Ulrich Zaum

Else Lasker-Schüler in the city of Zurich, in exile. She often told and wrote of how, in February 1933, she was knocked down in the streets of Berlin by SA men. Of how she stood up, walked to the train station and got onto a train without a single piece of luggage. Of how she wandered through the city of Zurich for more than a week without being noticed, sometimes sleeping by the shores of the lake, sometimes in a park, until she was picked up by the police.
Else Lasker-Schüler wove legends out of every stage of her life. With one eye turned to real things and the other to a world of fantasy, reality and imagination naturally merge, and she saw herself as a nomad rambling through the ordered world of the Swiss capital.
This woman had never acted on fixed ideas, expectations or rational calculation, and exile – often a traumatic experience of complete uprooting for the bourgeoisie – was no great rupture for her.
The years in Zurich were years of growth for her, the intensifying of all her basic desires, all of her conflicts in a struggle which she always waged against a supposedly hostile world, and ultimately only against herself.
“External reality is barely more tangible; inner fantasies dominate and at some point, even the dramatic space seems to be governed by her rules, by the rules of magic realism.
A realism that has its very own sense of time, like in a dream.
There is no past, no old age. She is a child, a girl, an old woman, nothing is finished and the dead are not dead. Her magical dream is a vision of the end. Farewell to a world, farewell to Europe.” (Ulrich Zaum)