Introduction

  Der Sturm

  Correspondence

  Image Gallery

ELSE LASKER-SCHÜLER, FRANZ MARC AND DER STURM

Else Lasker-Schüler lived in Berlin for almost 40 years; most of her art came into being in the city. Yet, it is not so easy to map her writings and paintings onto its streets. This is not only because of their expressive nature, which colors the world with strong colors, often covering what might be identified as historic reality with a blanket of images. It is also because while she lived in Berlin, Lasker-Schüler was also inhabiting a multitude of other spaces, living the lives of - or perhaps living her life as - other figures such as Tino of Baghdad or Prince Jussuf of Thebes. The challenge taken on in this project, then, is precisely to situate these orientalist figures and their mythlike movements through time and space in the Berlin of Lasker-Schüler's time.

The first stage of this work in progress, takes as its point of departure the poem Versöhnung and suggests that in order to locate its origins in Berlin, one must reconsider the publication history of the poem. Thus, my purpose is to take the poem out of its anthologized context - the context in which most readers of our day would be likely to encounter it - and reread it in the contexts in which it was published during Lasker-Schüler's life. This reorientation resituates the poem in a dense and interesting map of the cities cultural space. The first stage of this attempted reconstruction leads us to Der Sturm.

In September 1912, one could buy issue 125/6 of the Journal Der Sturm in selected newsstands and train stations in Berlin. The twelve paged "Weekly for Culture and the Arts" was sold for 40 Pfennig, and it contained, as the front page promised the reader, two original woodcuts as well as a handful of poems, letters, novel-installments and commentaries. In his book Reading Berlin 1900, historian Peter Fritzsche has described the mass of printed material that Berliners bought, read and discarded every day in the form of daily newspapers as a repository of maps of the city. One bought a newspaper to learn about the cityscape, orient oneself in it, find out about job possibilities, apartments and entertainment. In the newspaper, the urban reader learnt where the 'seedy' parts of the city where, and where the millionaires held house. Der Sturm was on the margins of this market of printed material, a journal that deliberately fashioned itself as a stage for avant-garde artists, targeting a sophisticated audience. Herwarth Walden, the publisher and author whose name looms over the first page of the journal, clearly had anti-local intentions. His publication was not to be a map of Berlin - but of the network of similarly minded modernists all over Europe and the world. Thus, like Lasker-Schüler poetry, the journal seems to resist any kind of translation into a map of the city.

Nonetheless, the journal was edited, printed and published in Berlin for almost two and a half decades. Thus, in this pathway I try to turn the pages of one of its issues into an archaeological site, digging in them for images of a milieu, or perhaps an 'ecology,' within which certain cultural phenomenon - such as Lasker-Schüler's poem - were made possible. This, in a sense, is the poem's natural environment; and what I ultimately hope to find out in this pathway is whether the reconstruction of this environment is a worthwhile excursion on the way to dealing with the poem.

What I invite you to do, then, is to read through the pages of Der Sturm no. 125/6. By clicking on (at this point, some of the) parts of the page - poems, essays, names, advertisements, woodcuts - you will reach background information on people and places in Berlin around 1912. Sometimes this information will lead you to other parts of the journal, or to other pathways in the Berlin Temporal Topographies website. You may choose to follow one of the longer side tracks (such as the one that deals with Lasker-Schüler's friendship with Franz Marc) or to wander between the short ones.
Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900, Harvard University Press, 1996.