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.

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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.

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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.

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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.


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.


‘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

 
 

Postcard from Vienna

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Hermann Bahr was living in this Viennese building when his book Der Antisemitismus was published in Berlin in 1894; today we are proud to finally present this vitally important work in its first English translation.

Incidentally, the building – on Salesianergasse to the south-east of Vienna’s old town – was also the birthplace of Austrian writer and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

Who was Édouard Drumont?

 
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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.

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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 …

 
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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.

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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.


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.

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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.


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


 
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Else Lasker-Schüler’s Berlin

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Writer Else Lasker-Schüler was born in Elberfeld (Wuppertal, in the Rhineland) in 1869 and died in Jerusalem in 1945, but her home for the majority of her adult life, as well as the stage for her creative personae and the crucible of most of her greatest works, was Berlin. She arrived in 1894 with her first husband, Berthold Lasker, but within less than a decade she had divorced and then married Herwarth Walden (né Georg Levin), by which time she was a fixture of bohemian Berlin. Before World War One she had established her uncompromising artistic vision and released some of her most important publications. From her hotel room in Schöneberg she was witness to the entirety of the city’s fabled Weimar period, before she was forced into exile in 1933. And it was in Berlin that she gave birth to her only child, and nursed him to his death just 28 years later.

Else Lasker-Schüler in 1907, the year she published The Nights of Tino of Baghdad

Else Lasker-Schüler in 1907, the year she published The Nights of Tino of Baghdad

In this, the 150th year since her birth, prompted by my translation of Lasker-Schüler’s The Nights of Tino of Baghdad, and further inspired by Jörg Aufenanger’s recent book Else Lasker-Schüler in Berlin, I set out to find the sites associated with the writer’s time in the capital and record how they looked in 2019. Many of the buildings in which she lived or spent time were destroyed during the Second World War, but these erasures themselves form a poignant memorial to a writer forced to absent the city she loved, eradicated from its cultural life at her moment of greatest renown.

Much of her activities in Berlin were encompassed within the bounds of what was then broadly termed the ‘New West’ – an expansive, orderly arrangement of largely bourgeois neighbourhoods with tree-lined streets which presented a stark contrast to the cramped and crooked laneways of the capital’s historic heart.

Here, in more or less chronological order, are some of the key stations of Else Lasker-Schüler’s life in Berlin.


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Brückenallee

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In 1894, Else Lasker-Schüler moved with her husband Berthold Lasker from Elberfeld and settled in Brückenallee in the central Berlin district of Hansaviertel. Lasker, a physician and chess master, hired a studio in the same street where his wife 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, and offering two synagogues to serve its large Jewish community. Lasker-Schüler departed after the breakdown of her marriage in 1899, and gave birth to her son Paul that same year; Lasker was not the father.

This area was almost entirely destroyed during the Second World War and the streetscape radically altered when it became a showcase of high-rise modernism including designs 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.


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Neue Gemeinschaft

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Leaving material security behind, Lasker-Schüler embarked on a new life in the new century and joined the New Community (Neue Gemeinschaft) in 1900, her first major contact with bohemian, literary Berlin. This idealistic group with anarchist tendencies initially met in an apartment in the Wilmersdorf district. Magnus Hirschfeld was associated with the Gemeinschaft, so too Hans Ostwald, the editor of the Metropolis Documents series for which Hirschfeld wrote Berlin’s Third Sex. Other members included Lasker-Schüler’s mentor Peter Hille, her future husband Georg Levin (Herwarth Walden), her beloved companion Johannes Holzmann (Senna Hoy), Hugo Höppener (Fidus), Erich Mühsam, Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber. The Neue Gemeinschaft operated a library and a meeting place here until 1902 when it moved beyond the (then) city limits, to the lakeside district of Schlachtensee. A number of Neue Gemeinschaft members (including Lasker-Schüler) contributed to Senna Hoy’s radical journal Kampf.

It is 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. That the Neue Gemeinschaft met here merely confirms the long, symbiotic, mutually parasitic relationship between bohemia and bourgeoisie. Pro tip: nearby Tian Fu is one of the best Chinese restaurants in Berlin.


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CABARET PETER HILLE

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The existence of a cabaret culture every bit as audacious and transgressive as anything found in the Weimar era is just one of the underacknowledged achievements of Wilhelmine Berlin; Else Lasker-Schüler’s involvement in the very dawn of the city’s fabled cabaret tradition is less heralded still. In 1901 she joined Peter Hille and future husband Herwarth Walden for two evenings of cabaret presentations under the name ‘Teloplasma’ – one night ‘erotic’, the other ‘tragic’; the former was – surprise – the more popular of the two. And Lasker-Schüler was there again in 1902 when Hille opened a cabaret under his own name at Dalbelli’s Italian restaurant, a popular bohemian meeting place.

Following intensive wartime bombing that left little standing for blocks around other than the adjacent Matthäikirche (the tip of its spire is seen here), the site was cleared. Part of an ensemble of institutions designed to compensate West Berlin for the major museums lost to the eastern side of the city, the Neue Nationalgalerie opened here in 1968 in a late design by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It was originally intended for Bacardí until it became apparent that a modernist temple to an international consumer brand might be off-message for revolutionary Cuba. The museum is currently closed as it undergoes extensive renovation.


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Café des Westens

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If there was one Berlin location indissolubly associated with Else Lasker-Schüler it was the Café des Westens. This was the main hub of bohemian Berlin in the early 20th century, with artists, writers, dreamers and camp followers hatching plans that earned the venue the nickname of ‘Café Größenwahn’, or Café Megalomania. Lasker-Schüler was a frequent visitor with second husband Herwarth Walden, whom she married in 1903, and her infant son Paul. Actor Tilla Durieux remarked disdainfully that ‘the little family lived, I suspect, on nothing but coffee.’

The café fell out of favour with artists and writers around the start of the First World War and closed in 1915; only the replica street lamp now suggests anything of the early 20th century streetscape. The space was later used as a cabaret, and in the 1920s ‘Dada Baroness’ Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven could be found selling newspapers on this corner after her return from New York. The building was destroyed in the closing stages of World War Two, and the post-war Café Kranzler that arose in its place is now history as well, leaving only its sign and its festive Wirtschaftswunder canopy as an incongruous adornment to a branch of the weekend custody dad’s outfitter of choice, Superdry. Because I largely get around the city by bicycle, and I value my life, I generally avoid this area. Heavy traffic, a concentration of buses and an almost total dearth of bike paths makes this the absolute worst place in central Berlin to cycle.


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Ludwigkirchstraße

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Lasker-Schüler and husband Herwarth Walden lived on this street from 1903 to 1907, first in a building at this location and subsequently an apartment diagonally across the road. Parts of The Nights of Tino of Baghdad were written here. This area of Wilmersdorf was almost entirely new at the time. The couple’s neighbours included Lasker-Schüler’s early publisher Axel Juncker, and architect August Endell, who operated his practice and design school around the corner, where he wrote his major critical work The Beauty of the Metropolis (1908).

Clearly not the original building, which fell victim to wartime bombing, unlike its fortunate neighbours either side.


Architektenhaus

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From the late 19th century until World War One, the Architektenhaus was a major venue for the avant-garde in Berlin. It hosted a scandalous exhibition by Edvard Munch, his first major showing outside Norway, as well as talks and readings; the ‘Commemoration for Fallen Poets’ hosted by Hugo Ball and associates here in 1915 was a Dada event in all but name (oh, and Aleister Crowley once attended a chess tournament here). In 1906 Lasker-Schüler first presented her Tino stories to the public here.

This is the only missing building on our tour not destroyed in the Second World War; the original (and numerous neighbours) was erased in 1935 to make way for Hermann Göring’s colossal Air Ministry, which ironically survived intensive aerial bombardment in the Second World War. Even for a Nazi-built structure in central Berlin there is an unusually dense set of historical associations around this building. The German Democratic Republic was declared here; one edge abutted the border later marked by the Berlin Wall. Later, in the newly reunified city, a commission operated out of here to divvy up East Germany’s spoils. This is now Germany’s Finance Ministry (see more here).


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Axel Juncker Verlag

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Danish-born Axel Juncker was a bookdealer who kept a store specialising in Scandinavian literature near Potsdamer Platz. He also operated a publishing house at this more sedate location, issuing works by the likes of Rainer Maria Rilke, Kurt Tucholsky and Max Brod. Juncker published Lasker-Schüler’s first book of poetry (Styx, 1902), her first prose work (Das Peter Hille-Buch, 1906) and, in 1907 the third and last of their publications together – The Nights of Tino of Baghdad.

A war survivor on a quiet, tree-lined street.


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Katherinenstraße

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In 1909-11, Else Lasker-Schüler lived here with husband Herwarth Walden in a building that has since been destroyed. As a plaque on its facade recalls, in 1910 Walden established one of the most important avant-garde publications of the early 20th century here. Lasker-Schüler not only provided articles to this new venture but its name as well – Der Sturm. It featured artists and writers of uncompromising intensity and subjectivity working in an emerging style that Walden christened in a 1911 article for the journal: ‘Expressionism’. Later Walden would open a gallery, an art school and something akin to a salon, all under the name Der Sturm.

The site is now occupied by a long, low building of functional construction that houses a luxury car dealership. One great thing about Berlin is that its streets are largely devoid of Maseratis and the other crass tokens of performative douchery. But for how much longer?


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Jewish Cemetery, Weißensee

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Else Lasker-Schüler’s beloved friend Senna Hoy was interned by Russian imperial forces before the First World War; despite her perpetually miserable finances she scraped the money together to visit him in Moscow in 1913. He died there in 1914 and his body was brought to the Jewish Cemetery in Weissensee, in Berlin’s north-eastern reaches. This cemetery would also be the resting place of the writer’s son Paul Lasker-Schüler (1899-1927) and, less than a year later, her first husband Berthold Lasker (1860-1928).

The burial ground, subject of a 2011 feature-length documentary, is Europe’s largest surviving Jewish cemetery. Last year it was recognised by the UN as a site of outstanding biodiversity, and a long-running campaign is seeking to have it included on the UNESCO World Heritage register. Some parts are relatively intact, others left wild; when a tree falls and topples and smashes headstones, they stay toppled and smashed. Unsure if I am stepping on what had once been paths, stung by nettles, I abandon my search for the graves of Paul and Senna Hoy. Anyway, it seems perverse to battle with this profusion of life just to momentarily reveal the markers of death. ‘Schlafe gut!’ says one headstone ‘sleep well!’ I leave them to it.


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Hotel Sachsenhof

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The second plaque of this tour records Lasker-Schüler’s extensive residency of the Hotel Sachsenhof. However her association with this site was of even longer duration than the plaque suggests; she first occupied a room here in July 1918 when it was called the Hotel Koschel, meaning that she witnessed more or less the entire Weimar Republic from this busy street in Schöneberg. Oskar Kokoschka was another guest, and the hotel features in Emil and the Detectives.

The building not only survived the war impressively unscathed but continues to operate as a hotel, now painted in recent-divorcée-lipstick pink. Two doors down is the ‘Magnus Apotheke’, a pharmacy celebrating Lasker-Schüler’s friend Magnus Hirschfeld in the heart of Berlin’s main gaybourhood. Its window is full of protein powders.


Deutsches Theater

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Although originally published in 1909, it took a decade (and the more sympathetic cultural environment of the Weimar Republic) for Lasker-Schüler’s major dramatic work, Die Wupper, to be staged. The venue for the 1919 production was the prestigious Deutsches Theater, founded in 1850. This was the establishment temple of German dramatic arts, but Wilhelm II famously refused to return to the theatre after it staged Gerhart Hauptmann’s Naturalist drama The Weavers in 1894, an affront to the Kaiser’s reactionary tastes.

It took a while to get here as there was a marijuana protest marching down Unter den Linden. And they were s o s l o w. Once I got to the deserted theatre and started snapping a friendly man cycling up to the front door asked if he should keep his bike out of frame, but I felt it added a humanising touch.


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Paul Cassirer

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In 1919, Lasker-Schüler’s works to that point were reissued by Paul Cassirer, who ran a publishing concern across the road from his primary business – an art dealership which was crucial in introducing modernism to Berlin. The new editions (including the version of The Nights of Tino of Baghdad on which we based our translation) all featured artwork by the author herself. Cassirer was one of the targets of a bitter reckoning with her various publishers that Lasker-Schüler issued in 1925. The following year he committed suicide (the events are unrelated; Cassirer was engaged in a bitter divorce with Tilla Durieux – who we caught throwing shade at Else back in the Café des Westens – and shot himself in his lawyer’s office).

Viktoriastrasse, the street from which Paul Cassirer operated, was wiped from the map in the Second World War. Where his publishing house once stood, traffic now sluices into the tunnel under the Tiergarten in a tableau of unsurpassable banality. If you wished to mark this important site with a plaque you’d have to bolt it to the mast of a street sign mounted on a traffic island. And who’s going to see it?


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Jussuf Abbo’s studio

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Another target of Lasker-Schüler’s ire was Alfred Flechtheim, also an important art dealer and publisher. He operated a gallery on the Landwehr Canal, in a building that was also the venue for the first international Dada ‘trade fair’, in 1920 (in which Lasker-Schüler exhibited a collaboration with Otto Dix). In her essay she mentions a little footbridge (memorably photographed by Marianne Breslauer) that stood before Flechtheim’s gallery, expressing the wish that it would collapse from the force of her indignation. The bridge led to a site on the opposite bank where Herwarth Walden once operated an offshoot of his Der Sturm gallery, where the Futurists exhibited in 1912. So Lasker-Schüler was more than likely familiar with the location when – around 1920 – she met Palestinian-Jewish artist Jussuf Abbo, who had a studio in the building in which he had erected a Bedouin tent. At a particularly low point, Lasker-Schüler moved in with Abbo to care for her gravely ill son Paul (pictured), who died here in 1927.

The site of Abbo’s studio is now occupied by a centre-left think tank. A plaque was recently unveiled on the building commemorating the artist with a quote from Lasker-Schüler (‘Artfully formed and carefully shrouded, Jussuf Abbu’s stone creations live pious lives’), from a poem written in 1923, the same year the artist depicted the writer in a lithograph. Jussuf Abbo was forced to leave Berlin in 1935, and died in London in 1953. It was actually the war rather than Lasker-Schüler’s rage that took out the bridge, but a replacement now adorns this picturesque bend in the canal. With willows weeping elegantly into the canal, this could be one of the most delightful corners of Berlin. But it’s not. Traffic once roared along the bank of necessity, when it was a key West Berlin thoroughfare. It now roars through here because urban planning authorities are evidently unaware that the Wall has been gone for thirty years. And remarkably, considering Berlin’s current development boom which has consumed just about every other city-centre vacant plot, the site of Flechtheim’s gallery and the Dada fair remains unfilled. It now serves as a depot for – how to describe these vehicles? They’re like canopied trucks with a beer barrel at one end, propelled by groups – bucks’ parties, in the main – who pedal through the city centre while drinking beer. From the sublime to the rebarbative.


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Theater am Nollendorfplatz

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In 1913, the Theater am Nollendorfplatz – a venue that hosted drama, concerts, and other attractions – became the first ever arthouse cinema, showing Hanns Heinz Ewers’ The Student of Prague which is considered the first auteur film. It also became a key location for the Weimar performance tradition under Erwin Piscator’s direction. Lasker-Schüler was a film fan, and a frequent patron of the venue which was just around the corner from the Hotel Sachsenhof. In 1930 she attended the premiere of All Quiet on the Western Front here, which ended in a riot started by Nazis affronted by the film’s pacifist message. Lasker-Schüler herself was injured by thugs who targeted anyone they suspected of being Jewish. After receiving the prestigious Kleist-Preis in late 1932, she gave her last Berlin reading in the theatre, just two months before the Nazis seized power. At least one other public assault followed before Else Lasker-Schüler left Berlin in April 1933, never to return.

The theatre survived the war and has had various functions since, including concert venue and porno theatre (see here). For Pride Week it was temporarily tricked out as another previous incarnation, the nightclub Metropol.


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Else-Lasker-Schüler-Straße

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After living in extremely precarious conditions in Zurich, Else Lasker-Schüler was on a trip to Palestine in 1939 when the war broke out, and she was refused re-entry to Switzerland. She settled in Jerusalem where she died in 1945. In 1998 a section of Motszstrasse, where she had lived throughout the Weimar Republic, was named for her.

The street is made up entirely of post-war buildings, and gentrification has made itself felt here, in the high-spec apartment block that has just gone up at one end of the street, and the gay sex shop which has closed down at the other. Sic transit glory hole.


 
 
Else Lasker-Schüler The Nights of Tino of Baghdad Translated by James J. Conway Design by Svenja Prigge 29 July 2019 68 pages, PDF only ISBN: 978-3-947325-05-4 Deleted More information here.

Else Lasker-Schüler
The Nights of Tino of Baghdad
Translated by James J. Conway
Design by Svenja Prigge
29 July 2019
68 pages, PDF only
ISBN: 978-3-947325-05-4
Deleted
More information here.