Else Lasker-Schüler

As the most notable female German Expressionist poet of the time, she stood at the center of Berlin's early modern culture at the turn of the 20th century. The "Moderns," as the influential members of Berlin's artist community were called, along with many young Jewish intellectuals, rebelled against the typical bourgeois conventions of the time. Their common ground was the café, especially the Café des Westens, where Lasker-Schüler held court at her regular table.

Lasker-Schüler's first play, Die Wupper [The Wupper] (1909) was written at the height of her productivity. Named after the river that flows through her Rhineland hometown, it examined the societal changes in the backdrop of the industrial age.

However, a major source of her writings was the Bible and much of her poetry was an expression of her personal struggle with Jewish identity. Her poem, Mein Volk [My people], which was included in Hebrew Ballads (1913) described her as emotionally attached to her ancestors, but isolated from their spiritual world. Contrary to other German-Jewish writers of the time, she portrayed the Jews of the East as a distortion of the truly authentic Oriental Jews, the proud Hebrews of the Bible, which were depicted throughout the novel. In the drama, Arthur Aronymus und seine Väter [Arthur Aronymus and his fathers] (1932), she again portrayed her ancestors as rabbis and religious Jews, yet she was mindful of the disparity between her personal identification as a Jew, from the collective Jewish existence of the era. All three works can be seen here.

Forced into exile by the Nazis, Else Lasker-Schüler emigrated from Germany in 1933 and spent her last days barely eking out a living in Jerusalem.