Else Lasker-Schüler can be regarded as the most important German female modernist and is one of the few women affiliated with the Expressionist movement. Her work—mainly poetry, poetic prose and several plays—has often been situated by its critics and readers in a realm not of this world and outside historical time, in a sphere of eternal poetic truth, a realm oblivious of the cultural, political, and social realities of her day. Although her eccentric and exalted poetic imagination indeed seemingly escapes her immediate environment into fairytale fantasies peopled by princes and princesses, sheiks and magicians, angels and tricksters, such a description of her work misses its importance as an artistic as well as existential endeavour of creative innovation in which a return to age-old religious, literary, cultural and textual traditions meets a radically modernist idea of poetry and selfhood.