Black Lines Matter: Poetry, Racism, Genocide, Cultural Zionism, and Anti-Colonial Solidarity in Else Lasker-Schüler's "Hagar und Ismaël" (1919)

Hagar und IsmaëlMax Reinhardt schenke ich dieses Gedicht.

Mit Muscheln spielten Abrahams kleine SöhneUnd ließen schwimmen die Perlmutterkähne;Dann lehnte Isaak bang sich an den Ismaël

Und traurig sangen die zwei schwarzen SchwäneUm ihre bunte Welt ganz dunkle TöneUnd die verstoßne Hagar raubte ihren Sohn sich schnell.

Vergoß in seine kleine ihre große Träne.Und ihre Herzen rauschten wie der heilige Quell,Und übereilten noch die Straußenhähne.

Die Sonne aber brannte auf der Wüste grellUnd Hagar und ihr Knäblein sanken in das gelbe Fell Und bissen in den heißen Sand die weißen Negerzähne.

(Lasker-Schüler, Werke 208)

First published in November 1919 in the journal Die Weißen Blätter, Else Lasker-Schüler's poem "Hagar und Ismaël" is replete with images of blackness: "die zwei schwarzen Schwäne" ("the two black swans"); "dunkle Töne" ("dark tones"); and, finally, the jarring concluding word, "Negerzähne" ("Negro teeth"), a phrase redolent of the pseudo-scientific jargon of race science, like something from an imperial-era museum of anthropology.² The poem recounts and reimagines episodes from Genesis 21:1–21. Where the Bible verses tell of how Sarah orders her husband to cast out Hagar, the Egyptianborn slave with whom Abraham has fathered a child, Lasker-Schüler's poem puts the accent on the cast-out mother and her son, and their desperate thirst in the wilderness—omitting the Bible's subsequent narrative of divine mercy, rescue, and future promise in response to their pleas. "Hagar und Ismaël" is most commonly interpreted in relation to Lasker-Schüler's cycle of Biblically-themed poems, Hebräische Balladen, which were published in several re-ordered and expanded editions.³ Critics have searched for direct biographical connections.⁴ Yet it is striking that, to the best of my knowledge, no scholars have ever recognized how this poem's pointedly racial language, deployed to portray a scene of a refugee woman and child dying of thirst in a hostile desert landscape, is clearly evocative of the 1904–1908 genocide in German Southwest Africa (today Namibia), when the German colonial Schutztruppe drove the Herero people into the Omaheke Desert, where more than half of them perished from starvation and dehydration (genocidal acts against the Nama people also occurred).⁵ In the following, I will explore Lasker-Schüler's 1919 poem as a belated response to this genocide, an act of anti-colonial solidarity figured within Lasker-Schüler's engagement with Judaism, cultural Zionism, antisemitism, modernism, and poetry.

Although the case of the Armenian genocide (1915), when Ottoman troops drove civilians into the Syrian desert, might have presented a more immediate point of reference for Lasker-Schüler in 1919,⁶ the poem "Hagar und Ismaël" presents ample evidence that the context is colonialism, specifically the German colonial adventures in Asia and especially Africa, which came to an end with Germany's defeat in World War I. Whereas the image of the "black swans" is often correctly read as Lasker-Schüler's reference to herself as a poet and an exotic outsider, as a Jewish woman in German society, taking up Peter Hille's early praise of her as "der schwarze Schwan Israels"⁷ (Israel's black swan), in "Hagar und Ismaël" we can also recall that the black swan has a special significance in the history of the European encounter with the rest of the world. In Western thought, since Roman times, black swans were presumed not to exist. They were considered fantastical beings until Dutch explorers in the late seventeenth century found actual black swans in Western Australia. Thus, in Lasker-Schüler's poem, the black swans signify at least five things at once: (1) a Romanticized symbol of the non-European exotic; (2) a figure for poetry as "singing" black swans, including poetry's ability to...