Poems by Else Lasker-Schüler A bilingual edition selected and translated by Francis Booth Along with Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, Else Lasker-Schüler was one of the most important German-Jewish poets of the twentieth century. And along with August Stramm and Georg Trakl, one of the most important early German Expressionist poets. Born into a middle-class banking family in 1869, Lasker-Schüler began writing poetry very early, imagining herself as a child living in the Orient. Later she lived a bohemian life in Berlin, where she moved to train as an artist in 1894. Else later married the artist Georg Lewin, who founded the seminal Expressionist magazine Der Sturm , which published much of her early work. Lasker-Schüler embraced political activism in favour of animal rights, artists' rights and Jewish causes. Although not explicitly a feminist, she advocated and used "gender-just" grammar. Else lived in Berlin until 1933, when she fled Nazi persecution, finally settling in Jerusalem where she lived a life of poverty and eccentricity until she died in 1945. The German text in this edition is presented as a near-facsimile of the 1917 edition of her Collected Poems , from which these verses are selected.