The Princess of Kagran

1. The Princess of Kagran

2. The Princess of Kagran as a fairy tale Why a fairy tale? • From Fairy Tale Beginnings p. 67-69: “Malina can also be read in the context of the postwar literary tradition in which a utopian fantasy is created in order to palliate the suffering sustained during and following the war…For many authors of the immediate postwar era, the act of writing and recalling fairy tales became a tool for invoking a utopian future, where the realities of the past war and immediate postwar despair could be overcome.” • From The Queen’s Mirror p. 2: “…Bettina von Arnim and Karoline von Günderrode describe their lives and the lives of their fictional alter egos in terms of flawed fairy tales, or tales that turn so sad they cannot be written to the end.” • From “Fractured Fairy Tales” p. 163: Fairy tales were written down at a time corresponding with “the establishment of the rise of the bourgeoisie, the advent of the age of literacy, and the beginning of the bourgeois concept of children as innocent and educable.” • From “Fractured Fairy Tales” p. 163: “In German women’s fairy tales I see an intentional synthesis of magic with the concretely mundane…I call this feminine use of concrete historical or social moment in fairy-tale format politico-fantasticism.”

3. The Princess of Kagran as a fairy tale Why a fairy tale? From “Fractured Fairy Tales” p. 171 “The spirit of synthesis of the mysterious and the rational, the public and the private, the personal and the political continues to be a theme in twentieth-century women’s use of the cultural baggage of the fairy tale.” “Women authors have turned the plot around, given the voice to the wronged woman, and let her tell her story. In the modern period, this was begun by Ingeborg Bachmann.” [Specifically in her tale Undine] “The problems common to women can only be solved magically: this format simultaneously releases the frustration of the impossible while giving rein to the utopian moment.”

4. The Princess of Kagran in relation to the whole narrative From Fairy Tale Beginnings The fairytale and dreams are where “Ich” can really express herself. the trope of apocalyptic/utopian visions played out in myth p. 48 & 54: the tale appears throughout the narrative in fragments the historical is imbued in the tale (borders) p. 53: “Thus the Kagran tale becomes a central, propelling force within the novel, describing the hopes and fears of the female narrator in a tone and poetic language other than the non-italicized narrative frame of the novel.” p. 74: “The ability to communicate successfully, whether in her Kagran tale with the stranger or with Malina, Ivan or her father, is an unattainable ideal for the female narrator.”

5. The Princess of Kagran in relation to her oevre and to the canon Her own works: semi-autobiographical, St. George, protagonists portrayed as a dreamer, like The Thirtieth Year (Fairy Tale Beginnings 72-73), the male character (Fairy Tale Beginnings 77) The canon: yearning for salvation (Sternheim, other works?), St. George/Siegfried – connections to history & Nazism, death leads to poetry (Droste) (p.126 of Droste essay – writer/survivor coded as male, words replace the body); drowning (as in Fleisser)