“Es tut so gut zu lieben und ganz wieder Mensch zu sein!” : Some Comments on Else Seel's Love Poetry

Es tut so gut zu lieben und ganz wieder Mensch zu sein!" : Some Comments on Else Seels Love PoetryWhat prompted Else Lubcke , a spirited young woman in her early thirties, to turn her back on Berlins eflFervescent cultural scene and plunge into the isolation and unimaginable loneliness of a log cabin in the backwoods o f British Columbia?After the devastation of the war years she had managed to secure employment and earn a livelihood for herself, her widowed mother and an elderly aunt.She was able to take university courses and satisfy her intellectual hunger.She enjoyed the friendship of like-minded young people-students, artists, co-workersgoing to the theatre, to concerts and art exhibitions; hiking through various parts of Europe, reading, writing, debating.She even had a first taste o f literary success when some of her poems and short stories began to be published in 1921.Why then did she, in August 1927, surprise and surely shock her own mother by placing on the table her hair, cut off and wrapped in tissue paper, together with a ticket to Canada, announcing curtly: "Mutter, kein Lamcntieren; hilf mir schnell packen, denn in einer Woche muK ich von Hamburg mit der 'Empress o f Australia' nach Quebec fahren" ("Letzte Pionierin" [1960], UM 13)?Rodney Symington, who has given us an insightful first account of the life and work o f this extraordinary woman, suggests that she was one o f numerous "Europamiide" -European writers and artists plagued by scepticism about the value of their civilization (1984, 17).Much as Else Lubcke may have shared current Rousseauistic notions about the purity and freedom to be found in the New World, and much as "she seems to have associated in these years with artists and writers who shared a radical, antibourgeois bias" (Symington 1984,19), there is insufficient evidence in her own writings that this translated into a disappointment deep enough to prompt her fateful step.On the contrary, her own-albeit retrospective-accounts o f her last years in Berlin sp>eak o f her happy participation in the Jugendbewegung o f the early 1900s and the bustling cultural scene of Berlin, and o f the hope for a "Pan Europa" she shared with her friends.Here is one telling excerpt:

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