Else Lasker-Schüler: Mein blaues Klavier, first edition (1943)
Else Lasker-Schüler: Mein blaues Klavier, first edition (1943)
Ich habe zu Hause ein blaues Klavier
Und kenne doch keine Note.
Es steht im Dunkel der Kellertür,
Seitdem die Welt verrohte.
[At home I have a blue piano
And yet I know not a single key.
It stands in the shadow of the cellar door,
Since brutalised, now, are we. (ed. trans.)]
Excerpt from the poem Mein blaues Klavier (1937) by Else Lasker-Schüler
Else Lasker-Schüler's last book, Mein blaues Klavier, was published in 1943 in a print run of 330 copies, one and a half years before her death. A collection of poems in which the poet found haunting words for her life in exile and her grief for everything that had been lost. She dedicated the volume to her "unforgettable friends in the cities of Germany - and to those who [like her] had been expelled and were dispersed throughout the world".
It contains 32 poems, almost all of which were written in the 1930s/40s; they include Die Verscheuchte, Jerusalem, Gebet and a prose epilogue entitled An mich. The poem at the beginning of the collection - An meine Freunde - however, comes from the early 1920s and is therefore not an exile poem. Originally it was the end of the story Das heilige Abendmahl.
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