly valuable insight into the rise of a new, virulent, politicised form of racial antisemitism whipped up by extremists both elected and unelected who together present a prototype for today’s breed of populism.

This extract from the Afterword takes us through the stages in Bahr’s early life that led up to the landmark study. In it we discover not only a key figure of European modernism who deserves far greater recognition in the English-speaking world, but also someone who was ideally suited to produce a pan-European study of the most contentious issue of his time.

Born in solidly middle-class, typically Catholic circumstances in Linz in 1863, Hermann Bahr early on exhibited a sharp mind and a rebellious spirit; graduating from secondary school as a star pupil in 1881, he was allowed to address his fellow students and caused a stir by using his talk to champion socialism. At university in Vienna, where he studied classical philology and philosophy, Bahr became an associate member of Albia, a Burschenschaft (a student association comparable to a fraternity) which was aligned with the pan-German movement. It was here that he came into contact with two figures who dramatically exemplified the range of responses to the ‘Jewish question’ at the time. On the one hand there was Theodor Herzl, the first modern Zionist, one of a number of Jews at the time who, with no previous cause to regard themselves as significantly other, responded to anti-Jewish agitation with increased identification with Judaism. On the other was Georg von Schönerer, the early instigator of racial antisemitism who would exert an enormous ideological influence on Nazism. Here, Bahr had personal links with the respective godfathers of modern Israel and the Holocaust.

To Bahr’s later shame, it was Schönerer who loomed largest in his thinking at the time. The passionate young pan-Germanist could see at close quarters those qualities he admired from afar in Otto von Bismarck, Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Adopting Schönerer’s views as his own, Bahr saw the Austro- Hungarian Empire as an ‘over-Slavified’ relic of the past. One of Bahr’s first published articles reflected his antisemitic beliefs, which found even cruder expression in slogans that he pasted up around Vienna, leading to his arrest.

In 1883 Bahr aired his outspoken pan-German views at a ceremony to mark the death of Richard Wagner and was dismissed from Vienna University for ‘treasonous activities’; he then moved to Graz, where he was arrested for insulting Jewish patrons in a café. It was an ignominious nadir. The worldly man of letters was yet to emerge, and in the meantime Bahr pursued sociology and economics, a combination of disciplines he regarded as the ‘alchemy of the future’. So when he moved to Berlin in 1884 it was as much the presence of famed economists Adolph Wagner and Gustav Schmoller as his Germanophilia that attracted him. Hermann Bahr arrived in Berlin with a highly quixotic blend of political beliefs, favouring a Hohenzollern monarchy ruling over Germany and Austria (but not the rest of Austria’s empire), free of Jewish influence and somehow also socialist. His admiration for Bismarck led Bahr to join a torchlight procession for the Iron Chancellor’s 70th birthday in 1885. He endeavoured to meet the man himself but was directed instead to an advisor, Franz Johannes von Rottenburg, who inspired an unexpected turning point. Rottenburg managed to convince the committed pan-Germanist of the necessity of Austrian sovereignty; Bahr became an Austrian patriot on the spot – and would remain so for the rest of his life – even as his antisemitic and socialist views receded.

From this transitional phase a writer was emerging. Die neuen Menschen (The New People), from 1887, was emblematic of Bahr’s shifting focus. Thematically it illustrated his gradual alienation from socialism but its form – drama – would increasingly come to preoccupy him as both a critic and a creator. The following year he met the foremost living practitioner of the art, Henrik Ibsen, and moved to Paris where he could satisfy his hunger for new literary forms.

Bahr dwelt among bohemians and came into contact with Decadent literature, with the key text of the movement, Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, inspiring his first novel, Die gute Schule (The Good School, 1890). He was one of the first German-speaking writers to regard the radical individualism and recherché perversity of Decadence as a way forward, as reflected in one of his most renowned essays, ‘Die Überwindung des Naturalismus’ (Overcoming Naturalism) in 1891.

As well as travelling to Spain, Morocco and Russia, Bahr returned to Berlin, where he was repelled by the advance of materialism, and in marked contrast to his younger years came to regard Jews as guardians of German culture (although he also complained that Germans were ‘two hundred years behind’ when he worked on the journal Freie Bühne für modernes Leben, or Free Stage for Modern Life). Through his literary criticism Bahr became closely identified in German-speaking Europe with die Moderne and he played a crucial role in the advancement of new forms.

Amid an intense period of publishing activity, Bahr issued a collection of stories entitled Fin de Siècle, helping to popularise a French borrowing that would come to be used as an umbrella term in German-speaking countries for Decadence, Symbolism and other inter-connected literary strains at the close of the 19th century. However, six of the book’s tales were judged obscene by Prussian authorities for depicting ‘abnormal and aberrant gratification of the sex drive’, and Bahr was fined 150 marks.

In 1891 Bahr returned to Vienna, with no little reluctance initially, although he soon became an essential part of the city’s literary life at one of its most exciting periods. Again, Bahr was pivotal, the ringleader of the ‘Young Vienna’ group which included the likes of Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, as well as Karl Kraus, with whom Bahr conducted a long-running feud. In 1892 Bahr met Emil Auspitzer, the Jewish editor of Vienna’s Deutsche Zeitung, a newspaper that went through a number of ideological shifts. Auspitzer took Bahr on with a handsome salary and a generous brief that encompassed theatre as well as wider cultural phenomena, and Bahr made the most of it. In October of that year he ran a series of interviews with notable figures in Vienna’s theatre scene. This was a highly novel concept in German-language letters; the authoritative Duden dictionary locates the first instance of the loan word das Interview in 1887. Toward the end of that year Bahr returned to Paris to cover the Panama Scandal, interviewing Émile Zola among others, and also met up with Theodor Herzl again, who was there covering the same story as the foreign correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse, competitor to the Deutsche Zeitung.

In 1893 Bahr marshalled these elements for a far more extensive undertaking – a series of interviews with prominent international figures on the subject of antisemitism.

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Antisemitism by Hermann Bahr (tr. James J. Conway) will be published on 21 October 2019. You can find more information here.

Who was Senna Hoy?

Our translation of Else Lasker-Schüler’s The Nights of Tino of Baghdad is prefixed with the words: ‘This book I give to my beloved playmate, Sascha (Senna Hoy)’. At least, this is the dedication in the 1919 second edition that formed the basis for our translation; the first edition from 1907 was dedicated to the author’s mother.

So who was Sascha, a.k.a. Senna Hoy? Behind these names was a man born in 1882 with the far less exotic handle of Johannes Holzmann. But it was as ‘Senna Hoy’ – a phonetic reversal of his first name bestowed by Lasker-Schüler herself – that the German-Jewish bohemian anarchist writer found a measure of fame, or at least infamy. The extraordinary image above appears to be the only photograph of him that has survived, but it offers a vivid sense of a man whose zeal, magnetism and rebellious spirit made a great impression on his contemporaries. It remains a mystery why no one has yet undertaken a biography of this enormously compelling character.

Senna Hoy was a member of the ‘Neue Gemeinschaft’, or New Community, which greeted the dawn of the 20th century with grand plans for society from their base in Schlachtensee, a lakeside district then south-west of Berlin’s city limits. It was here that Else Lasker-Schüler made numerous vital contacts as she embarked on a new life, having recently separated from her first husband, Berthold Lasker. She was particularly drawn to the handsome young Holzmann in a group that also included the reform-minded artist Fidus (born Hugo Höppener), the philosopher Martin Buber, radical activitist Erich Mühsam, anarchist pacifist Gustav Landauer, writer and part-time vagrant Peter Hille, as well as Georg Lewin, who would become Lasker-Schüler’s second husband and a vital catalyst for early modernism in Germany under the name Herwarth Walden – also an invention of his wife.

In 1902 Senna Hoy became associated with the journal Kampf (or Kampf!), which began as a supplement to the Berlin newspaper, the Montags-Post. In 1904-05 it was a freestanding publication under Senna Hoy’s editorship and featured numerous contributions under his own hand and from his Neue Gemeinschaft colleagues, as well as Hanns Heinz Ewers, Paul Scheerbart and sado-maso cabarettiste Dolorosa. Senna Hoy was never shy of controversy, offering vocal support to workers, anarchists and homosexuals. He was one of the very first of numerous Western intellectuals to take inspiration from revolutionary Russia, eagerly following the 1905 upheavals in his journal. Apart from Kampf, Senna Hoy’s major literary work was an idiosyncratic 1904 novella entitled Golden Kätie, in which he makes direct reference to Lasker-Schüler and her alter ego of Tino.

Just about every second edition of Kampf was banned and in 1905 Senna Hoy left Germany, fearing arrest. He ended up in Warsaw and joined an anarchist gang who robbed the rich to fund their struggle. He was arrested by Russian imperial forces; the loyal Lasker-Schüler, who could barely keep herself in coffee, scraped together the money to visit him in Russia and desperately tried to gain attention for his plight. She referred to him as ‘Sascha, Prince of Moscow’, but it was not a palace that he inhabited there, but an asylum.

Efforts to free him were in vain. Having basically lived out the entire 20th century before World War One even started, Senna Hoy died of tuberculosis in 1914, aged just 31. He is buried in the Wiessensee cemetery in Berlin – a few metres from where Else Lasker-Schüler’s son Paul would be buried in 1927. Might the two young men have had a closer connection than previously assumed? Read the Afterword to our translation of The Nights of Tino of Baghdad and find out …

A 1914 edition of socialist journal Die Aktion dedicated to Senna Hoy, shortly after his death.

Else on Magnus

With our forthcoming publication The Nights of Tino of Baghdad, we though it would be interesting to share a short piece by the author of that work, Else Lasker-Schüler, in which she discusses her friend Magnus Hirschfeld, author of Berlin’s Third Sex.

This is one of numerous pen portraits of her friends and associates – including Karl Kraus, Oskar Kokoschka, Gottfried Benn, Tilla Durieux and Alfred Kerr – that Lasker-Schüler produced throughout her career, prose miniatures that capture the essence of her subjects’ personae. This article was first published toward the end of the First World War, and takes the form of an open letter to university students in Zurich where Hirschfeld was shortly to give a lecture. Describing his 50th birthday party which had taken place a few weeks earlier, it presents a warmer, more playful side to the tireless activist and pioneer of sex studies than most other accounts, including his own autobiography.

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Else Lasker-Schuler

Doctor Magnus Hirschfeld

translated by James J. Conway

On Thursday, 11 July you will hear Magnus Hirschfeld speak in Zurich at the Schwurgerichtssaal; it is an evening to which you can look forward. I should like to tell you something about our doctor in Berlin. He is not just our doctor, he is also our host; his consultations end in beaux jours, the ailing forget their neuroses and for the healthy patient an afternoon in his delightful waiting rooms provides pleasing stimulation for the nerves. There in the middle of the Tiergarten amid stout chestnut trees and whispering acacias lives Medical Councillor Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Not that he likes us calling him that. ‘Children, just call me “Doctor”.’ Nevertheless, he confessed to me that his appointment to the Medical Council on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, greatly disputed and contested among the medical profession though it was due to his exceptional position, had pleased him. Beaming like a child, he showed me all his presents. We call him our doctor. And unto our doctor my playmates and I delivered an exquisite serenade on the eve of his birthday revels. Touched, the revellers came out onto his balcony to hear our songs accompanied by accordion and drum. The concluding chorus: ‘I should like to carve it in every crust...’. He is amused by our exuberance, because – being earnest – Dr Hirschfeld understands jest, he is not some serious professor with an oak-leaf beard. Now, I must confess to you dear students that, to my shame, I am not familiar with any of the many famous books that the doctor has written (essentially I only read my own), but can nevertheless judge them from his incomparably interesting lectures, these thrilling medical, historical novels, standard works that never turn stale. Doctor Hirschfeld is the advocate of sincere love of any kind, opponent of all forms of hatred. A gentle forensic physician who seeks to understand everything. All compassion, he sacrifices his strength, his time, his good heart to the departing soldier. At the railway stations one often sees our doctor cultivating entire tobacco plantations, distributing numerous boxes of cigars and cigarettes as he farewells them in their field grey. He is a man whose goodwill is truly blind to class. He rushes to those who summon him. I once ambushed him myself, and managed to get him away from his great practice to accompany me to a wounded friend in Pomerania. Gentlemen, I am pleased to sing the praises and wonders of our Doctor Hirschfeld. When he is away from Berlin it is as though our father confessor were missing. We all long for his words of comfort, for his cosy, warm green chambers which are as soothing as the man himself.

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‘Doktor Magnus Hirschfeld’ by Else Lasker-Schüler was first published in German in the Züricher Post und Handelszeitung, 10 July 1918. First book publication in Essays, published by Paul Cassirer, 1920.

This translation © 2019 James J. Conway