Gesammelte Gedichte

Else Lasker-Schüler wrote poems that pulse with a feverish, almost painful intensity, as if each word had been torn from the quick of living. This collected edition gathers the work of a poet who stood at the heart of German Expressionism yet remained utterly singular, her voice unlike anyone else's in the movement. Here is love that burns and vanishes, grief that becomes its own country, and a longing for home that aches across continents and decades. Her Jewish identity suffuses these pages with an ancient mourning, while her wild, imagistic language cracks open German poetry into new shapes. Born in Elberfeld, she fled Nazi Germany for Jerusalem, where she died in 1945, a poet in exile from her own language. These poems preserve the flame of a sensibility that refused to look away from suffering or from the strange, fleeting beauty that makes suffering worthwhile. They are for readers who want poetry that wounds and heals in the same breath.