Reading the Politics of Else Lasker-Schuler's 1914 Hebrew Ballads

“[I]ch bin unpolitisch.”

—Else Lasker-Schüler, 1937

“[T]hat [Lasker-Schüler] places members of the fascist regime of Germany on stage does not demonstrate her ability to think politically. She is as incapable of this [in her drama Ichundich (1941 IandI)] as earlier. Political thought has to be realistic. . . .”

—Sigrid Bauschinger

For most readers, lyric poetry stands on the farthest end of the literary continuum from politics. On the other hand, feminist and marxist readers identify all literature as political in the sense that all texts participate in cultural ideologies and hence in structures of discourse and power. Else Lasker-Schüler’s 1914 publication of Hebrew Ballads (Hebräische Balladen) provides an interesting case for thinking about how both positions function; this volume of lyric poetry contains no public or social “political” references and the poet herself claims not to be “political,” but its repeated themes and structure as a volume suggest a radical critique of the assumptions underlying the political dynamics of Wilhelmine Germany. Because such a critique is merely suggested and because it is formulated largely through mythic, religious narrative and love poems, readers who, like Bauschinger, believe that “Political thought has to be realistic” remain confirmed in their conviction that the volume’s significance is instead biographical, spiritual, or aesthetic. Like many of her contemporaries, however, Lasker-Schüler saw no dissonance between the fantastic or utopian and the political. Expressionist philosopher and essayist Ernst Bloch, in particular, defends what he calls the “utopian function” inherent in all great works of art or social visions as being responsible for whatever humanizing the world has experienced. The intensity of excess or surplus in utopian creations causes a “mobilization of those contradictions inherent in the bad existence in order to overcome that existence, in order to bring it to the point of collapse.” ¹ He argues that the imaginative power of anticipation or consciously directed hope is more real than any sociological or bourgeois realism and that all great art aspires to such power. While distinctly less utopian than Bloch, as well as less grounded in a specific political ideology, Lasker-Schüler does construct mythical-religious fictions that critique early-twentieth-century Wilhelmine culture through their celebration of relationships defying its conventions and norms. ²

Most poems in Hebrew Ballads portray intimate moments in the lives of biblical figures, but instead of celebrating same-class, same-nation, heterosexual love or partnership, much of the volume’s love and communication occurs between social unequals and between men. As a consequence, love appears instructional, not sentimental or weakly ideal. To use Bloch’s terms, these poems display the “unimpaired reason of a militant optimism,” personally, not socially, cast. ³ Complex responses to dominant gender constructions underlie these portraits of intimacy and imply another kind of instruction. All the relationships Lasker-Schüler portrays suggest principles and practices that stereotypically would have been seen as feminine but that in her poetry also partake of a power and expressiveness associated with men. Moreover, Lasker-Schüler attributes these qualities and practices both to women and to the great patriarchs of Jewish and Christian tradition—Joseph, David, and even God himself. In an era characterized by extreme gender essentialism and misogyny, such portraits imply a protest by demonstrating alternative possibilities. Through their characterization of rulers and powerful men, these poems also implicitly protest the nationalism and militarism characterizing the age of Wilhelm II and more generally the ethos of a military-industrial state as experienced in Berlin, a city with extensive slums, huge factories, and rigid class divisions. Lasker-Schüler modifies the anticipatory or hopeful aspects of the volume, however, by placing its utopian moments in a mythic past that itself also contains treachery, death, and isolation. Consequently, Hebrew Ballads seems to mix elements of nostalgia and mourning with the sharper edge of its utopian social critique.

Else Lasker-Schüler was a German Jewish poet born in the industrial town of Elberfeld (Wuppertal) in 1869; she moved to Berlin in 1894; and her publications span the years 1902–1943...