“My heart belongs to no one”

Berlin 1912: the city is restless, electric, drunk on new art. At the Café des Westens, amid smoke, laughter, and arguments, Else Lasker-Schüler sketches her lovers, invents her alter egos, and writes the book that will become her most intimate performance. My Heart is less a novella than a love letter shattered into shards—half diary, half masque—where betrayal is staged as theatre and longing reimagined as myth.


Lasker-Schüler was more than a poet; she was a presence—fierce, erratic, unforgettable. In a world that tolerated women as muses but rarely as visionaries, she demanded to be both. Costumed in self-invented regalia, she strode Expressionist Berlin like a living emblem of the new. Her husband Herwarth Walden founded Der Sturm magazine and gallery, a citadel for the avant-garde, but she embodied its uncompromising and brilliant spirit.


In My Heart, Lasker-Schüler chronicles the collapse of their marriage not as domestic drama but as art. Letters slip into masquerade: she is Tino of Baghdad, Prince of Thebes, most enduringly Prince Yussuf—a fantasy figure who lets her claim a freedom denied her in life. Around her orbit Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde, Arnold Schönberg. They appear not as footnotes but as fragments of a cultural Big Bang. To read her is to enter a hall of mirrors, where lover, rival, and stranger merge into one dazzling kaleidoscope.


Yet amid the exotic costumes and veils, the heart of the book beats with something raw. Lasker-Schüler insists that her heart belongs to no one, not even herself. There is defiance in that gesture, but also fragility—the survival tactic of a woman always both at the center and on the edge.


No surprise then (but a surprise nonetheless) that Deutsche Welle named My Heart one of the “100 German must-reads in English translation,” dedicating both an article and a video review to the book’s English edition. For what better witness to Expressionist Berlin than its most unruly queen?



Exile would later drive Else Lasker-Schüler from Berlin to Switzerland, Egypt, and finally Jerusalem, where she died in 1945. The cafés were gone, the circle of artists scattered, but the imaginative kingdom she built—of letters, fantasies, and alter egos—never deserted her. My Heart remains both monument and mirror: a record of a vanished era, and a testament to a woman who refused, until the end, to let her heart be possessed.