Queer Places:
Mount of Olives Cemetery, Jerusalem, Jerusalem District, Israel

Else Lasker-Schüler (February 11, 1869 - January 22, 1945) was born Elisabeth Schüler on February 11, 1869, in Elberfeld, Germany, and grew up as a recognized child prodigy who learned to read and write by age four. Her mother, Jeannette Kissing, deeply inspired her poetry, while her father, Aaron Schüler, a Jewish banker, served as the inspiration for her play Die Wupper. Demonstrating an early brilliance, she attended the Lyceum West an der Aue before continuing her education through private lessons at home.

In 1894, she married physician and chess master Berthold Lasker, the brother of World Chess Champion Emanuel Lasker, and relocated to Berlin to train as an artist. Although her mother passed away in 1890 and her father followed seven years later, her life shifted with the birth of her son, Paul, in 1899, and the publication of her earliest poems. Her debut poetry collection, Styx, was published in 1902. Following her divorce from Berthold Lasker in 1903, she married Georg Lewin, an artist and the founder of the Expressionist magazine Der Sturm, for whom she invented the pseudonym Herwarth Walden. During this period in Berlin’s vibrant avant-garde, Lasker-Schüler pushed boundaries through fluid gender expression, cross-dressing, and non-conforming sexual and romantic identities, famously adopting alternative personas such as the male prince "Yussuf" and serving as a close protégé and devoted admirer of poet Peter Hille, whom she portrayed as a king-like, prophetic figure in her prose work Das Peter-Hille-Buch (1906).

Lasker-Schüler established herself as a leading female voice of German Expressionism with prose collections like Die Nächte der Tino von Bagdad (1907), her play Die Wupper (1909), and her seminal 1911 poetry volume Meine Wunder. After separating from Walden in 1910—ending in divorce in 1912—she struggled financially and relied on friends like Karl Kraus, while also engaging in an intense, creatively fruitful friendship with Gottfried Benn that yielded numerous love poems. Despite winning the prestigious Kleist Prize in 1932, the rise of the Nazi regime brought severe physical harassment and threats due to her Jewish heritage. She fled to Zurich and later emigrated to British-ruled Palestine in 1934, officially settling in Jerusalem in 1937, where she was stripped of her German citizenship in 1938.

In Jerusalem, she lived in relative poverty, facing hardship and local misunderstanding regarding her eccentric dress and behavior. She founded a literary salon named "Kraal" in 1942, though her readings were eventually banned because they were conducted in German. Despite these struggles, she completed her final poetry volume, Mein blaues Klavier (My Blue Piano), in 1943. Her health failed toward the end of World War II, and following a heart attack, she died on January 22, 1945, at the age of 75, and was laid to rest in the Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery.

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