UC Berkeley

Between 1910-1914, the German poet Else Lasker-Schüler formed her infamous alter ego, Prinz Jussuf von Theben, in her frequent publications in the expressionist periodicals Der Sturm and Die Aktion. The publishing opportunities in these periodicals allowed Lasker-Schüler the space to explore genre conventions and to begin including her own graphic art. Central to Lasker-Schüler’s creation of Prinz Jussuf and her increasing incorporation of visual art, were her unsuccessful and successful collaborations with Oskar Kokoschka and Franz Marc. The texts published in the two periodicals ranged from short theater, book, and art gallery reviews to her poetry and two epistolary novels. In Der Sturm, Lasker-Schüler serially published Briefe nach Norwegen, a series of letters written to her husband and Der Sturm editor Herwarth Walden on his two-week trip to Scandinavia. The letters were published over nine months and chronicle life in bohemian circles in Berlin, merging Lasker-Schüler’s emerging fantasy world into her artistic practice. Later published as Mein Herz, the letters have previously only been analyzed within the context of this later novelization and never within their original context of a weekly periodical. By analyzing the texts within their original context, check by jowl with other texts, illustrations, and advertisements, Lasker-Schüler’s idiosyncratic engagement with contemporary life in Berlin is brought into high relief. Lasker-Schüler’s second epistolary novel was published in Der Sturm’s competitor, Die Aktion, after Lasker-Schüler’s divorce from Walden. Briefe und Bilder was addressed to Franz and Maria Marc, and corresponds to a rich private correspondence between Lasker-Schüler and the Marcs. In Briefe und Bilder, Lasker-Schüler incorporates her emerging Kingdom of Thebes, and regularly references her simultaneous private correspondence with Marc, confusing and blending the boundaries between public and private, as well as the real and the fantastic. Later published after Franz Marc’s 1916 death at Verdun in an expanded form as Der Malik, Lasker-Schüler’s text in its Briefe und Bilder form has been ignored in existing scholarship. Utilizing biography and historiography to responsibly read these texts, this dissertation approaches Lasker-Schüler’s frequent publications in weekly periodicals to understand how her identity as Prinz Jussuf von Theben was formed in the public sphere and how her multimedia practice emerged.