1980

I AM DYING OF LIFE AND BREATHE AGAIN IN THE IMAGE

Life and Work of Else Lasker-Schüler

I first encountered Else Lasker-Schüler as a child, at school, where one or two poems by the poets listed in the anthologies are compulsory. Usually nothing sticks except a faint memory of the name, with which one cannot connect anything. That is how it was at my second encounter with the poet, in Berlin towards the end of the 1970s. The name was familiar, but what lay behind it was unknown. The Schaubühne was staging "Die Wupper", and in the programme I read excerpts from her polemic "Ich räume auf!" (I'm Clearing Things Up!).

It was really this polemic that aroused my interest in the poet. A woman at the beginning of the century, a Jew, a poet, fighting with words, that is with her own weapons, against the tyrants of the book, the publishers who "sell off poetry at the markets to line their pockets". It is the description of a struggle that the poet loses because she is too weak, as a woman, as a Jew.

Else Lasker-Schüler's indictment of the publishers then led me to study her work and her life. I had just finished a work on the poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, who, like Else Lasker-Schüler, had to fight for her emancipation as a woman. For Droste it was a struggle against the aristocracy; for Lasker-Schüler, a hundred years later, a struggle against the bourgeoisie. While Droste can only dream of being a man, Lasker-Schüler really becomes one by stepping into the role of Prince Jussuf of Thebes. She cuts her hair short, wears trousers and carries a knife in her belt.

One aim of the soirée was to show Lasker-Schüler in her contradictions with the life of the bourgeoisie in the Berlin of the 1910s and 1920s, and her struggle to establish herself as a poet and as a woman; the other was to show her as a Jew for whom it was impossible to continue the struggle for emancipation and artistic recognition in Germany after 1933; and the hard years of exile, which ended only with her death in Jerusalem in 1945.

In the soirée it is Else Lasker-Schüler herself who tells her life. Letters, autobiographical writings and poems bear witness to the hardship and the few joys of her life, which was played out at first between coffee houses and cheap boarding-house rooms and was then lived abroad, far from her home city of Berlin and her friends. Much of the music linking the texts is piano music by Arnold Schoenberg, a fellow sufferer, if you like, and a friend of Else Lasker-Schüler. It alternates with the coffee-house and light music of those years. The very alternation between so-called 'tonal' and 'atonal' music is meant to underline the poet's contradictions with the bourgeoisie of her time and with herself.

VOICES	Ursula Langrock, Gustl Halenke, Wolfgang Reinsch, Helmut Wöstmann, Rudolf Jürgen Bartsch and others
MUSIC	Arnold Schönberg
DIRECTOR	Georg Brintrup
SOUND ENGINEER	Groß, Schröder
EDITOR	Peter-Paul Schulz
DURATION	160 minutes
FIRST BROADCAST	SWF 24.1.1981