Else Lasker-Schüler

Else Lasker-Schüler (born Elberfeld, now part of Wuppertal, 1869; died Jerusalem, 1945) was a German poet and playwright, and one of the few women associated with Expressionism. Born Elisabeth Schüler, she signed most of her work with the surname of her first husband. As a Jew, she was forced out of Nazi Germany and spent the last years of her life in Jerusalem, a city she never quite felt at home in.

She was the youngest of six children of a Jewish banker, Aaron Schüler, and his wife Jeannette Kissing, who became a central figure in much of her poetry. She was considered a child prodigy, and it is said that she could read and write by the age of four. After marrying the physician Berthold Lasker, she moved to Berlin, where she moved in the city's literary and artistic circles. The marriage ended in divorce, and her later union with the artist Herwarth Walden, editor of the magazine Der Sturm, also ended in separation.

A run of family deaths shaped her life and work. Her brother Paul, her mother, her father and later her own son all died, and the losses pushed her into an unsettled existence of frequent moves and shifting friendships. Some of those friends gave her material support, most notably the writer Karl Kraus, while the poet Gottfried Benn received many of her love poems.

Her poetry blends love, death and religion without keeping them in separate compartments. She handled poetic form with little regard for convention, invented words, drew on archaisms, and often illustrated her own books with drawings. Her verse brings together biblical imagery, oriental motifs and a personal, mystical voice. Her poems appeared in journals such as Der Sturm and Karl Kraus's Die Fackel, and in 1932 she won the Kleist Prize.

After the Nazis took power she left for Switzerland and then for British-ruled Palestine, where she lived in real hardship with failing health. In 1938 her German citizenship was revoked and her books were banned. She died in Jerusalem in 1945. Her name is now honoured in Germany and Israel through streets, plaques and studies, and her poetry is still read as one of the most distinctive voices of Expressionism.