Renderings of Alice in Wonderland in Postwar German Literature

This article examines reworkings of Alice in Wonderland in works by postwar authors writing in German. While writers of both genders use Lewis Carroll's fictional character to question the expressive capacities of language, Rose Ausländer, Sarah Kirsch, Elisabeth Plessen, and Angelika Mechtel optimistically interpret her protean character as essential to poetic creativity and psychological autonomy. H.C. Artmann and Jürg Federspiel, by contrast, associate Alice with a postmodern loss of coherence in identity and narrative form. (CM)