Else Lasker-Schüler: Writing Hysteria

An examination of Else Lasker-Schüler's connection to the discourse of hysteria so pervasive in her day tells us much about how she viewed herself as a woman and an author. Images and metaphors of hysteria figure within Lasker-Schüler's prose texts "Der Fakir" and "Arthur Aronymus," and her autobiographical essays "Lasker-Schüler contra B. und Genossen" and "Only for Children over Five Years" can be analyzed within the context of the case history as literary genre. In writing about her own illness and that of her fictional characters, Lasker-Schüler both criticizes the gender relations of her time and invokes the repressed desires and radical possibilities inherent in the language of hysteria.