Defiant Imagination: Else Lasker-Schüler and the Art of Survival

How might a person react when threatened by new political forces? How did writing and making art provide a way for one person to deal with escape from Hitler`s Third Reich and offer a means for response to the Nazi murder of the Jews?

On April 19, 1933, almost three months after Hitler`s ascent to power, the Jewish writer and artist Else Lasker-Schüler knew that it was time for her to flee. She had been physically attacked by young Nazi thugs on her street in Berlin, because she was a Jew. Lasker-Schüler, who often lived in her world of imagination, understood that she had to physically escape from the new power that ruled in her German homeland. Her flight from Germany to Switzerland and subsequently to British Mandate Palestine spared her from the horrors of the Shoah, but plunged her into the desolation that came with exile. She was sixty-four when she left Germany and it was difficult to subsist as a refugee.

Existence in exile was extremely difficult, but Else Lasker-Schüler did not abandon her life as a writer and artist. In fact, her creative force helped her to surmount its physically challenging aspects. Though Lasker-Schüler retreated into her own artistic world to cope with loss, and as method for maintaining her identity, the result was not paralysis. Especially in Jerusalem she drew upon her surroundings to produce a novel, play, and volume of poetry in German, while making images featuring the people and land that would become Israel.