Repetition as Aesthetic Practice: Hearts in Else Lasker-Schüler’s Modernist Project

This article investigates the extensive use of the heart as word and image in the creative work of Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945), focusing especially on her love poetry. Specifically, it situates Lasker-Schüler’s practices in the context of modernist appropriations of repetition, revealing how the multiplied hearts allow the poet to invite an exploration of difference within unity, through which meaning is alternately multiplied and questioned; of difference within the self, which forms the basis of modernist subjectivity; and of abstraction, achieved through emphasis on repetition of the heart as form. Such a reading enriches our understanding of Lasker-Schüler’s work – especially her love poetry – in that it reveals the possibility for that very symbol of love and the erotic – the heart – to function beyond the traditional role to which existing scholarship has largely assigned it.