Werke und Briefe Band 6: Briefe 1893-1913, and: Werke und Briefe Band 7: Briefe 1914-1924, and: Werke und Briefe Band 8: Briefe 1925-1933 (review)

Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945) was among the best-known poets of the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods in Germany. A Jew who moved from the industrial town of Elberfelde to Berlin in 1894, Lasker-Schüler had published volumes of poetry, plays, experimental fiction, and essays, supporting herself in part through selling her drawings, before going into exile in 1933, first to Zurich and then to Palestine, where she died. Although she is little known today outside German and Jewish Studies, she was praised by the most astute critics of her era. Karl Kraus called her poem "An Old Tibetan Rug" one of the greatest since Goethe's. Among others, Gerschom Sholem, Walter Benjamin, Richard Dehmel, and Gottfried Benn admired her verse.

A bohemian more flamboyant than most, Lasker-Schüler challenged most norms of behavior during this chaotic period of German history—religious, gender, sexual, and social. Twice-married and with a son whose paternity she never revealed, the poet called herself by a variety of names, including Tino Princess of Baghdad, Jussuf (Arabic for Joseph) Prince of Thebes, the Malik (Arabic for king), and the Blue Jaguar. In her poems, she speaks as a "prince" and as a woman, writing love poems to both women and men. Lasker-Schüler also cross-dressed—primarily for her readings, which were highly staged performances, although she sometimes wore a turban and pants on more ordinary occasions. By the 1920s, tourists to Berlin made a sighting of, or acquaintance with, the "Prince of Thebes" part of their tour; in 1920, for example, the poet accuses Djuna Barnes of being just this kind of curiosity-seeker (6:336).

The Jüdischer Verlag's publication of Lasker-Schüler's Works and Letters in a critical edition will make broader knowledge of this extraordinary writer possible. Now in its eighth volume, with three more volumes of letters to come, it has already presented her complete poems, plays, stories, sketches, and novels with detailed annotation. Volumes 6, 7, and 8 present her letters from 1893—when the poet was twenty-four—through 1933, the year she fled Berlin for Zurich. These volumes are among the most valuable of the critical edition, since well over half the letters have not previously appeared in print and the indexes make it possible to determine quickly the extent of her correspondence with, and reference to, particular individuals during particular years. Volume 6 covers the most extraordinary period of her productivity. The twenty-four-year-old poet's first extant letter, to her soon-to-be brother-in-law, suggests the ordinary excitement of a young woman anticipating her sister's marriage. By the third letter of the volume, Lasker-Schüler herself was married (to Doctor Berthold Lasker) and living in Berlin, where she soon began taking painting classes and, a few years later, left her husband to enter wholeheartedly into the German literary and artistic avant-garde. In the letters of this volume, from nearly the beginning, one witnesses the degree to which Lasker-Schüler both fantasized the details of her life (constructing various stories of her birth, family, and earlier involvement in art, and creating a rich fictional culture for herself and her friends) and worked with clear-sighted ambition to bring her writing to the attention of the poets and readers she most admired. Before long, she was also promoting the work of lesser-known artists and writers with equally energetic direction.

These...