When the author and one time social revolutionary Ernst Toller took his life in his New York exile in May 1939, it  caused a stir with many other exiles. Toller’s suicide  was motivated mainly by the despair about the growing facism in Europe and the resulting hoplessness.

The poet and author Else Lasker-Schüler was one of the exiled intellectuals and artists who reacted to Toller’s action. The obituary she wrote, however, was published in a small newspaper in Jerusalem,  her final place of exile. Tragically, therefore, the text of a great author about a no less great author remained hidden from the general public.

It appears from Lasker-Schüler’s words that she had previously corresponded with Toller. This correspondence is now lost. We can no longer verify to what extent her descriptions were realistic or more an artistic fantasy. The author compared Toller’s death with the suicide of the anarchist writer Johannes Holzmann in a Moscow prison in 1913. This reflections on the artist’s suicide does nonetheless open another avenue to muse over herself and her fortune. Below is the first draft of the obituary, which was later repeatedly re-worked by the poet.

Further reading:
Karl Jürgen Skrodzki, Itta Shedletzky (Hrsg.): Else Lasker-Schüler. Prosa 1921-1945. Nachgelassene Schriften, Anmerkungen. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp-Verlag 2001