Der Malik: Else Lasker-Schüler's Anti-War Novel

Elsa Lasker-Schüler's Der Malik: Eine Kaisergeschichte (1919) is a pacifist roman à clef, which I view as the poet's response to World War I. It represents the artistic battleground where she attempts to solve, through embracing art as the supreme value, the complexity of her own situation amidst the mounting tensions between Jews and non-Jews, pro-war and anti-war writers and artists, and to reassess her identity as a woman writer among the male Expressionists. (IR)