Three Plays: Dark River, Arthur Aronymus and His Ancestors, and I and I (European Drama Classics)

312 Pages·2005·0.99 MB·English

by  Else Lasker-Schuler

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THREE PLAYS
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THREE PLAYS
Dark River,
Arthur Aronymus and His Ancestors,
and I and I
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ELSE LASKER-SCHÜLER
Edited and with an introduction by inca molina rumold
Translated from the German by jane curtis
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESSIEVANSTON, ILLINOIS
Northwestern University Press
Evanston, Illinois 60208-4170
English translation copyright © 2005by Northwestern University Press. Published
2005.Die Wupper (Dark River)published1962by Kösel Verlag, Munich; copyright
©1919by Paul Cassirer, Berlin. Originally published 1909by Osterheld & Co.,
Berlin.Arthur Aronymus und seine Väter (Arthur Aronymusand His Ancestors)
published1951by Kösel Verlag, Munich; copyright © 1932by S. Fischer, Berlin.
IchundIch (I and I) published1980by Kösel Verlag, Munich. All rights reserved.
This English translation follows the Reclam edition of 1977forDark River,the
Kösel Verlag edition of 1962forArthur Aronymus, and theKösel Verlag edition
of1980forI and I.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
isbn0-8101-2197-2(cloth)
isbn0-8101-2189-0(paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lasker-Schüler, Else, 1869–1945.
[Plays. English. Selections]
Three plays : Dark river, Arthur Aronymus and his ancestors, and
I and I / Else Lasker-Schüler ; translated from the German by Jane
Curtis ; with introduction by Inca Molina Rumold.
p. cm. –– (European drama classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn 0-8101-2197-2 (cloth : alk. paper) –– isbn 0-8101-2198-0(pbk :
alk. paper)
1. Lasker-Schüler, Else, 1869–1945––Translations into English.
I. Title: Dark river. II. Title: Arthur Aronymus and his ancestors.
III. Title: I and I. IV. Lasker-Schüler, Else, 1869–1945. Wupper. English.
V. Lasker-Schüler, Else, 1869–1945. Arthur Aronymus und seine Väter.
English. VI. Lasker-Schüler, Else, 1869–1945. Ichundich. English.
VII. Curtis, Jane, 1927– VIII. Title. IX. Series.
pt2623.a76a234 2005
832'.912––dc22 2005010144
8The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.
CONTENTS
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Editor’s Introduction / vii
A Note from the Translator / xxiii
Dark River / 3
Arthur Aronymus and His Ancestors / 91
I and I / 219
Bibliography / 283

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
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inca molina rumold
In the last two decades, the Expressionist poet and playwright
Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945)—a contemporary of Bertolt
Brecht and one of the most eccentric authors in the coffeehouse
scene in the Berlin of the teens and twenties—has become an icon
among scholars in Jewish-German and gender studies. Her birth-
place in the industrial town of Elberfeld, where the hills and valleys
of the wider Ruhr area begin to stretch westward toward the Rhine-
land, has been converted into a museum and archive, and there
now is an ambitious international Lasker-Schüler Society. A steady
flow of new critical writing is being published every year, and con-
ferences, whether in Germany, Jerusalem (2002), or even Philadel-
phia (1998), are dedicated exclusively to analyzing her oeuvre. Yet
apart from translations of a few poems dispersed in various antholo-
gies and a few passages from Das Hebräerland(1937) [The Land of the
Hebrews], her work remains relatively unknown to the English-
speaking world. And only now is there a focus specifically on her
contributions to the theater. With this anthology, the provocative
plays of this German-Jewish poet will for the first time be available
to a diverse English readership, whether interested in theater,
women’s studies, Jewish-German studies, or modernism at large.
Both famous for her poetry and infamous for her bohemian life-
style, as well as her association with political radicals, Else Lasker-
Schüler is one of the few women writers in the Expressionist move-
ment in the teens and twenties of the last century. She now begins
to occupy her place among the most advanced and accomplished of
twentieth-century European poets, male or female. The younger
poet Gottfried Benn (the somber “Giselher, the Barbarian” of her
prose and correspondence), who certainly took a wrong turn in the
early years of the Third Reich before being banned by the Nazis, did
show proper judgment (rather than guilt) when he addressed her in
a postwar eulogy as the “greatest poetess Germany ever had.” Along
with Expressionism, banned by the Nazis as “un-German” art,
Lasker-Schüler, who died in Palestinian exile, was rediscovered in
the1950s.
Before that, her fame had rested exclusively on her poetry. Her
anthologies, from Styx (1902) to the Hebräische Balladen (1913)
[Hebrew Ballads,English translation published 1980] to Mein blaues
Klavier (1943) [My Blue Piano, no published English translation],
were typically read for their romantic soul and beauty, conceived of
as essentially feminine. By the same token, literary criticism had
long tended to ignore, if not dismiss, her complicated, multilayered
prose as well as her iconoclastic dramatic works. This trend is
presently being reversed.1
Lasker-Schüler’s plays have been reevaluated as highly avant-
garde and politically subversive, both in form and content.2 Her
three plays are Die Wupper(1909) [Dark River,no previous English
translation]; Arthur Aronymus und seine Väter (1932) [Arthur
Aronymus and His Ancestors,no previous English translation]; and
Ichundich (1980) [I and I, English translation published 1992].
While small in quantity, her dramatic work, spanning the first half
of the century, critically engages and—in a lively, spirited, uncon-
ventional manner unique to her—illuminates Germany’s sociopo-
litical and cultural climate from the Wilhelminian Empire to the
Weimar Republic and through the Second World War.
By breaking away from the traditional aesthetic canon, the
plays show a unique formal development from Naturalistic Expres-
sionist episodes in the lyrical Dark River to a historicizing politi-
viii ✧ Three Plays
cization of the theater in Arthur Aronymusto the forms of montage
and “epic” presentations in I and I.Furthermore, the representation
of topics taboo in patriarchal societies, such as the interrelatedness
of class, gender, and sexuality in Dark River,of religious and racist
anti-Semitism in Arthur Aronymus,and her coping with the utterly
painful split and loss of identity as a German-speaking Jew forced
into exile by the National Socialists in I and I, places her plays
squarely at the focus of present-day women’s studies as well as
Holocaust debates. Their introduction to an English readership will
dispel the long-held notion that there were no German women
playwrights in the early part of the twentieth century.
From the beginning, though older by a generation than the typ-
ical Expressionist poet, Lasker-Schüler was an artistic and social
rebel. This is reflected in her life and work, for instance, in her play
Dark Riverand her prose work Der Malik(1919) [The Emperor,no
published English translation], which I have discussed elsewhere as
a “political novel.”3Written during the Wilhelminian Empire, the
former play had to wait ten years for its Berlin premiere in 1919,
when Germany had undergone a crucial political change from an
absolute monarchy to the first significant German experiment and
experience in democracy, the Weimar Republic. But even then, in
spite of her fame as a lyrical poet, it was shown only on a secondary
stage behind the main theater. Its performance has always been con-
troversial, causing a great scandal then as well as at its 1958revival
in arch-Catholic Cologne for its alleged obscenity and amorality.4
The author’s liberal leanings were reflected in her friendships
with contemporary artists and writers such as the coal miner poet
Paul Zech from her hometown, the radical workers’ leader and in-
tellectual Erich Mühsam, the painter of social satire George Grosz
(addressed as “Leatherstocking” in her idiosyncratic live universe of
poems, letters, and personal relations), and the poet Wieland
Herzfelde, all members of the Spartacus League of the Communist
Party.5 Early on she had become keenly aware of society’s double
moral standard when her brothers, among others, ostracized her
when she became a single mother in 1899.6By taking into account
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION ✧ ix