Anyone who attempts to write a biography of Lasker-Schüler has to overcome a major difficulty: she fictionalized her life and lived her life as a work of art. As a representative of the neo-Romantic attempt to break down the barriers between "life" and "art," it was natural for her to invent an autobiographical legend that frequently departs from the documented facts. To her, art and life formed a unity that resisted a strict separation of its elements, as she explains in her epistolary novel Mein Herz (My Heart, 1912): "Lebe das Leben ja tableaumäßig, ich bin immer im Bilde.... Ich sehe also das Leben aus dem Bilde an; was nehme ich ernster von beiden? Beides. Ich sterbe am Leben und atme im Bilde wieder auf. Hurrah" (I live life according to a pictorial arrangement. I am always in the picture.... Thus I look at life from the picture; what do I take more seriously? Both. I die from life and I recover in the picture. Hurrah).
The documented facts are that Elisabeth Schüler was born in Elberfeld (today part of the city of Wuppertal) on 11 February 1869, the sixth child of the banker Aron Schüler and Jeanette Kissing Schüler, both of the Jewish faith.
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