Else Lasker-Schüler’s Prose Sketch »The Sea«

Iris Hermann

The archives of the National Library of Israel hold a manuscript of the prose sketch »Das Meer« (»The Sea«) published in the 1932 prose volume Mein Konzert (»My Concert«), and two newspaper clippings from the first publication of »The Sea« in the Berliner Tagblatt on 25 June 1930.

The significance of this short prose text derives from the fact that, in it, Lasker-Schüler imagines an entire history of creation. Familiar antique myths, such as the myth of Uranus, are combined with Kabbalistic concepts in the creation of a place that offers space for the incommensurable.

The text imagines a deliberately empty, limitless space. The composition unites romantic, cosmic, and Kabbalistic references. The outlined cosmogony displays religious origins that resemble the biblical story of Genesis: »The sea, too, before it began to rage, was once enveloped by the body. The sea is the wide, flowing soul that ›was left‹ to the world. The sea is of this world. But the spirit of God hovers above its waters.«

Concealed in this image is the Kabbalistic notion that the unborn person is surrounded by three bodies: its own body, the mother’s body, and the celestial body. The sea is imagined as a bodily entity, the outcome of events that dissolved it. When immersed in this figurative space, bodies dissolve. Bodies of »earthly weight« become light: »without qualities«, without desire, without the sense of pain. While these dematerialized figures are strangely incorporeal, they are nevertheless associated with movement: floating, gliding, lurching, diving, sailing – all these are images of unburdened weightlessness. The figure that emerges here is a figure of the self. In its hazy, amorphous corporeality, this figure possesses characteristics of modernity. It has dissolved all fixed bodily or physical boundaries and is in constant osmotic exchange with its surroundings. A figure imagined in such a way is not a subject identical to itself, but is rather subject to constant change.

»If one looks up to the sky, to the heavenly sea, one enjoys resting on the beach of its horizon. And the waves of cloud come and go; one risks drowning in the overwhelming sight.«

By devising these great, boundless spaces, Else Lasker-Schüler evokes associations of homelessness, of sensual or painful dissolution of the self, of love and death. Not least because this unbounded space can be understood as a place of art.