‘I had fled the city and sank down exhausted before a rock and rested for a drop of life which was deeper than a thousand years …’
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Else Lasker-Schüler
Three Prose Works
Translated by James J. Conway
20 June 2022
218 pages, trade paperback
115 x 178 mm, French flaps
ISBN: 978-3-947325-12-2
Distribution
UK/Ireland (Central Books)
US (SPD)
Never before translated into English, this trio of works finds one of the greatest German writers of the 20th century mythologising her own pursuit of freedom in captivatingly original fiction. In The Peter Hille Book (1906), Else Lasker-Schüler offers an elegy for her arch-bohemian mentor. But this hypnotic blend of Nietzsche, fairy tale and paganism also celebrates the one Hille called ‘Tino’ – the author herself – and the electrifying uncertainties of the creative life. In the 1907 text The Nights of Tino of Baghdad she sends her alter ego on a heady voyage through an imagined ‘Orient’. From the banks of the Nile the narrative advances across a wide emotional landscape, using Muslim and Jewish motifs to explore the commonalities of Semitic identity. Finally, Lasker-Schüler’s avatar encounters dervishes, biblical figures and a 20-year-old foetus in The Prince of Thebes. Issued on the eve of World War One, this sequence of dark fables seethes with violence and eroticism, culminating in a great clash of civilisations in which Tino leads the charge. An insightful afterword details the genesis of these Three Prose Works in the context of the author’s tumultuous life.
Most readily identified with the Expressionist movement, German-Jewish writer and artist Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945) was a major figure of early modernism. She claimed dual citizenship of Wilhelmine Germany and an invented poetic dominion in which she identified as ‘Tino’ or the ‘Prince of Thebes’ and refigured her bohemian associates as compatriots. Lasker-Schüler’s creativity was an uninterrupted continuum of verse, prose, drama, art, performance, costume, correspondence and everyday life. The Weimar Republic offered a more sympathetic setting for her bold work and singular character, and in 1932 she won the country’s top literary prize. But once the Nazis took power she was forced to flee, living in fraught circumstances in Zurich before settling in Jerusalem, where she died in 1945. While Else Lasker-Schüler’s timeless poetry continues to win new devotees in English translation, her prose works are less known outside her native Germany.
RELATED
External links
‘The Black Swan of Israel’: Remembering Else Lasker-Schüler (James J. Conway for the Jewish Book Council)
The Son of Lîlame (extract on Strange Flowers)
Dear King of Holland (newly discovered correspondence by Else Lasker-Schüler)
Else Lasker-Schüler, 1920 (the writer’s appearance at the Bauhaus)
Else Lasker-Schüler’s Berlin (Slow Travel Berlin)
If The Peter Hille Book functions as a sort of “Portrait of the Artist as a Shifting Name,” both The Nights of Tino of Baghdad and The Prince of Thebes showcase the exercise of this artistry. These works display the geographical and temporal scope of the epic alongside the deep psychological probity of the lyric. They are like miniature epics, but instead of detailing the founding of a nation or a world, they describe the founding and dismantling of a poet. […] Lasker-Schüler has been largely forgotten, but the resurfacing of her work now is part of a welcome project of restoration, of memory.
– Jared Joseph, Los Angeles Review of Books
… this is a time for escape and fantasy. And that’s what you’ll find in the wildly imaginative work of the German Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945). This queen of Berlin’s early 20th-century Bohemia authored an impressive oeuvre of poetry and prose that was powered by a spiritual Fernweh and typified by the mixing of Jewish and Arab motifs into a rich expressionist dreamscape.
– Alexander Wells, Exberliner
The three works in this volume “The Peter Hille Book,” “The Nights of Tino of Baghdad,” and “The Prince of Thebes” all share in common a character named “Tino”—Peter Hille’s pet name for Lasker-Schüler and one of the names she adopted for herself in letters to close friends, along with “Prince of Thebes.” Knowing those two facts pave the wave to understanding the fables in these three works as metaphors for her life as an independent woman: taking on and disposing with gender identities as they serve her purpose—moves necessary for women to take to become truly independent.
– Tom Bowden, The Backroom
There's a quality of hallucination and incantation, as if the author were trying to rewrite Montesquieu's Orientalist Persian Letters or the Bible's alchemy-inflected Song of Songs, but in the stuttering, cryptic language of Wilhelmine Germany's proto-dada, proto-expressionism … Conway and Rixdorf Editions should be commended for rising to the challenge of helping to recreate the worlds of Wilhelminism and the Weimar Republic.
— Frank Garrett, My Crash Course (reviewing The Nights of Tino of Baghdad)
Else Lasker-Schüler’s prose is immersive. It is not what I think of as prose at all, but poetic and imaginative, it changes scenarios more according to dream narrative than waking chronological events. I came to realise that her perception of life (as she lived it as well as the way she wrote) is a visionary drama, highly theatrical (she was also a performer and experimented with film).
— Morelle Smith, Rivertrain
FROM THE AFTERWORD
The variously named – at times nameless – protagonist falls through time, place, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, a kind of Orientalist Orlando. In fact the inspiration for Orlando, Vita Sackville-West, met Lasker-Schüler in Berlin in 1928 and wrote to the book’s author, lover Virginia Woolf, that she was ‘not unworthy to be a denizen of Virginia’s world.’
Lasker-Schüler’s engagement with the ‘Orient’ was clearly not a fact-finding mission but nor was it a mere flirtation with exotica; instead it represented immersion through identification. The minds of many present-day readers will naturally turn to post-colonial theory, particularly Edward Said’s landmark 1978 study Orientalism. But it is also worth noting that ‘Orientals’ was an offensive term applied to Jews in Lasker-Schüler’s time, and that adopting it for herself was an act of positive reclamation comparable to shifting use of the word ‘queer’. The ‘wild Jew’ who recurs in Lasker-Schüler’s prose – belligerent, ungovernable, free – represents the antithesis of assimilation, the Jew who has endured a ‘life of degradation’ in the words of Martin Buber, yet ‘remained Oriental throughout it all’.
[…]
Else Lasker-Schüler never designated the three books presented here as a triptych, but it is impossible to ignore their links and similarities. In fact they are difficult to compare with anything of their time except each other. They are all short, fragmentary works made up of epics masquerading as miniatures, and if their digressive density is at times alienating it is because they are tracing the development of a sensibility rather than a grand narrative in the 19th-century sense. Their prose is anything but prosaic, crafted with a rapacious appetite for words entirely piqued by poetry. They all issued from a concentrated burst of creative energy, their production largely confined to the period 1905 to 1910. They share numerous characters and motifs while tracing the arc of a remarkable transformation. We first find Tino in The Peter Hille Book, timid, lost, a blank slate of identity crouching beneath the rock and the might of Petrus. In The Nights of Tino of Baghdad she ventures out into a bright and hazardous world and encounters the raptures of love, yet she is still beholden to patriarchal power. Finally, in The Prince of Thebes we witness her apotheosis as a triumphant warrior princess, burning bright in the evening colours of Jerusalem.
In this edition
The Peter Hille Book (originally published as Das Peter Hille-Buch in 1906; this version taken from the slightly revised second edition, 1919)
The Nights of Tino of Baghdad (originally published as Die Nächte Tino von Bagdads in 1907; this version taken from the revised second edition published as Die Nächte der Tino von Bagdad, 1919)
The Prince of Thebes (originally published as Der Prinz von Theben in 1914; this version taken from the slightly revised second edition, 1920)
Afterword by the translator, James J. Conway
Previous edition
The translation of The Nights of Tino of Baghdad included in this edition was originally published by Rixdorf Editions in 2019 and issued as a PDF (978-3-947325-05-4) to its mailing list.
