5 - Else Lasker-Schüler: A Theater of the Self?

Summary

SO FAR IN THIS STUDY, I have considered ways of finding space for a female subject in the traditional dramatic forms of comedy and tragedy, and for the expression of female creativity within a literary and social discourse that largely denies its existence. I have observed modes of articulating the woman's self as “I,” and of defining the artistic and political project of drama in such a way that female subjectivity acquires a space. One way or another, all the playwrights considered have striven to create materiality for themselves through the medium of drama. In the final chapters I shall look at the work of two writers who have, more than any of the others in this volume, been granted materiality — space or presence — in literary history: Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945) and Marieluise Fleisser (1901–74).

Lasker-Schüler is better known as a poet than a playwright. Both her dramatic work (with the possible exception of Die Wupper) and her prose have tended to be overlooked — she is known, read, and taught primarily as a writer of poetry. Like those of so many women, her plays have been classed as “undramatic”; the subtext, again, is that women don't really write drama — not even when their oeuvre includes plays. Like so many women of letters, Lasker-Schüler has been defined as a “masculine” writer, most famously by Karl Kraus, who designated her “die einzige männliche Erscheinung der heutigen deutschen Literatur.” This suggestion is doubly insidious. On the one hand, it is presented as a compliment to a woman writer, and the positive status of masculinity is reiterated; on the other, Lasker-Schüler is denied female identity as a poet and functionalized to shame the “feminine” male writers who are implicitly present in Kraus's statement. Nearly fifty years later, Sigismund von Radecki could still conjure the notion that literary talent is essentially male, in his crass characterization of Lasker-Schüler: “Sie war in ihrem Genialen männlich und hatte doch ein Frauenleib.”