Else Lasker-Schüler: Letter to Emil Raas (1939)
Else Lasker-Schüler: Letter to Emil Raas (1939)
...I am totally done, in other words, I can’t stand it anymore...
Else Lasker-Schüler’s letter to Emil Raas, August 13, 1939
In 1939, the poet Else Lasker-Schüler took her third trip to Palestine. She intended to return to Switzerland, as she normally did. However, the authorities there refused her a visa, and she was detained in Jerusalem from September 1939, when World War II began.
A couple of weeks before the war started, the desperate poet appealed to her friend Emil Raas for help with her visa. The restless style of the prose reflect the anxious psychological state of Lasker-Schüler, now in her second exile.
Further reading:
Jakob Hessing: Else Lasker-Schüler. Biographie einer deutsch-jüdischen Dichterin. Karlsruhe: Loeper 1985
Else Lasker-Schüler: Werke und Briefe. Kritische Ausgabe. Band 10: Briefe 1937-1940. Bearbeitet von Karl Jürgen Skrodzki und Andreas B. Kilcher. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag 2009
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