Bain and Elsa

Author: [German] Brahms
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1978-01-01
Features: "Her diet was irregular, and she ate very little, often surviving on peanuts and fruits for weeks. She frequently slept on benches and always lived in poverty. This is the prince of Tepin—Yusuf, the Tino of Baghdad, the black swan. She was the greatest female poet Germany ever had." In 1952, four years before Behn's death, he wrote in his eulogy for his lover: "Elsa Schüller died alone and destitute in Jerusalem in 1945, having married Rask and later becoming the wife of Helwart Walden. The son of a young pastor and the poet seven years his senior met in Berlin before 1912, and they fell in love that same year; they confessed their love through poetry. Although this story appears to have ended on the surface, German history continues to focus on it. This is not an ordinary life scene: they dated in cafes; slept in rooms; publishers spread the story of the two of them. To be precise, it is a dangerous phenomenon of German-Jewish coexistence, a combination that could not last, whether in reality or in poetry. Helma Sandras-Brahms depicts the politically charged tragedy of the couple in a poetic manner. Behn had once turned against the Nazis; Rask Schüller won the Kleist (literary) prize in 1932 and then left Germany. 'It passes you/It falls': This is a line from a poem Elsa wrote for Behn, and Behn praised this line in his eulogy for her, perhaps having understood its meaning."