Abstract:

Nostalgia, utopia and play in fairy tales of contemporary German literatureFairy-tale motives and narratives seem to be more up to date than ever and are employed and updated in a wide variety of mode in the German literature of the th and the 21th century. M.L. Kaschnitz’ Der alte Garten – a tale between idyll and apocalypse – offers an utopian concept of human life in harmony with nature, addressing men’s moral responsibility. Wit and irony, parody and gender play structure K. Duve’s fairy-tale-novel Die entführte Prinzessin and her ‘corrections’ of the KHM-pretexts in Grrrimm. Very different again is M. Lüder’s Aminas Restaurant using elements of oriental fairy tales as escape routes from reality. These and many other examples employ fairy-tale elements as collective survival narratives in – or even especially in – times of modern and postmodern crises.

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