Else Lasker-Schüler: Who was the influential German poet and artist?

Jewish author best known for poem ‘My Blue Piano’ was forced to flee from Nazi Germany

Else Lasker-Schüler, the acclaimed German writer and artist who fled Nazi rule, is being honoured with a Google Doodle today.

A key figure in the Expressionist movement, Lasker-Schüler was a prolific writer who produced poetry, plays, short stories and essays chronicling romance and religion.

She is perhaps best known for her poem “My Blue Piano”, which was first published by a Swiss newspaper on this day in 1937.

Born into a wealthy German-Jewish family in Elberfeld in 1869, she was home-schooled by her mother, who encouraged the young Lasker-Schüler to develop her voice as a poet.

Following her marriage to Berthold Lasker, a doctor and chess master, she moved to Berlin in 1894 and became a prominent figure in the city’s bohemian scene.

She often appeared in costume across Berlin’s artistic cafes, including in flamboyant robes to portray a fictional Egyptian prince named Yusuf.

The poet divorced her husband in 1903 and married the artist Georg Lewin, better known by the pseudonym Herwarth Walden, only to divorce again in 1912.

Lasker-Schüler won the Kleist Prize, a renowned German literary award, in 1932 but spent much of her career destitute and reliant on financial help from her friends.

Following Hitler’s rise to power, she was the victim of several street attacks by Nazis and forced to flee Berlin – first to Zurich, then Palestine and Jerusalem.

She was later stripped of her German citizenship outbreak and unable to return to Europe following the outbreak of the Second World War.

Lasker-Schüler died in Jerusalem in early 1945, aged 75, following a heart attack. She left behind an incomplete draft of a play, titled I and I.

Her work remains influential in Germany and, as the Jewish Women’s Archive notes, “her entire life and work are a testimony to the truly independent and liberated woman she was”.