Die dunkle Seite der Moderne

The study offers a new perspective on German Dark Romanticism and its continuing impact in the early 20th century by conceptualising the German Gothic as a transhistorical literary mode of crisis response. Rather than offering a purely motif-based account, it develops a differentiated model of Dark Romanticism and the Gothic, grounded in narratology and the history of problems. Based on exemplary analyses of E. T. A. Hoffmann, central methods of historical Dark Romanticism are reconstructed. Building on this, the work examines texts by Alfred Döblin, Arthur Schnitzler, and Leo Perutz, positioning the German Gothic as a productive interpretive category for the literature of modernity.