Announcing: Three Prose Works

June 2022: three fiction pieces by the great German-Jewish writer appear in English for the first time

Three Prose Works
by Else Lasker-Schüler

Rixdorf Editions is very proud to announce a major forthcoming anthology by one of the greatest German writers of the 20th century. Appearing in June 2022, Three Prose Works unites an interconnected trio of fiction publications by Else Lasker-Schüler originally issued before the First World War and presented here in English for the first time. The translator is James J. Conway who also provides an insightful afterword. Three Prose Works shows a vital facet of the German-Jewish writer’s creative output developing in parallel with her better-known verse, as she mythologises her own ceaseless quest for freedom and meaning in captivatingly original prose. Each of the three works is self-contained although they contain numerous thematic links with each other:

• The Peter Hille Book (1906), is a collection of gem-like, Nietzschean tales in which her alter-ego ‘Tino’ shares the odyssey and the wisdom of ‘Petrus’, a stand-in for her beloved mentor Peter Hille.

• The Nights of Tino of Baghdad* (1907) is an episodic fantasia which explores a notional ‘Orient’ of the author’s devising, blending Muslim and Jewish traditions to explore the commonalities of Semitic identity.

• The Prince of Thebes (1914), issued on the eve of the First World War, offers a sequence of dark fables seething with violence and eroticism, culminating in a great clash of civilisations.

Cover artwork for Three Prose Works designed by Svenja Prigge

Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945) was a major voice of Expressionism and a bohemian fixture of early 20th century Berlin. She received Germany’s most prestigious literary prize shortly before she was forced into exile with the rise of the Nazis in 1933. While her verse works such as the late collection My Blue Piano continue to gain new devotees in English translation, her compelling, heavily autobiographical prose works largely remain to be discovered.

Described by the TLS as an ‘exciting new list’, Berlin-based Rixdorf Editions is introducing forgotten German classics to a contemporary English-language readership, focusing on the Wilhelmine period (1890-1918), when daringly innovative writers defied a reactionary mainstream. In bringing vital German texts from around the beginning of the 20th century to new readers, Rixdorf Editions has been particularly focussed on women’s writing; Three Prose Works is the eighth print publication by the press, half of which are by women. The Rixdorf list of original translations includes titles by Anna Croissant-Rust, August Endell, Franziska zu Reventlow, Hermann Bahr and Ilse Frapan, plus its latest work, Papa Hamlet, by Arno Holz & Johannes Schlaf (October 2021), and its best-selling title, Berlin’s Third Sex by Magnus Hirschfeld (2017). Three Prose Works is the last in this current series of rediscovered German literary treasures from Rixdorf Editions, which will return with a new format in late 2022.

* subscribers to the Rixdorf Editions mailing list had a preview of The Nights of Tino of Baghdad, which was issued in electronic form in 2019 and since deleted.

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Else Lasker-Schüler Three Prose Works
translated by James J. Conway
Cover: Svenja Prigge
20 June 2022 | ISBN: 978-3-947325-12-2
218 pages, trade paperback | 115 x 178 mm, French flaps
EUR 12 | GBP 9.99 | USD 20
US distribution: SPD | UK/Ireland distribution: Central

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.

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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

Else Lasker-Schüler’s Berlin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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Architektenhaus

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

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

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

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

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.

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Deutsches Theater

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.

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