Else Lasker-Schüler was hailed by her contemporaries as one of the greatest German poets at the same time she was ridiculed as a starryeyed eccentric. Karl Kraus, eminent critic and editor of the avant-garde organ Die Fackel, called her the most powerful poetic force in modern Germany, but Franz Kafka reacted with boredom and aversion to what he saw as her emptiness and artistic extravagance. She is still a controversial, elusive, yet alluring figure in German literary history. Her poems, essays, plays, and novels, burned by the Third Reich, were rediscovered in the 1950s. Charming and puzzling readers and critics alike, her poetry has greatly influenced the postwar generation of German poets.

Accounts of Lasker-Schüler's life and analyses of her opus are fraught with inaccuracies, contradictions, and speculation. The present picture of Lasker-Schüler, a composite drawn by herself and by her friends...